Calgary and Toronto will host a panda pair for a decade, a deal which could cost about $1 million a year. The cost hasn’t been announced. Nor has the date.
But the news is finally official.
At the end of two days of meetings that Canadian officials are beaming about, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Chinese government announced another package of 21 commercial agreements worth about $3 billion.
One of those, a key goal of the Canada-China Business Council, was to agree to export more Canadian uranium to China, a market where Canada has lost ground to Australia.
But the trophy in the eyes of Canadian zoo-goers, kids, merchandisers and in the view of the Chinese practice of “panda diplomacy” was in paragraph 17 of a joint statement.
“Following agreement by Canada and China, the Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens will sign an agreement with the Toronto and Calgary zoos to provide a pair of giant pandas for 10 years of collaborative research on conservation.”
It was perhaps a clear sign Sino-Canadian relations have moved to a different level, as Harper had claimed the night before.
It was also one of the worst-kept secrets of the trip, with hints in advance it could happen. But a Conservative minister had gloated before about pandas, in 2010, and they didn’t materialize.
Harper’s main goal on this trip has been to do business, and lots of it.
In addition to Wednesday’s agreement to finalize the legal text of a still-unreleased agreement to protect foreign investment in their respective countries, Harper and Chinese leaders also agreed to begin preliminary talks on “deepening trade and economic relations”—a phrase the Chinese state-controlled media quoted Premier Wen Jiabao as calling the move towards a free trade agreement.
Canadian officials wouldn’t go that far.
“This agreement will help Canadian uranium companies to substantially increase exports to China, the world’s fastest growing market for these products,” said Harper in a written release. “It will generate jobs here at home while contributing to the use of clean reliable energy in China.”
But as with so much of the trade deals that are being touted by Canadian officials as ground-breaking, there was no text on the uranium export agreement.
“Representatives from both countries will work to finalize the text ...within the next few months with a view to proceeding with their respective adoption processes as soon as possible,” said a Canadian government background document on the uranium export deal.
Already, the stats showed China has become Canada’s second largest trading partner.
Some of the agreements reached here will see Bombardier sell more rail cars and technology to the Chinese public transit system, and Telus and Bell upgrade their networks in Canada with hi-tech radio transmitters to perch on shared towers across Canada—equipment bought from a major Chinese manufacturer, Huawei.
Harper’s visit is as much about political outreach to a new generation of Chinese leaders. He met Thursday with President Hu Jintao, and other senior officials, including Wu Banguo, chairman of the National People’s Congress, and Vice Premier Li Kejiang who joined Harper at a Canada-China Business Forum late in the day.
Original Article
Source:
Author:
No comments:
Post a Comment