OTTAWA — Days before Prime Minister Mark Carney traded lower tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles for relief on Canadian canola, a Toronto-area Chinese business association reportedly urged his office to remove Canada's 100 percent surtax on those vehicles, citing support for Canadian farm exports.
The association is led by a Wenzhou-born industrialist whose affiliations within Beijing's United Front system are documented in a 2016 profile published by a political party operating under Chinese Communist Party leadership.
The association, SinoCann, submitted the proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office and to Members of Parliament and Senators, according to a report published January 13 by a Toronto Chinese-language outlet, three days before Carney announced the electric vehicle agreement in Beijing.
“By working with China to remove tariffs on electric vehicles, Canada can transform trade friction into a new engine of cooperation — one that supports Canadian farmers, strengthens our technological base, and accelerates innovation in the green and digital economies,” the proposal says, framing it as insulation against U.S. protectionism in “a rapidly changing global order.”
Three days later in Beijing, Carney announced a deal along those lines, and made a similar case for it.
The Toronto association’s longstanding ties to senior Chinese consular officials are part of the public record.
A former president of the association had been under national-security investigation by Canadian Security Intelligence Service since 2021, according to reporting by The Globe and Mail in 2023. He has not been charged, and is challenging the allegations in a lawsuit against the federal government and the newspaper.
The Globe also reported that the former association president had attended a controversial $1,500-a-person Liberal fundraiser with then-prime minister Justin Trudeau in Toronto in May 2016. The gathering brought together wealthy businessmen through the Liberal Party’s fundraising networks in the Chinese-Canadian business community.
The electric vehicle agreement has drawn criticism from senior U.S. officials. Carney outlined the agreement at a Canada China Business Council gathering in Beijing on January 16, crediting the council’s business leaders with helping bring the relationship to that point. The council’s board has included a Toronto businessman, photographed shaking hands with Xi Jinping, whose association and political circles overlap with those of SinoCann’s current and former leadership, according to event reports and photographs reviewed by The Bureau.