Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to China this week is being billed by his government as a “turning point” a necessary reset in a relationship frozen by years of mistrust, retaliation, and diplomatic breakdown. Liberal MP Kody Blois has framed the trip as pragmatic statecraft: Canada, he argues, cannot afford to ignore the world’s second-largest economy, especially at a time when U.S. protectionism is squeezing Canadian exports.
From a purely economic lens, that argument is hard to dismiss. Canada’s heavy dependence on the United States has long been a strategic vulnerability, and Donald Trump’s renewed tariffs on metals and automobiles have exposed it once again. With the Carney government aiming to double non-U.S. exports over the next decade, Beijing inevitably looms large. China is already a major buyer of Canadian oil via the Trans Mountain pipeline and a player in Canada’s LNG sector through PetroChina’s stake in LNG Canada. Agri-food, energy, and climate cooperation are obvious areas where mutual interests overlap.
Yet this “recalibration” also raises uncomfortable questions not just about economics, but about memory, values, and power.
Canada’s relationship with China did not deteriorate by accident. It collapsed under the weight of the Meng Wanzhou extradition saga and Beijing’s subsequent detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor an episode that many Canadians still see as hostage diplomacy, plain and simple. For more than 1,000 days, those two men symbolized the risks of dealing with an authoritarian state willing to weaponize people for political leverage.
To speak now of a “turning point” without fully grappling with that history risks appearing naïve at best and cynical at worst.
Blois argues that dialogue itself is the point that sitting at the table with China is better than shouting from outside the room. Diplomacy, after all, requires engagement, even with governments we distrust. That is true. But engagement without clarity can quickly slide into accommodation.
Conservative critics have seized on this tension. They point to unresolved concerns over alleged Chinese election interference, the slow enforcement of Bill C-70 on foreign interference, and the optics of Liberal MPs cutting short a visit to Taiwan to avoid offending Beijing. To them, Carney’s China outreach looks less like recalibration and more like déjà vu a return to the Trudeau-era hope that economic cooperation can be neatly separated from security and human rights concerns.
Former diplomat Michael Kovrig’s warning cuts to the heart of the issue. Human rights, he argues, cannot be “compartmentalized” as a side topic to be raised politely while pursuing trade deals. How the Chinese Communist Party treats its own citizens is not an abstract moral concern; it is a preview of how it exercises power abroad.
This is the central challenge for the Carney government. Canada does need diversified trade. It does need dialogue with major powers, including China. But it also needs a long-term strategy grounded in realism, not short-term transactional gains. Rebuilding ties should not mean forgetting lessons painfully learned.
If this trip is truly a turning point, it should be one defined by clear-eyed engagement: pursuing economic opportunities while setting firm boundaries, defending democratic principles, and recognizing that partnership with Beijing comes with costs as well as benefits.
Recalibration is necessary. Amnesia is not.
