The new site of AIIB headquarters near the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing Photo: cnsphoto

Canada on Wednesday announced it is freezing its ties with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in response to the bank's former global communications director's groundless comments, as the country ratchets up its hostility against China by closely following the US' anti-China policy.

Experts said that Ottawa's clumsy political playacting, obviously targeted at China, demonstrates that Canada has become an anti-China vanguard of the US. This will see Canada sacrificing its own interests while dealing a further blow to China-Canada relations, which are already at a low point.

"The government of Canada will immediately halt all government-led activity at the bank. And I have instructed the Department of Finance to lead an immediate review of the allegations raised and of Canada's involvement in the AIIB," Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Freeland said she did not rule out any outcome of the investigation, hinting that Ottawa could pull out of a bank it officially joined in March 2018, according to the report.

The AIIB's global communications director Bob Pickard, a Canadian national, tweeted on Wednesday that he had resigned and alleged that the bank is "dominated by the Communist Party of China." 

The AIIB refuted the allegations as "baseless and disappointing."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Thursday said that the AIIB always sticks to its international and rules-based nature as well as high-standard operations. 

The institution has achieved important outcomes in various aspects including institution-building, strategy and policy, as well as investment, which are widely recognized by the international community.

"As the largest shareholder, China will join hands with other parties and stick to multilateralism to support the development of the AIIB, and make positive contributions to infrastructure development and sustainable development in Asia and the world," Wang said.

According to AIIB's introduction, it began operations in January 2016 and its mission is financing infrastructure with sustainability at its core. As of the end of April this year, AIIB has approved a total of 212 projects amounting to over $40 billion in 33 member countries, which have contributed to economic development and improved the quality of life for communities in beneficiary countries, official data showed.

The Chinese Embassy in Canada on Wednesday blasted the remarks by the former AIIB employee as outright lies with an attempt to be sensational. 

"China is an important member of the AIIB and it has always followed multilateral rules and procedures, and participated in decision-making through multilateral governance mechanisms such as the Board of Governors and the Board of Directors," it stressed.

In response to the allegation of "authoritarian regimes," some countries are willfully pointing fingers at other countries and even wielding the big stick of sanctions, which are absolutely "authoritarian" behaviors, the embassy said.

"Canada aims to undermine the credibility of the AIIB by fabricating these allegations," Yao Peng, deputy secretary-general of the Canadian Studies Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Yao said that Freeland's planned investigation of Canada's involvement in the AIIB is an answer to pressure from Washington and the Conservative Party of Canada, as she frequently criticized China on ideological topics when she was Canadian foreign minister, for the benefit of her party and her political career.

"Canada has acted as the vanguard of the US' smearing and slander against China over the past several years, as shown by its involvement in several incidents including Huawei's Meng Wangzhou. All these cases were based on groundless and unwarranted charges," Huang Renwei, executive vice dean of the Fudan Institute of Belt and Road & Global Governance, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Acting as an acolyte of the US will see Canada sacrifice its own interests, Huang said. The US is set to benefit from the current China-Canada tensions the most, as it will further coordinate Ottawa's pace with its own and even pressure Canada in many spheres by making it rely more on US imports and become an important part of its industry supply chain restructuring, analysts said.

Ottawa has been following Washington's China policy closely and set off waves of hostility in various aspects. In addition to following the US' malicious hype over the Chinese "wandering balloon," Canada also engaged in clumsy political playacting obviously targeted at China.

Over the past few weeks, some Canadian politicians and media have sensationalized the allegation that China "interferes" in Canadian federal elections and internal affairs, citing so-called "leaked intelligence reports." 

In response to the Canadian side's claims that hyped "China's interference" and its move to expel a Chinese diplomat, Beijing declared a consul of the Consulate General of Canada in Shanghai as "persona non grata" and asked the Canadian diplomat to leave China before May 13.

Amid skyrocketing anti-China sentiment in Canada and the Canadian government's hostility, there will be no improvement to China-Canada relations in the short term, Yao said. He said Canada's hostile moves would further affect trade and industrial cooperation between the two countries and cast a shadow over gradually recovering people-to-people exchanges and economic cooperation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, some Chinese traders are looking to divert their business to reduce potential risks. CEO of a trading company in Changzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, told the Global Times recently that his company has been importing timber from countries including Canada for a decade, but the recent political rows have sparked concerns about how sustainable this trade can be.

"We are reducing imports from Canada from 1.32 million cubic meters in the previous year to 900,000 cubic meters of timber from Canada in 2022," the manager said.

Huang Zhong, an associate researcher at the Center for Canadian Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, told the Global Times on Thursday that Canada may not really pull out of the AIIB because it wants to play a role in multilateral institutions and aims to diversify its trade with more countries to reduce economic reliance on the US when it joined the multilateral institution in 2018.

"It's beneficial for Canada to stay in AIIB, as it gains access to the huge Chinese market and other markets via the platform. Unlike the US that has massive economic scale, Canada will face heavy losses if it withdraws from the multilateral platform," he said.