📆 2025-11-02 3:35 PM

Politics And International Relations News

Canada, China, Trade

• 📆 2025-11-02 3:35 PM

• 📰 globeandmail

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This article examines Canada’s complex and often tumultuous relationship with China over the past two decades, highlighting multiple attempts to ‘reset’ diplomatic and economic ties. It analyzes the motivations behind these shifts, the challenges faced, and the potential pitfalls as Canada navigates its engagement with China, the world’s largest manufacturer and consumer market.

You will excuse the raised eyebrow. This will mark the fifth time Canada has reset and reversed its relations with China in the past 20 years, under three prime ministers. Two of those resets have required their own resets, by the same PM, after they worked out badly.

Uneasy lies the hand that sits on the China Reset button. To be sure, Mr. Carney has good reasons to attempt this century’s fifth reset. Canada has lost unimpeded access to its largest trading partner, the United States, possibly permanently. His desire to diversify our America-centric economy as fast as possible pretty much has to include the world’s largest manufacturer and most populous consumer market. Our canola and mining companies would really like access. Our climate ambitions only make sense with those cheap electric cars, powered by our nearly carbon-free grid – and the loss of Big Three e-vehicle manufacturing removes disincentives.The “hold your nose and make a deal” factor tied to Beijing’s crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy and its mass repression of racial and religious minorities is now mitigated somewhat by Washington’s sharp turn into hold-your-nose territory – not quite on the same scale, but headed that way. Odourless trade partners are in short supply. Yet Canada’s first big reset occurred when prime minister Stephen Harper, newly elected in 2006, listened to those in his party who found China’s communist regime distasteful. In a reversal of the Liberal “Team Canada” approach, Mr. Harper declared he wouldn’t “sell out important Canadian values… to the almighty dollar,” gave honorary His idealism ran counter to the thinking of the day, which held that engagement would provoke China’s liberalization and democratization. But that thinking was largely right: A decade before Mr. Xi’s sharp turn, China was becoming more open and free. And Canadian CEOs were furious with the approach. That provoked the second reset: At the end of 2009, facing straitened times in the wake of the world economic crisis and listening to the executives, Mr. Harper and President Hu Jintaoof Alberta’s Nexen by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Though Mr. Harper promised this would be the last big sale to Beijing, he and foreign minister John Baird were accused by veteran diplomats of being far too close to Mr. Xi’s regime.” would have to be even more intensive, culminating in a comprehensive free trade and investment deal. By then, there were signs of Mr. Xi’s shift from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, and his installation of Communist Party organs within formerly independent enterprises. This worried Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, especially foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, who had spent her youth combatting similar Soviet authoritarianism in Ukraine. They consulted widely, but executives with experience in China won the day by telling them they believed Mr. Xi was turning in a more democratic direction., and the trade agreement became unlikely after Beijing demanded an intolerable extradition agreement, rejected any labour or gender protections and saw its proposed takeovers rejected by Ottawa on national-security grounds. But Mr. Trudeau plowed ahead.was solely responsible: His decision to arbitrarily arrest Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver for violating Iran sanctions that Canada didn’t recognize forced Mr. Trudeau into a crisis he couldn’t avoid . Beijing’s brutal detainment of two Canadians, along with its blocking of CanadianThat leaves us two for four on China resets, with Mr. Carney on the pitcher’s mound. As he continues to try to engage with Mr. Xi, he should be careful who he listens to: Executives and ideologues both have unrealistic expectations. Whatever happens, we will have an economic relationship with China. May it be one that avoids our earlier missteps.Carney says he raised foreign interference with Xi

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