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Trump’s jaundice does not diminish Canada’s biggest challenge: China
5–7 minutes
Sitting beside Justin Trudeau at that Mar-a-Lago banquet table, Donald Trump’s forced smile didn’t mask the contempt.
A few days later, recounting the scene to a packed auditorium, Trump had the audience chanting when he began taunting Canada as the 51st state. (“I spoke with Canada, and Justin came flying right in because we talked about 25 per cent tariffs. That’s just the beginning.”)
It’s not just Trump. His team, his advisors, the right-wing organizations who crafted Project 2025 — the playbook for expanding presidential power and imposing ultra-conservative values — bristle with disdain for Canada.
They see a freeloading country that lets allies pay for most of their mutual security. They remember leaders, including Trudeau, mocking Trump at the G7. They think most Canadians revile MAGA. They blanche at what they perceive as a lefty social welfare state (mind you, when the starting point is today’s Republican party, pretty well everything else is to the left).
When Trump brandished his threat of massive tariffs for everything Canada exports to the States, he got the response he covets. Within two hours Trudeau was on the phone pleading Canada’s case; by week’s end he flew to Florida for that face-to-face.
Dealing with an antagonized neighbour is difficult at the best of times. Canada has just posted its eighth consecutive monthly trade deficit. Being priced out of its biggest market by mercenary tariffs would devastate an economy dependent on trade.
Getting Trump to rescind his threat will require much more appeasement than having more drones, helicopters and RCMP officers patrol the border for southbound fentanyl and migrants.
Ottawa will need to find the political will to make extreme concessions of historic magnitude. The incoming administration wants things like scrapping Canada’s protectionist supply management system, or finding billions to immediately raise defence budgets.
On the latter, the Trumpists want not just two per cent of GDP but three per cent, doubling Canada’s current defence budget. (They will have rolled their eyes on Friday when Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly proposed a new “North American Arctic” defence framework which envisions a joint Canada-U.S. effort. Skeptics in Washington will see it as a partnership propped up by American military capabilities.)
Some issues will prove considerable barriers to Canada-U.S. reconciliation. For example, it is too late for Ottawa to satisfy the ascendant U.S. Christian right whose support for Israel is unconditional and unapologetic.
But for all the complexities of managing Canada’s most important relationship, Ottawa’s greatest challenge, Trump-wise, is China.
For Trump — who plans to send anti-China hawk David Perdue to Beijing as U.S. ambassador — the priority for foreign policy is confronting China’s “broad and unrelenting” threat to American economic, security and critical infrastructure. Unlike Canada, the U.S. has been taking meaningful steps to counter it. Washington has been active in addressing PRC influence across nine domains: academia, domestic politics, economy, foreign policy, law enforcement, media, military, society, and technology.
In another example, while the U.S. takes actual measures to ban imports of products made with Uyghur forced labour, Ottawa declares that selling such products in Canada is “unacceptable,” but otherwise done no more than token interdiction of these imports.
Evidently, in Ottawa-speak the term “unacceptable” means “we will continue to accept it even if it is morally repugnant because otherwise vested political interests would be negatively impacted.”
Then there is Bill C-70, which would create a Foreign Influence Transparency Registry and other measures to manage national security threats from foreign interference. But, six months after Parliament unanimously passed the bill, there’s still no “independent foreign influence transparency commissioner” — or any movement on establishing a registry of foreign agents.
On this file, the spectre of Canadian policymakers or political influencers having their foreign perks and benefits exposed seems to have paralyzed the government into delaying implementation of this Bill for the foreseeable future.
There is also the prospect of the Foreign Interference Commission, under Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, coming up with its report and recommendations at the end of next month, despite the government itself crippling her investigation by withholding thousands of critical documents. Washington will be watching this closely and will not be pleased if Hogue’s findings are ignored. Unfortunately, Canada’s record is poor when it comes to recommendations of government commissions being carried out.
Of all the worries over working the incoming president, ending the obfuscation and standing up alongside Washington to deal with China could turn out to be the hardest issue for Ottawa to resolve.
Charles Burton is a former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing and a senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a global China-focused think tank based in Prague; committee member of Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab’s China Index.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
