It was a moment of global clarity. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the world’s political and economic elite gathered in Davos this week described global realities, past and present, with a candour and nuance rarely heard from a serving politician.
The message was twofold.
First, Carney made clear that the world has changed, and the old comfortable ways of global politics are not coming back. Those who wait for sanity to return are waiting in vain. We are in a world increasingly shaped by the threat and the use of hard power. All states must accept that reality.
Despite this, Carney’s second and more hopeful message was that while the globally powerful may act unilaterally, others — notably “middle powers” like Canada — are not helpless.
By finding ways to co-operate on areas of shared interest, states like Canada can pool their limited resources to build what amounts to a flexible network of co-operative ties. Taken together they can provide an alternative to simply rolling over and taking whatever great powers like the United States dole out.
Canada needs to build lasting relationships with democratic allies like the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others. Carney’s visit last week in China and the deal was a mistake imo. It risks to contribute to Canadian canola farmers ongoing dependence from a single market that is governed by a dictatorial government, and could make Ottawa vulnerable for future coercion as we have seen in other countries.
That’s silly, you can’t just decouple from both of the world’s largest economies. The EU deindustrialized itself, and Australia and New Zealand aren’t exactly economic superpowers. Also, Japan is a de-facto one party state with a far-right government.
The smart thing to do is to play the superpowers against each other - distance yourself from the US as much as we can (which we of course can only do to an extent), and normalize relations with China. We would be fools to continue to blindly follow US foreign policy while the US threatens to invade us.
This is how China argues, but it doesn’t make sense. There is no such thing as a ‘normal’ relationship with a dictatorship like China (or the US). Canada needs to diversify its trade toward reliable partners in the democratic world. China will take advantage at the cost of Canadian citizens as soon as it can.
The rest of the “democratic” world supported Israel as they bombed Gaza to rubble, and supported America in basically every murderous invasion and regime change of the last 80 years, right up until America threatened to take Greenland - suddenly it’s different if America comes for someone in the club. All the “democratic west” amounts to is a few rich countries run by rich pedophiles, but God forbid we do business with big bad China, right?