Foreign Affairs committee  That's why I think we should be honest and transparent in public. The quiet diplomacy route doesn't seem to have worked the way we'd hoped.

Foreign Affairs committee  With regard to the Celil case, I wouldn't want to second-guess.... But when I was in Beijing working with the central committee party school, I took advantage of my time to go to the international liaison department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which is an important foreign policy institution in China.

Foreign Affairs committee  I agree with you. You're right, we should be doing a comprehensive, integrated approach to China, using everything that we have in Canada to try to engage that country in the most effective way. It will pay off for us. We put a lot of money into our relationship with China. I'm not proposing a massive increase in funding allocation; it's simply a matter of drawing on resources that we have, but in more effective ways.

Foreign Affairs committee  Our foreign ministry tends to rotate people--they have one posting in China, and then they don't go back there during their whole career--whereas in other foreign ministries, it's a detail; they circulate people in Chinese-speaking places. So they'd have a career that would be the capital, Beijing, as well as Shanghai, their office in Hong Kong, and maybe Taiwan and Singapore.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's an interesting point. My university, Brock University, has over 1,000 students, out of our 17,000 student population, who are self-funded from the People's Republic of China. We're not sending 1,000 students to China to study. So they seem to be taking advantage of us; we don't seem to be taking advantage of them as much.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I agree. One area that I admired in your committee's report on democratic development was the possibility of including more NGO input into government information about China. With respect to these issues that you talk about--the AIDS issue; the violence against women issue, which is a serious and growing issue in China; and the repression issue, and so on--there are a lot of Canadians, particularly Canadians of Chinese origin, who have a lot of expertise in these areas, but currently our Department of Foreign Affairs doesn't have any mechanism for getting genuine input from these people.

Foreign Affairs committee  Do I think we should have a different kind of policy? I like your democratic development report, and I like the idea of developing a Canadian institute for democracy that would focus on these areas, bringing in all the elements of our society--separate, at arm's-length relationship from government agencies.

Foreign Affairs committee  My observation is that Canada engages China too much with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that's not a powerful agency in China. They speak English, so it's easy for our diplomats to contact through that ministry. But the senior-level Communists I've had some contact with—because I went to university in China and I know a lot of people in the higher levels of that party in Beijing—regard the Chinese foreign ministry as interpreters.

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, I think the bottom line is, regardless of how we engage China on social issues, if we have the best product at the best price, the Chinese are going to buy it from us. So it's a question of understanding the market clearly, producing products that are suited to the Chinese conditions, and taking the Chinese conditions seriously, as this company in northern Quebec evidently is.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll be brief. I don't think anyone is suggesting that we shouldn't engage the Chinese. It's really a question of what sort of engagement, and if our past mechanisms of engagement through their foreign ministry have not been yielding results, then I think we have to look at a smarter engagement in ways that will achieve results.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that's true. They're all over Africa. Mr. Mugabe's residence recently had a nice Chinese roof put on it. They gave him a doctorate from a Chinese institution. We don't like Mr. Mugabe all that much, I don't think, but they do. Returning a bit to what Mr. Dewar was saying, my concern would be that the Chinese believe they're having a comprehensive rise to power.

Foreign Affairs committee  I hear you, but I think we should be positive and engage the Chinese in a positive way and a respectful way, but in an honest way. We have to engage China because it's so important, but I wouldn't like the Chinese to think that Canada wants to hold them back or try to influence their sovereignty.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would be happy to stay.

Foreign Affairs committee  When I was working in the Canadian embassy, I remember welcoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to China, and she spoke to senior judges there. We have a senior judges training program. I don't think it worked out quite as we'd hoped. A lot of those judges ceased to become judges and sought refugee status in Canada or joined Canadian law firms.

Foreign Affairs committee  The program was at the University of Montreal. I've been involved in a program at the Central Party School in Beijing. It's their main think tank for the party. I find that the colleagues I'm interacting with fully support the idea of separation of powers and the rule of law. They recognize this as the best system.