Canada must revive the Parliament's Special Committee on Canada–China Relations: without an integrated forum like that, we are left reacting to headlines rather than shaping strategy
Canada must revive the Parliament's Special Committee on Canada–China Relations: without an integrated forum like that, we are left reacting to headlines rather than shaping strategy
It’s time to revive Parliament’s tool to stand up to China with courage
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For too long, Canada has lived within a cocoon of peace and predictability, where our political class rarely needs to think or act like a country prepared for even slight pressure. That calm has bred complacency. We have forgotten how to meet challenges with clarity, confidence, and conviction.
Ottawa’s tariff on Chinese EVs was not just symbolic. It addressed legitimate national-security risks—including the data collection possible through connected vehicles, and our growing dependence on Beijing’s control of global battery supply chains. It also recognized that state-subsidized EV imports could erode North America’s manufacturing base. However, we should separate the talk between trade and national security, which Beijing wants to muddle.
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Beijing’s retaliation was anything but random. Its decision to target Canadian agriculture is deliberate and sophisticated—a message to Western Canada that Ottawa’s “Laurentian elites” make decisions at their expense. It’s a classic divide-and-rule tactic: pit sector against sector, province against province. We can already see the fault lines cracking: premiers of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta on one side; and the premier of Ontario on the other. This is combined with the lack of leadership from the federal government.
China understands this well. It has responded the way it always does: by striking exports that hurt politically, targeting Prairie farmers and sectors that influence votes. It’s a calculated, classic Chinese Communist Party move—divide the country, isolate provinces, and undermine national resolve.
We’ve seen this playbook before. During the Meng Wanzhou and “Two Michaels” affair, China’s trade restrictions and diplomatic retaliation exposed how easily our economic levers could be turned against us. Now, the same tactics return, once again through canola.
Other democracies have learned to respond differently. When Taiwan was punished with a sudden ban on its pineapples in 2021, its people responded with unity, proudly consuming and exporting their own produce as a symbol of resilience. When Australia faced restrictions on lobsters, wine, and coal, it refused to bend, choosing sovereignty over convenience. Both nations discovered something Canada still struggles with: adversity can reveal, and strengthen, national purpose.
That’s why Parliament must urgently reconstitute the Special Committee on Canada–China Relations (CACN). During its previous mandate, the committee produced some of the most thorough work ever done on our Indo-Pacific strategy, foreign interference, trade dependencies, and human-rights abuses in East Turkistan and Hong Kong. Its reports informed stronger transparency rules and laid the groundwork for a long overdue foreign-influence registry.
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