Opinion piece by Kyle Matthews is Executive Director of the Montreal Institute for Global Security and McConnell Professor of Practice at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.
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With Trump’s belligerent threats to Canada’s economy and sovereignty and his doubling down on annexing Greenland, the rationale seems sensible: as the United States becomes more unreliable and unstable, perhaps Canada should embrace Beijing?
That impulse is understandable. It is also dangerous.
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In this unstable moment in history, Canada cannot afford to drift between discomfort with Washington and economic engagement with Beijing. We need a foreign and security policy grounded not in hedging between these giants, but in deliberate alignment with democratic partners.
The most urgent fault line runs through Ukraine. Russia’s invasion is not only about Ukraine’s survival; it is about whether borders can be changed by force and whether authoritarian powers can dismantle the rules-based order piece by piece. A Russian success would reverberate far beyond Europe. It would validate violence as an effective tool of statecraft. China is not only watching closely with an eye on Taiwan, it is also directly supporting Putin’s war of aggression.
Beijing’s trajectory is not ambiguous. It is expanding its nuclear arsenal, modernizing its military at extraordinary speed, weaponizing supply chains, and normalizing political warfare abroad. It threatens Taiwan daily. It menaces Japan, the Philippines and Australia. And it increasingly projects power into the Arctic that directly poses a threat to Canada.
For Canada, this is not abstract geopolitics. China has interfered in our elections. It has conducted transnational repression against communities on Canadian soil. It arbitrarily detained our citizens as leverage. The Canadian government recognizes that Beijing engages in pervasive economic espionage and cyber operations.
The key lesson is that Canada cannot respond to American instability by drifting toward authoritarian China.
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Beijing is not a neutral counterweight. It is a systemic challenger working to reshape global rules in ways fundamentally hostile to Canadian interests, democratic governance, and human rights—from the mass repression of Uyghurs and Tibetans to the normalization of hostage diplomacy, political interference, and digital authoritarianism abroad.
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Like our allies in Europe and Asia, Canada needs to stay focused and treat foreign interference, cyber operations, and transnational repression as core national-security threats. It also needs industrial and innovation strategies that reinforce allied supply chains rather than deepen authoritarian dependencies.
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The choice is not between Washington and Beijing. It is between a future shaped by authoritarian leverage and one sustained by democratic cooperation. In a world coming apart, Canada’s security will not come from reviving the language of “strategic partnership” with an authoritarian power.
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I don't know anyone who's seriously discussing that Canada should "embrace" China the way this author posits.