Bob Mackin
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Aug. 31 pick to chair the federal foreign investment promotion agency advised a Yuen Pau Woo-led group that lured a Chinese state-owned company to Vancouver and Richmond.
Dominic Barton, who was Canada’s Ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, was the global managing partner at the McKinsey consultancy when Woo led HQ Vancouver, the $6.5 million partnership between the federal Western Economic Diversification agency, B.C. Ministry of International Trade and Business Council of B.C.
Their marquee 2016 signing was a subsidiary of China Poly Group, which quietly closed its office and gallery in 2023. Also in 2016, Justin Trudeau appointed Woo to the senate.
The Sardis-raised, University of B.C.-educated economist is the new chair of Invest in Canada, which recently funded a closed-to-media trade promotion during the FIFA World Cup in Vancouver.
Immigration influx
Barton and Mark Wiseman, Carney’s ambassador to the U.S., co-founded the Century Initiative in 2014 to lobby for 100 million population in Canada by 2100.
In 2016, the Barton-chaired Advisory Council on Economic Growth recommended the federal government raise annual immigration targets to 450,000 by 2025. The Trudeau Liberals listened and went further, quicker. They set a 485,000 target for 2024, despite warnings that Canada’s housing, hospitals and schools could not handle the influx.
“By the way, 100 million, I’m sorry to say, is not a big number,” Barton told Canadian Club luncheon in 2018, noting that Canada’s population is the same as one Chinese city, Chongqing.
Meanwhile, Putin and Xi
Elsewhere on Aug. 31, the leader of China, Carney’s January-declared “strategic partner,” met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit.
“Co-operation is successfully developing on all fronts,” Putin told Xi Jinping.
In 2022, before the Beijing Olympics and invasion of Ukraine, they signed a “no limits” partnership. In 2024, NATO called China the “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
On Sept. 1 in Asheville, N.C., U.S. treasury secretary welcomed Russia’s finance minister Anton Siluanov to the G20 finance ministers’ summit.
Donald Trump promised voters in 2024 he would solve the war before he was inaugurated.
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