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As Chinese markets plunge and virus continues to spread, Beijing praises Ottawa for calm

From link.

The Chinese government has held up Canada as a bulwark of calm next to the more dramatic U.S. reaction to the spread of the Wuhan virus, drawing Ottawa into the middle of a new spat between the world’s two largest economic powers – even as plunging stock markets reflect widespread panic among people across China.

Shares traded in Shanghai and Shenzhen fell more than 8 per cent Monday – a contraction of roughly US$400-billion – as investor fears overrode a concerted effort by government-affiliated institutions to prop up shares. It may take hundreds of billions of dollars in government financial support to bring stability back to the markets, one scholar warned, as the developing health crisis – which has now killed 361 in China – takes on sharper economic and political dimensions. Another 17,320 cases have been confirmed and a further 21,558 suspected.

And while Beijing struggles to ease fears at home, it is also directly battling those outside its borders that it accuses of exploiting the situation, particularly the United States.

Washington has told its citizens to avoid travel to China and has banned entry by foreigners who have been to China in the past 14 days. New Zealand, Australia and eight other countries have imposed similar restrictions, which have angered Beijing. On Monday, Hong Kong said it would close all but three entry points from mainland China, including a land crossing and its airport.

On Monday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs lashed out at the United States for spreading fear, setting a bad example and, spokesperson Hua Chunying said, “turning from overconfidence to fear and overreaction.”
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But she specifically praised Canada, whose relations with China have been fraught since the arrest in Vancouver of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, for not following the U.S. approach. Canadian Health Minister Patty Hajdu has said the risks to Canada are low and Ottawa sees no need to keep out travellers who have been to China. “Canada believes the entry ban has no basis, which is a sharp contrast to the U.S. behaviours,” Ms. Hua said in a news conference held on the WeChat app.

The comments underscored how, with the Wuhan virus, Canada once again finds itself wedged between China and the United States as those two superpowers continue their economic and political struggle.

However, Ms. Hua made no promises about when Beijing might give permission for a plane chartered by the Canadian government to fly from Hanoi to Wuhan to evacuate 325 Canadians trapped in a sprawling lockdown zone around the epicentre of the virus.

That plane ”is standing by” and will fly to Wuhan “once the Government of China has given authorization to land,” Global Affairs Canada said in a news release Sunday.

For Beijing, concerns about stranded foreigners have commanded less urgency than the scale of the crisis it is confronting among its own people.

The plunge in stock markets defied heavy spending by state-controlled investors in an effort to “help combat negative feelings and anxiety,” said Zhao Xijun, deputy director of the School of Finance at Renmin University. There is good reason, he said, to rein in the confusion among retail investors who have plunged from “heaven to hell,” with a festive Lunar New Year season swiftly blackened by virus fears.

But the market pessimism overwhelmed even the powerful tools wielded by Beijing. To arrest falling markets may take as much as five times the four trillion yuan – $750-billion in today’s dollars – used by China to shield its economy from the 2008 financial crisis, said Wang Fuzhong, a scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics.

“The virus has seriously damaged China's production, consumption, exports, imports and investment. It’s like a lethal strike against our country,” said Prof. Wang.

“The most terrible fact is that many small businesses will die,” he said. What’s happening is “not just a short-term phenomenon. It’s a long-term downturn. The effects of this epidemic are very profound and won’t easily be fixed.“
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Many reached for comparisons to the SARS epidemic, which in 2003 caused financial losses equivalent to 1.05 per cent of China’s economy. Scholars have estimated the global loss from SARS at US$40-billion.

But China has grown into a far larger economy in the intervening years and is much more tightly interwoven with the rest of the world, factors that considerably raise the stakes for the Wuhan virus.

“The interruption of supply chains could have a snowball effect if stocks of essential electronic components from China are depleted,” ING economists Timme Spakman and Rico Luman wrote Monday.

“And this isn’t necessarily a temporary slowdown. The coronavirus could potentially impact the annual level of world trade in 2020, as it’s not certain that factories and logistics will be able to catch up and fully compensate for earlier delays, given the limited capacity.”

At the heart of all this anxiety lies great uncertainty. It took more than half a year for SARS fears to recede. The response to the Wuhan virus has been far more swift, but so too has its spread.

“The epidemic is in its developing stage,” said Li Huiyong, chief macro analyst at Shenwan Hongyuan Securities. “Nobody can judge how severe the negative impact will be because we don’t know how long the battle against this epidemic will last and, most importantly, how long it will take to rebuild everything and restore production after the battle is over.”

With reporting by Alexandra Li
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Bulwark of calm? Yeah I'd say. Not standing up to a regime that throws people in concentration camps and kidnaps foreigners. A dirty police state that threatens its neighbours with expansionist bullshit.

Bulwark of calm? Nah, mate, it's called appeasement. Ask Neville Chamberlain's ghost. Him and his gang of sycophants couldn't get their tongues out of Hitler's arse either.

Sell your souls for economic gain /= bulwark of calm.

Dominic Barton as our ambassador sure is bulwark of calm regard. You know, the same Barton that was involved in McKinsey's "consulting" on the whole Uyghur concentration camp/surveillance state thing. No big deal. "Re-education" and "enlightenment" for those dirty Muslim bastards, eh?

Bulwark of calm, my balls.

Anyway, in regards to coronavirus, why wouldn't we be calm?
 
We're bringing some home.

nationalpost.com

Canadians returning from Wuhan to be quarantined in motel at CFB Trenton

OTTAWA — Canadians returning from the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak will remain in isolation — including from each other — and still need significant …
nationalpost.com nationalpost.com

The headline calling it a 'motel' is a little misleading. Yukon Lodge is a CAF transient quarters, but it does look nice.
 
Just two hours into a WestJet flight from Toronto to Montego Bay, Jamaica, passengers had their trips unexpectedly cut short on Monday after a passenger claimed he had the coronavirus.

At some point during Flight WS 2702 the man stood up, announced that he was recently in China and had contracted the disease, according to Peel Regional Police.

The captain informed passengers that, because of the incident, they couldn't land in Jamaica or the U.S. and had to return to Toronto.

The captain said he believed it was a hoax, according to Broderick.

"I guess this guy thought it was a funny joke but it's just really weird. We were all very frustrated, to just place 240 people...it's just so selfish. We've lost a day of our vacation," says Broderick.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/coronavirus-plane-1.5450824
 
tiffer24 said:
Just two hours into a WestJet flight from Toronto to Montego Bay, Jamaica, passengers had their trips unexpectedly cut short on Monday after a passenger claimed he had the coronavirus.

At some point during Flight WS 2702 the man stood up, announced that he was recently in China and had contracted the disease, according to Peel Regional Police.

The captain informed passengers that, because of the incident, they couldn't land in Jamaica or the U.S. and had to return to Toronto.

The captain said he believed it was a hoax, according to Broderick.

"I guess this guy thought it was a funny joke but it's just really weird. We were all very frustrated, to just place 240 people...it's just so selfish. We've lost a day of our vacation," says Broderick.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/coronavirus-plane-1.5450824
Click to expand...
If it turned out to be a hoax, he would have to pay for all the lost time and resources.
 
A new viral threat revives an old one: racist scapegoating

The SARS outbreak showed us that fear brings out the worst in some people. Did we learn from the experience?

Rosemary Barton · CBC News · Posted: Feb 04, 2020 4:00 AM ET

Last Thursday, Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam was busy doing her job: keeping the Canadian public informed about the spread of the coronavirus, calming our worst fears and reminding us that we're all in this together.

Tam, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the U.K., took to Twitter to decry the reported rise in racist acts and vile comments on social media directed at people of Chinese and Asian descent since the coronavirus caseload began to grow.

"These actions create a divide of us versus them," she tweeted. "Canada is a country built on the deep-rooted values of respect, diversity and inclusion."

Tam's statement got more than 500 online comments right out of the gate — and a depressingly large number of them were themselves racist and ignorant. Some of those comments doubtless came from the usual bots sowing discord; many clearly came from actual Canadians. Tam came in for a lot of the vitriol personally — tweets telling her to "go home" or accusing her of using "the race card."

 
W. K. Lis said:
"These actions create a divide of us versus them," she tweeted. "Canada is a country built on the deep-rooted values of respect, diversity and inclusion."
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Whenever I read statements like this I think to myself, what country are they talking about? She's confusing idealism with fact. Canada is built on the deep-rooted values of colonialism and northern European cultural and economic dominance. Diversity and inclusion are very new concepts, speaking more about what we aspire Canada to become, not what was built upon.

The Canada she describes wouldn't have stomped the indigenous people, taking their lands, language and children, sent back shiploads of Sikh and Jewish refugees, denied the Canadian victims of Air India, allowed a province to outlaw religious symbols, etc. It wasn't until 1960 that all Canadian women gained the right to vote - that's the roots of the Canada we have today.

We may not like or even want to envision the roots of Canada, but we shouldn't be ignorant of them.
 
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Jasmine18 said:
Looks like federal govt takes orders from china.
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Yep. We're unsophisticated players on this stage. Just like in December when China dropped its ban of Canadian pork (because of a massive swine flu in China), and Ottawa was saying see, our trade is improving, when what we should have done is said, you can have our pork when you release the two detainees. Canada doesn't even realize when it has leverage to play.
 
Aspiring Toronto rapper who halted Jamaica-bound flight over false Coronavirus claim says he was seeking publicity

By Gilbert Ngabo Staff Reporter
Tues., Feb. 4, 2020

The man who forced a Jamaica-bound flight to turn back in a stunt about the Coronavirus is an aspiring Toronto rapper who said he pulled the prank in an effort to get famous.

“Going viral goes bad,” James Potok posted on his Facebook page Tuesday, attaching a story about the Monday incident that caused a delay for two WestJet flights.

www.thestar.com

Aspiring Toronto rapper who halted Jamaica-bound flight over false Coronavirus claim says he was seeking publicity

James Potok has been charged with mischief and breach of recognizance.
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com
 
Lmao this tool

POTOK-PHILIPPE.jpg
 
Wuhan Boy should hook up with Chair Girl...

An Ontario man who caused a WestJet flight to turn around and fly back to Toronto claims his intent was to create a viral video when he suggested on the plane that he may be sick with the new coronavirus.

"It certainly wasn't a smart thing to do," James Potok, 28, of Vaughan, Ont., north of Toronto, said on Tuesday.

Potok, who describes himself as a frequent flier and an upcoming hip hop R&B artist, apologized to 243 passengers aboard Flight 2702 to Montego Bay, Jamaica.

But Potok, who has been charged with mischief and breach of recognizance, claimed that he didn't actually say he had the coronavirus. Halfway into the flight, he said he pulled out his camera, stood up, then asked if he could get everybody's attention.

"I said: 'I just returned from a flight from Hunan province.' I might have said: 'This is the capital for coronavirus.' And then I said: 'I don't feel too well.' And I looked around. I saw the reception of the people. They didn't seem too happy about it. I don't blame them. And I stopped recording and I sat back down in my chair," Potok said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/coronavirus-claim-plane-westjet-flight-diverted-1.5452221
 
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