Jen Gerson: What if they're all bad guys?

An erratic and menacing U.S. is pushing us toward an autocratic and dangerous China.

By: Jen Gerson

I’m not sure anything highlights the sheer counterproductiveness of the U.S.’s new National Security Strategy more than the fact that Mark Carney and a Canadian delegation are touring China right now.

Relations between Canada and China have been on the rocks for nearly a decade. China is an authoritarian state with an astonishingly bad human rights record; it has kidnapped our citizens and interfered in our electoral process. And yet, one year of Trump v. 2 is all it took for us to look across the Pacific with a bead of warmth and longing.

And we’re doing so despite the fact that the aforementioned NSS set out to accomplish the exact opposite of this — the Americans increasingly want to pull everyone in the Western hemisphere into their explicitly imperial domain. One that has no room for Chinese interference.

But Canada — stressed by tariffs, CUMSA threats, and God-knows whatever slew of demands are about to be issued via TruthSocial during a 3 a.m. cable TV rage binge — suddenly finds itself without a lot of good options.

We’re a middle power. Wealthy, but not enough. We have no real capacity for self defence. In a Big Power game, our best ploy is to play the bigger players off one another while running our own interests up the middle. China is not more attractive today than it was a year ago, but if we’re no longer considering shared values in how we go about operating in the world, then the only choice left is to play the board Donald Trump himself has laid out — pure amoral transactionalism. In short, the question we’re asking ourselves with this delegation is whether we can afford our pride and moral purity in this new world order.

China is betting on “no.”

Their state media encouraged us to pursue “strategic autonomy“ from the United States in a vaguely menacing editorial that warns us not to work in tandem with the Americans to shut them out again.

Unlike our friend and ally to the south, the Chinese appear to be willing to act at least a little bit nice. Reports suggest that the delegation to Beijing may secure some easing of canola tariffs, in exchange for lifting our tariffs on their EVs we imposed in 2024. This would please electric car buyers and be welcomed by prairie provinces soured by Ottawa’s willingness to protect domestic automakers (ahem, Ontario) at the expense of the non-supply managed agricultural sector (ahem, the west.)

By the way, I can acknowledge our collective pickle while also categorically opposing China’s history in this country. China tried — and failed — to sway an election in favour of the Liberals. They imprisoned Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in response to the legal detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou (a warrant we issued on the Americans’ behalf. Thanks buds!).

The Chinese guys are not good faith actors, and the Liberals don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt on this file. It’s reasonable for conservatives who were already alienated by the self dealing in this country to have suspicions about who is really calling the shots.

What we all need, however, is to ensure that we’re clear eyed about the risks that we’re accruing by diversifying our trading relationships with a regime like Beijing.

We also have to understand the risks of failing to do so.

Any critique of the Liberals on this file must likewise be grounded; Justin Trudeau is not going to go down as one of Canada’s greatest prime ministers. But his record doesn’t hold up to the claim that he was in Beijing’s pocket, either. He actually rejected a call from within his own cultural and political establishment to release Meng.

Trudeau also blocked corporate takeovers by Chinese companies in the minerals sector, and banned Huawei from our wireless infrastructure. (Oligopoly vs. Oligopoly. Choose your fighter!)

And while China has tried to influence our elections, there’s no real evidence that they’ve been effective at it.

Overall, what we’re left with is a rather murky picture. We see a bad faith state actor overstepping normal boundaries in order to bring Canada closer into its sphere of influence, certainly. But it’s not clear that they have been much more effective than other nations or, indeed, other major interests. All politics are a little like this; a tangled string of actors vying for bandwidth that doesn’t quite add up to puppetmaster levels of conspiracy. China’s in the mix. So are the Sikhs, and Big Dairy, and public-sector unions, and, lately, legacy media lobbyists. Governments are, at their heart, about managing priorities amid competing interests.

One will note that this observation is very far short of an absolution. Canada has not done a stellar job either setting priorities or managing competing interests of late, but we can’t really blame the Chinese for that.

Further, one of my nagging concerns is that I see bubbling from comments sections and social media a fairly un-nuanced view of all this. One that presumes every action of our government can be explained through one lens — namely that the Liberals are irrevocably and corruptly in thrall to the ChiComs. This bled into real life recently at protests at the constituency office of Michael Ma, a formerly Conservative MP who recently crossed the floor to support the Liberals, getting the party one seat closer to a majority government. (Ma joined Carney in the Beijing delegation.)

One might fairly protest Ma for switching parties, but there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence that he’s influenced by China — and considering he was elected as a Conservative, some reason to believe he isn’t.

My concern is that circumstantial evidence will fuse with a grain of truth to cement a narrative — that Canada is run by ChiComs and is in need of liberation.

And who does that story benefit?

Well, that conspiracy creates a narrative that serves foreign actors of a different, and much more proximate, kind.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Americans were, through their own foreign policy choices, pushing us into a closer relationship with China — and then using the fact of that closeness as an excuse to further hobble us financially and politically? It’s sharks and pirates in every direction; north, east, west and south.

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