CHINA IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO CANADA'S TRADE DIVERSIFICATION STRATEGY

India offers openness, scale, and alignment with democratic systems. China offers constraint, opacity, and strategic leverage embedded in every agreement. Yet Ottawa behaves as though the inverse were true.

- DEAN BAXENDALE

‘War is no longer confined to battlefields. It is waged through supply chains, trade corridors, energy dependencies, and the quiet alignment of nations that claim values they are no longer prepared to defend.

Like Achilles, the archetype of the great warrior whose strength defined the battlefield, yet whose vulnerability determined his fate; modern states project power while exposing their weakest points. Today, those vulnerabilities are not found in armour, but in dependence: on adversarial economies, compromised supply chains, and the erosion of moral clarity.

From Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific, the world is dividing along familiar lines. Democracies on one side, authoritarian regimes on the other. Yet in this moment of global fracture, Canada continues to speak in contradictions.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has chosen a curious line of defence when pressed on forced and child labour: that such abuses exist “throughout the world.” It is a statement that sounds balanced, even reasonable until one understands what it is designed to do.

It dilutes. It deflects. It equalizes the unequal and this is part of the Liberal governments communications strategy on selling China to Canadians. The state broadcaster has been granted access to China and now presents glowing accounts of the brilliance of Chinese engineering, automation and its green initiatives. (Still the biggest emitters of Green House Gases, 2025.)

When everything is a problem, nothing is a priority.

This moral relativism has become the intellectual cover for an increasingly visible reality: Canada’s “all-in” strategy with the People’s Republic of China. A strategy that, notably, did not include any meaningful public confrontation on human rights during Carney’s recent visit with Xi Jinping according to a readout from the Privy Council Office but rebuked by the Prime Minister’s Office.