‘Neither strong nor free’ until now: Canada’s sovereign reckoning

BY WENRAN JIANG

Septeber 14, 2026 In October 2018

     Eight years of following America’s China policy bought Canada exactly zero credit, and instead it culminated in a full-blown sovereignty crisis.

Prime Minister Mark Carney standing firm against ‘being told to do something or being restricted to doing something else’ is the philosophical foundation of Canada’s reset with Beijing, writes Wenran Jiang. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

     I wrote in The Globe and Mail that under the then-newly renegotiated Canada United States-Mexico Agreement, “Canada is neither strong nor free.” The so-called poison pill —Article 32.10—surrendered Canada’s sovereign right to negotiate trade agreements with third countries. Few took the warning seriously.

     Eight years later, the poison pill has mutated into overt economic vassalage. To understand why Canada accepted it then and why it must reject it now, we need to examine the changing dynamics of great-power politics—and Ottawa’s miscalculated bet on Washington, D.C.

     Back then, Canada-China relations were already sliding downhill. The Trudeau government— aligned with Five Eyes co-ordination under U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term—saw no prospect of a free trade deal with Beijing. Worse, Ottawa calculated that following Washington’s China containment policy would earn goodwill elsewhere. So when the poison pill arrived, it was swallowed with less resistance than it should have been. What followed confirmed the trajectory: the Meng Wanzhou arrest in December 2018 froze bilateral ties; the 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy branded China “an increasingly disruptive global power”; and the 2025 100-per-cent electric vehicle surtax blindly mirrored U.S. policy. For eight years, Ottawa’s China file was defined by alignment with Washington.

     The miscalculation was this: the federal government assumed that strategic obedience would be credited as alliance loyalty. It was not. In Trump’s second term, Washington launched a trade war against Canada— and then, as leverage in the CUSMA renegotiation, invoked a Great Depression-era “ghost clause” to threaten 50-per-cent tariffs on $20-billion of Canadian goods unless Ottawa submitted to U.S. terms. Trump repeatedly mused about Canada becoming the “51st state.” Then came the breaking point: in the final hours of August 2026 talks, U.S. negotiators demanded explicit control over which countries Canada may trade with, and even sought to dictate Ottawa’s bilingual labelling and cultural content rules. That demand collapsed the negotiations. Eight years of following America’s China policy bought Canada exactly zero credit, and instead it culminated in a full blown sovereignty crisis. But Prime Minister Mark Carney is far from isolated: three-in-four Canadians support walking away from the U.S. negotiating table.

     The Washington-Ottawa rupture has, predictably, triggered a fierce debate over the U.S.-Canada China triangle. The Washington Post ran an article titled “The U.S. and Canada are in a trade war: China aims to win it.” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer accused Canada of doing “the kind of things that China would do,” arguing Ottawa’s relations with Beijing must be constrained to prevent Chinese products from entering the U.S. via Canada. This is precisely Washington’s fear: that Carney might use the China card as leverage. But Ottawa has already settled the question. As Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc declared: “The idea that the United States would have a word to say in the sovereign decision of Canada to enter into a free trade agreement with another reliable trading partner, obviously wasn’t something that we were prepared to consider.” Carney himself drew the line this way: Canada acting “in our joint interests” is acceptable; “being told to do something or being restricted to doing something else” is not. That distinction—voluntary diversification versus coerced alignment—is the philosophical foundation of Canada’s reset with Beijing. It is not alignment. It is sovereignty.

     Carney gave this sovereign stance its doctrinal name at Davos in January 2026: middle-power strategic autonomy. “The old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy,” he declared. “Middle powers must act together. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” His “value based realism”—principled and pragmatic—is now the intellectual anchor for Canada’s current course.

     Carney’s government is not turning to China—it is returning to Canada. A sovereign player in a multipolar trading system does not ask permission to trade. It calculates its interests, acts on them, and manages the consequences. That is not idealism. That is 2026 realism.

     The January 2026 reset with Beijing is the textbook application. Carney’s visit—the first by a Canadian prime minister in eight years—established a new strategic partnership and produced the China-Canada Economic and Trade Cooperation Roadmap. Replacing the 100-per-cent EV surtax with a managed quota, and securing China’s adjustment of anti-dumping measures on canola are not acts of alignment. They are trade diversification, plain and simple—Canada reclaiming its sovereign right to conduct independent economic diplomacy with the world’s second-largest economy, while refusing to become a counterweight dependency.

     Canada today must be strong and free—and also strategic and flexible. This means four things. First, abandon the illusion that obedience earns respect from Washington. Carney’s refusal to surrender Canada’s third-country trade rights must be matched by institutional hedging: accelerating non-U.S. export diversification—to double non-U.S. exports within a decade— while negotiating with America on terms of reciprocity, not submission. Second, institutionalize the China reset through mechanisms like the Economic and Financial Strategic Dialogue and the Joint Economic and Trade Committee—de-ideologizing the relationship so it serves Canadian interests, not great-power agendas. Third, practice flexible non-alignment between the U.S. and China: refusing to bankroll Washington’s containment, while declining to underwrite Beijing’s strategic ambitions. Fourth, recognize that strategic autonomy is a process, not an event. Canada cannot decouple from the U.S. overnight—70 per cent of our exports still flow south. The task is to gradually broaden the portfolio: deepening the European Union partnership, implementing the China roadmap, negotiating with India, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Mercosur,  all while keeping the door open to a renewed CUSMA on reciprocal terms.

     Eight years ago, “neither strong nor free” was a warning. Today, it is a blueprint for sovereign action. The poison pill taught us that surrendering autonomy to a hegemon buys not protection, but ever-greater extraction. Carney’s government is not turning to China—it is returning to Canada. A sovereign player in a multipolar trading system does not ask permission to trade. It calculates its interests, acts on them, and manages the consequences. That is not idealism. That is 2026 realism.

About the Author：Wenran Jiang, the founding director of the China Institute and MacTaggart Research Chair Emeritus at the University of Alberta, is an adviser at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. Source link:

https://www.hilltimes.com/2026/09/14/neither-strong-nor-free-until-now-canadas-sovereign reckoning/517878/ See all stories BY WENRAN JIANG