Thank you for the question.
First of all, we have to acknowledge the problem: even with the commitments that Beijing announced this week, it won't meet the United Nations' targets in the fight against climate change. China has to do more, and the same goes for Canada.
Alone, Canada cannot do much to change China's position. However, Canada's strength lies in its capacity to rally its allies and other states around positions that are similar to its own in order to exert pressure. One of the ideas that is currently being discussed within the European Union is to impose tariffs according to the amount of pollution caused by international imports. If we establish an international consensus with the United States and our European friends in matters of trade and we set a price on pollution, that could change China's position. This type of cooperation would be one of the ways to do so.
We naively think that all countries will wish to collaborate on this issue, because it is a matter of the common good and that everyone will die if we don't fight climate change, but that's not true. Sometimes, China does not want to decouple the issues of the day, which means that it establishes links between cooperating in the field of climate change and our positions regarding Taiwan.
We have to stop this, and the only way that Canada can do so is to collaborate and establish common strategies that seek to set a price on pollution.