Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 16.Sean Kilpatrick/The Associated Press
On Saturday, a conference hall in Hong Kong played host to a deeply Canadian affair, dedicated, fittingly given Ottawa’s new strategic partnership with Beijing, to people who literally build bridges for a living.
The deans of eight Canadian engineering schools, as well as hundreds of Canadian, Chinese and Hong Kong engineers, came together to mark the centennial of the iron ring ceremony, a unique vow of ethical integrity taken by Canadian-trained engineers, which traces its roots to a bridge collapse in the early 1900s.
“It’s an embedding of the values we have as Canadians,” said Mary Wells, head of the faculty of engineering at the University of Waterloo.
“No other place in the world does this form of voluntary commitment for the engineers that graduate, and we’ve been doing so for 100 years now, and I think it has led to Canada’s technology being trusted around the world.”
While the conference was planned – by local engineering-school alumni to mark the iron ring centennial – long before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to China this month, attendees were keen to seize potential new opportunities offered by a long-awaited thaw in Sino-Canadian relations.
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“Academic partnerships are the bedrock of engagement with any country,” said Christopher Yip, dean of the University of Toronto engineering school. “Students have always come back and forth, but this is an opportunity for us to expand on other potential partnerships.”
Ms. Wells said Hong Kong in particular, home to some 300,000 Canadians, has a strong “human connection” with Canada.
Mr. Yip added: “And I think we can certainly leverage that. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”
China is the source of the second-largest population of foreign students in Canada, after India, and Canadian universities have long targeted the country for recruitment and potential partnerships.
These ties came under intense scrutiny in recent years, however, as relations between Ottawa and Beijing entered a deep freeze amid fears of Chinese interference in Canadian politics.
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In 2024, the federal government unveiled strict new national-security rules limiting the work that Canadian universities could do with any institution linked to military or state security bodies. In China’s case, this can complicate partnerships with many top universities, given the often-strong intertwining of the education, security and defence sectors.
Geopolitics has changed a lot since then, as has the person at the top of Canadian politics: in Beijing, Mr. Carney advanced a vision of “pragmatic engagement” with China, particularly on “energy, clean technology and climate competitiveness.”
While the 2024 rules remain in place, and universities still face scrutiny for ties to China, attendees at the Hong Kong conference were delighted by what Mr. Yip called the “reopening of opportunities for us to expand, be it partnerships, placing students in various companies, research engagements, all of that.”
And while government-to-government ties frayed in recent years, brand Canada remains remarkably strong in China.
The iron ring, worn by engineers on their pinky fingers – and able to be used as an impromptu bottle opener, as one attendee demonstrated for the crowd – is symbolic of the kind of reliability and trustworthiness that is key to this identity.
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China continues to pursue massive engineering projects, such as expanding the world’s largest high-speed rail network, including in the Greater Bay Area, which contains Hong Kong and the Chinese megacities of Shenzhen and Guangdong. Both deans felt this creates potential opportunities for Canadian engineers and the universities that train them.
They also hoped that Canada could take some inspiration from China when it comes to infrastructure. Mr. Carney is advancing several “nation-building projects,” including new ports, trade corridors and long-overdue upgrades to Canada’s rail system.
“I went to China last October for the first time in eight years and I was blown away by what I saw in terms of the technology, the infrastructure, the safety, the ambition. It was really, really impressive,” Ms. Wells said.
Mr. Yip said this is the advantage of academic and other exchanges, the type of people-to-people ties hailed by both Mr. Carney and Chinese leader Xi Jinping as key to the countries’ new era of relations.
As well as drawing inspiration from Chinese infrastructure, the flow of new technology, such as the 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles soon to be allowed into Canada, presents “huge opportunities,” Mr. Yip added. “When you see it, you get inspired. How can we catch up to this?”