Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ongoing Asian tour signals a welcome shift in Canada’s regional engagement. After six months in office, Carney appears to understand what his predecessors missed: Asian leaders value consistency and realism over grand gestures and progressive rhetoric.
The Indonesian free trade agreement and pursuit of an ASEAN-wide free trade agreement demonstrate concrete progress. Canada’s participation in sanctions invasion exercises and provision of dark vessel tracking technology to the Philippines shows we’re serious about regional security. Our Taiwan Strait transits and intelligence cooperation send the right signals about upholding the rules-based order.
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The elephant in the room remains China. From Seoul to Manila, our partners watch nervously as Ottawa signals renewed engagement with Beijing. They understand engagement is necessary, but worry Canada hasn’t internalized the hard lessons about Xi’s China—a regime that weaponizes economic ties and views compromise as weakness. Using China to hedge against Trump’s America is less clever realpolitik than it is dangerous naivety.
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Our Asian allies know the scorpion and frog fable well. They’ve felt China’s sting through economic coercion, territorial aggression, and broken promises. They want Canada as a serious Indo-Pacific partner, but one that approaches Beijing with clear-eyed realism about its authoritarian ambitions.
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To be taken seriously in Asia, Canada needs sustained cabinet-level visits, deeper security partnerships, and patient relationship-building. Most critically, we must demonstrate we understand that Xi’s China is not a benign alternative to American unpredictability—it’s an authoritarian power seeking regional dominance.
The region is watching. They want more Canada, but a Canada that deals with Asia as it is, not as progressive idealists wish it were. Carney has made a decent start. Now he needs to show up regularly, engage consistently, and above all, approach China with the hard-headed realism our partners expect.
I think that’s making Carney seem like the only politician who’s playing this game; that’s not true at all. Many of the less developed Asian economies have become more reliant on China over the years, and IS playing the realpolitik game, and we’re only seeing Carney trying to play a similar game here.
Why am I saying that? If you look within many of those ASEAN countries, you’ll notice that China has been putting investments into and through their countries at various levels, and they’ve been happy (if reluctantly) to take them despite how many of them are in a conflict with China esp over the South China Sea.
Ideally, we shouldn’t feed the beast that would claw our faces, but this beast stands in the way of accessing various critical minerals and even technology (China is no longer playing catch up; they lead in certain sectors now), and Canada is in a position where we need to progress lest we be crushed by the times.
Western countries like the idealist approach to foreign policies, which is fine, but you can only play that game when you’re not being threatened. The so-called Global South has never had that privilege, and has thus generally resorted to more pragmatic approaches. Unfortunately for Canada, those days to being pure idealists is over, and it’s time to learn to be pragmatic, and how to play that game safely.
So it’s “Wake the fuck up” really. Those stable times are over, and we’re in some of the most turbulent times since WW2 and the Cold War, and given who’s fanning the flames, it’s only going to get worse from here. Fingers crossed that we keep voting in politicians that know what they’re doing, especially if we’ve not been doing that at all in the last several decades.