China likely to escape scot-free in persecution of two Canadians

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Charles Burton

Beijing propagandists are already using recent claims to vindicate the appalling treatment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor

There is a deep sadness to reports that Michael Spavor feels he was badly wronged by his fellow former political prisoner Michael Kovrig and, by extension, political officers at Canada’s embassy in Beijing and their masters in Ottawa.

Spavor reportedly wants millions in compensation from the Canadian government for its alleged complicity in his detention in his Chinese prison ordeal. If this ends up in court, Kovrig and his superiors would have an opportunity to defend themselves against these allegations, but Beijing propagandists are already using them to vindicate the appalling treatment of Kovrig and Spavor — a gross violation of international law — by a ruthless regime that arrested them to pressure Canada into releasing Chinese Communist Party figure Meng Wanzhou from house arrest in Vancouver.

While few specifics are known about Spavor’s claims, media reports depict a connection to Kovrig’s former job at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, and later with the International Crisis Group think tank, roles in which he would allegedly meet with people in China, engage them in his fluent Mandarin, and mine the conversations for nuggets of insight into China’s political or economic affairs.

Chinese authorities, of course, don’t like such activities. One expects that Kovrig and his superiors, both in government and the ICG, would have been well aware that this type of work would irritate Beijing, thus the danger of arbitrary detention on trumped-up charges was always there whenever he visited China without the protection of a diplomatic passport. And so it was.

One particularly troubling aspect of this sort of activity is the risk it presents to people who might unknowingly be sources for these information-gathering practices. Apparently Spavor and Kovrig routinely got together for drinks and sessions of good-humoured conversation. But friendships with diplomats imply that observations shared in a bar can end up the next morning in a report to Ottawa, and on to the Five Eyes. Was this possibility lost on Spavor? Was Kovrig perhaps not as forthcoming as he could have been about the full dimensions of their chats?

And there is always the possibility that China’s Ministry of State Security has access to Canadian diplomatic communications, which led them to open a file on the two.

Spavor ran a business, Paektu Cultural Exchange, that facilitated sports, cultural, tourism and business exchanges with North Korea. These pricey tours necessitated the transfer of badly-needed foreign currency into North Korea, arguably helping to enable the repressive Pyongyang regime. Perhaps more intriguing, in the course of his work Spavor developed an unlikely rapport with the third-generation Kim family dictator, Kim Jong Un, and was photographed jet-skiing and drinking cocktails with him on a private yacht. It is very plausible that China strongly disapproved of their junior proxy Korean communist dictator cavorting with non-Chinese foreign friends, hence his arrest.

Troublingly, Canadians — who were transfixed and infuriated by the two Michaels’ incarceration — have had little news about Kovrig and Spavor’s China nightmare since their sudden release in September 2021, just hours after Canada released Meng. One wonders if Ottawa really did enough to incentivize China’s Communist authorities to send them home sooner, or if there were other factors in Canada’s murky relationship with Beijing that took priority over what was perhaps downplayed behind closed doors as just another consular matter, one of many that are de facto subordinated to trade and political interests.

We may never see any Global Affairs Canada officials or former diplomats giving public evidence in a Canadian court to defend against Spavor’s accusation. To be sure, much of what goes on between Canada and China — indeed, within our own government internally — is kept from us by the secretive walls of the Security of Information Act.

Perhaps Spavor will be given a big whack of taxpayer money in an out-of-court settlement laced with ironclad nondisclosure provisions. One thing is for sure though. The Chinese authorities who so brutally persecuted him will, as usual, get off scot-free.

Charles Burton is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, non-resident senior fellow of the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, and former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing.

Up Next

Why Canada should get carbon credits for LNG exports

Don't Miss

BC healthcare workers prevented from returning to work despite understaffing

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Business / 6 hours ago

Canadians paid $90 billion in government debt interest in 2024/25

Alberta / 8 hours ago

From Underdog to Top Broodmare

Business

Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss

There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.

The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.

It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.

The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.

Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.

And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.

Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.

Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.

A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.

These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.

As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.

Jason Clemens

Executive Vice President, Fraser Institute

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Business

Canadians paid $90 billion in government debt interest in 2024/25

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss, Tegan Hill and William Dunstan

Next week, the Carney government will table its long-awaited first budget. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched a federal spending review to find $25 billion in savings by 2028. Even if the government meets this goal, it won’t be enough to eliminate the federal deficit—projected to reach as high as $92.2 billion in 2025/26—and start paying down debt. That means a substantial amount of taxpayer dollars will continue to flow towards federal debt interest payments, rather than programs and services or tax relief for Canadians.

When a government spends more than it raises in revenue and runs a budget deficit, it accumulates debt. As of 2024/25, the federal and provincial governments will have accumulated a total projected $2.3 trillion in combined net debt (total debt minus financial assets).

Of course, like households, governments must pay interest on their debt. According to our recent study, the provinces and federal government expect to spend a combined $92.5 billion on debt interest payments in 2024/25.

And like any government spending, taxpayers fund these debt interest payments. The difference is that instead of funding important programs, such as health care, these taxpayer dollars will finance government debt. This is the cost of deficit spending.

How much do Canadians pay each year in government debt interest costs? On a per-person basis, combined provincial and federal debt interest costs in 2024/25 are expected to range from $1,937 in Alberta to $3,432 in Newfoundland and Labrador. These figures represent provincial debt interest costs, plus the federal portion allocated to each province based on a five-year average (2020-2024) of their share of Canada’s population.

For perspective, it’s helpful to compare debt interest payments to other budget items. For instance, the federal government estimates that in 2024/25 it will spend more on debt interest costs ($53.8 billion) than on child-care benefits ($35.1 billion) or the Canada Health Transfer ($52.1 billion), which supports provincial health-care systems.

Provincial governments too spend more money on interest payments than on large programs. For example, in 2024/25, Ontario expects to spend more on debt interest payments ($15.2 billion) than on post-secondary education ($14.2 billion). That same year, British Columbia expects to spend more on debt interest payments ($4.4 billion) than on child welfare ($4.3 billion).

Unlike other forms of spending, governments cannot simply decide to spend less on debt interest payments in a given year. To lower their debt interest payments, governments must rein in spending and eliminate deficits so they can start to pay down debt.

Unfortunately, most governments in Canada are doing the opposite. All but one province (Saskatchewan) plans to run a deficit in 2025/26 while the federal deficit could exceed $90 billion.

To stop racking up debt, governments must balance their budgets. By spending less today, governments can ensure that a larger share of tax dollars go towards programs or tax relief to benefit Canadians rather than simply financing government debt.