Prime Minister Stephen Harper inspects the honour guard with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Thursday, December 3, 2009.
The federal Tories insisted Thursday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper scored a diplomatic victory in his first visit to China, despite an embarrassing exchange in which China's Premier rebuked him for neglecting relations between the two countries.
Mr. Harper walked away from the meeting with several small agreements and one sought-after prize: Canada's long-standing request to be granted approved destination status, a designation that will pave the way for a projected 50-per-cent increase in Chinese tourism here by 2015. But before China granted this status, its Premier, Wen Jiabao, admonished Mr. Harper for taking so long to visit, noting that a Canadian leader hadn't made a trip to China in five years.
"Five years is too long a time for China-Canada relations and that's why there are comments in the media that your visit is one that should have taken place earlier," Mr. Wen said.
In Mr. Harper's first few years in power, the Chinese were annoyed by his complaints about the secret trial of Uyghur-Canadian dissident Huseyin Celil; his assertion that he would not sell out human rights to the "almighty dollar"; and especially the reception of the Dalai Lama.
Diplomats in the Foreign Affairs Department who pushed for a friendlier tone were mistrusted, but Mr. Harper also faced internal pressure to make a visit from former trade minister David Emerson, former public works and trade minister Michael Fortier, and his former top civil servant, clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch.
"I've been pushing for it endlessly and with great frustration, but now it's there," Mr. Emerson said Thursday. "He has been afforded the opportunity to start to engage, and I think a symbolic and substantive signal is that we're getting approved destination status. I think that's a huge signal that the relationship is going to be re-energized."
Over the past year, Mr. Harper has dramatically changed approach: He avoided criticism of China, his Foreign Minister said Beijing had progressed on human rights, and a long list of ministers visited to thaw ties.
The approved destination status allows Canada to market tourism in China, and for Canadian tour operators to do business there, opening the door for the projected increase in Chinese tourism here. It is not the billion-dollar deals the Chinese have signed with other leaders, but still resolves what Gordon Houlden, director of the University of Alberta's China Institute, said was a persistently knotty problem when he served as a diplomat in Beijing from 2001 to 2004.
Mr. Martin's Liberal government struck an agreement in principle to get the status, but didn't complete the details before losing power.
"I think Canada is the last nation in the whole globe to get this. There's no other country left," remarked Tommy Yuan, president of the Canada-Asia Business Network.
While opposition politicians contended that the awkward rebuke to Mr. Harper showed that relations remain frosty because of him, Conservatives dismissed the public friction as meaningless when weighed against the tourism agreement.
"The reality is that our government has managed to achieve what previous Liberal governments couldn't and I don't know how many visits there were between prime ministers Chrétien and Martin," said Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.
Veteran China watchers, however, landed somewhere in the middle. They said Mr. Harper has not made a massive breakthrough, but also played down fears that the Sino-Canadian relationship is irreparably damaged.
The net message, said Peter Harder, president of the Canada China Business Council and former deputy minister of foreign affairs, is straightforward: "You have to work at this relationship."
In Vancouver, political commentator Gabriel Yiu pointed out that there is a contingent of Canada's Chinese-language media on the trip, and said the Chinese rebuke to Mr. Harper is unlikely to hurt the Conservatives' effort to make electoral inroads into the traditionally Liberal Chinese-Canadian community.
"Every day, he's getting two to three pages of coverage in those papers. Yes, there might be a slight negative impact [from Mr. Wen's criticism] but compared to the big wave of coverage in the Chinese-language media, I think the spin will be praise for this historic trip."
With reports from Jane Taber in Ottawa and Rod Mickleburgh in Vancouver
Campbell Clark