Trudeau kicks off China visit with tourism pitch, boost for Mississauga company
The prime minister is set to meet later Monday with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, with possible free trade talks in the works.

TheStar.com
Dec. 3, 2017
Tonda MacCharles and Alex Ballingall

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose the flashy new headquarters of China’s social media giant Sina Weibo as the first stop on his trade-focused official visit Monday, where he pumped up Canada as a tourist destination and later highlighted an emerging green tech connection between the Chinese capital and a company in Mississauga.

Trudeau strode onstage at the Weibo headquarters to applause from a youthful crowd, who strained to snap photos as he sat under a giant cylindrical plasma screen for an armchair chat with young Chinese social media stars who had recently travelled to Canada.

“We have to learn as a planet not to be afraid of someone who is different,” Trudeau said, waxing philosophical about the self-discovery he experienced travelling in China as a young man in the early 1990s.

“It’s a great path forward for friendship,” he said of discovering new cultures. “I hope to see you all in Canada very soon.”

Trudeau arrived in Beijing on Sunday night with a contingent of ministers and staff, and was greeted at Beijing’s airport by a ceremonial military guard and police escort.

Later Monday, Trudeau was set to meet with Premier Li Keqiang, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Chinese government, for bilateral talks and a private dinner. It is widely expected that Trudeau’s visit could mark the start of formal free trade talks with the world’s second-largest economy, after more than a year of exploratory discussions between the two countries.

Canada would become the first G7 country to seek a free trade deal with the authoritarian economic giant. A government consultation this year found Canadians have mixed feelings about the prospect, with many acknowledging economic opportunities of expanded trade, and others skeptical of labour and environmental regulations in China, as well as about whether Canadian firms would be treated fairly next to the gigantic state-owned enterprises that dominate the Chinese economy.

But Trudeau has also underscored his hope that closer economic ties with China can yield tighter connections through tourism and co-operation on international issues such as climate change. Accompanied by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who has said the push for lower greenhouse gas emissions can go “hand in hand” with economic growth, Trudeau on Monday highlighted a Canadian success story that lends support to that argument.

After his roundtable at Sina Weibo, Trudeau rushed off to test an emissions-free bus with Canadian technology that could help this country’s megacities deal with choking smog problems.

The company behind the technology is Mississauga-based Hydrogenics, one of two Canadian firms that specialize in hydrogen energy storage technology.

Daryl Wilson, president and chief executive officer, said he has struck four contracts with Chinese companies since he came here on a trade mission with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne two years ago.

That’s when China’s central government shifted its support for battery buses to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which prompted Chinese bus makers to seek out the Canadian technology, he said.

Now his firm is en route to providing 1,000 of the hydrogen fuel cell batteries to a Chinese research company that uses them to replace diesel-powered buses in cities like Beijing, with the first 200 units set to be installed this month, Wilson said.

“The market in China is probably our largest market opportunity because of the very serious concern over air quality and the urgent need to get diesel off the road,” Wilson said.

Wilson added that what’s unique about this technology is it can put “a lot more energy on the bus than you can with a battery.”

It takes the same amount of time to fuel up with hydrogen as it does with diesel, in contrast to battery buses that take five to six hours to charge, he said.

“We use hydrogen gas and hydrogen fuel cells, which generate electric power and then drive an electric motor on a bus,” Wilson told the Star. “So it’s an electric bus, but it’s not a battery electric bus; it’s a hydrogen fuel cell electric bus.”

Reducing the smog and acrid air that routinely chokes cities like Beijing has become a priority for government officials here. In January, the country’s energy agency announced it would spend $361 billion (U.S.) in 2017 to create more energy from wind, hydro, solar and nuclear sources.

While it remains far and away the world’s largest consumer of coal — responsible for almost 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 — China committed to closing 500 coal-fired power plants in 2017 alone. The government also wants to multiply its solar production by five times by 2020.

The moves mark a significant shift from China’s past stance on climate change. As recently as 2009, during high-stakes climate negotiations in Copenhagen, China skirted efforts by the nascent Obama administration in the United States to reach a global climate pact.

China’s position started to change when the country inked a landmark climate deal with the U.S. in 2014, and then signed on to to the Paris Agreement the following year, pledging to reach “peak” emissions between 2025 and 2030, after which they will begin to drop.

In October, Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed that the country had “taken a driving seat in international co-operation to respond to climate change.” The statement came at a time when the U.S. under President Donald Trump has scaled back environmental regulations and announced its intention to drop out of the Paris Agreement.

Wilson, meanwhile, applauds the Canadian government’s efforts to position itself closer to China. It has helped him support a workforce of about 200 people in Mississauga, and with the Chinese central government and big cities as catalysts, the business has grown faster than Wilson expected.

“I said it would be $10 million in the short term, and it turned out to be $15 million. And $100 million in the medium-long term — we’re on track to see that kind of target,” Wilson said.

He said visits like Trudeau’s can highlight priorities to the benefit of Canadian firms like his.

“It’s especially important to China,” Wilson said. “They like to see that our own government knows and respects what we do.”