By Kyle Matthews

January 19, 2025

The unveiling of the Canada-China strategic partnership this week in Beijing offers a revealing snapshot of Ottawa’s anticipatory anxiety over Donald Trump’s extreme second-term volatility.

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.

The world around which Canada built its prosperity and security is fracturing. Russia’s war against Ukraine has returned military conquest to the centre of geopolitics. China is rapidly militarizing, tightening authoritarian control at home, coercing its neighbours, and aligning itself more closely with Moscow.

And the United States—the anchor of Canada’s security architecture—has entered a period of systemic toxicity, where alliance commitments, trade relationships, and even respect for national sovereignty and international law are no longer supported by the White House.

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.

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.

The choice is not between Washington and Beijing. It is between a future shaped by authoritarian leverage and one sustained by democratic cooperation.

Canada should be embedding itself more deeply within a widening community of democracies that share not only our values but our vulnerabilities.

Europe must be the first pillar. Europe is confronting Russian aggression, Chinese economic coercion, hybrid warfare, and internal democratic stress tests simultaneously. It is rearming, rebuilding defence industrial capacity, and developing new security tools.

Canada has committed itself into this process through a Security and Defence Partnership with the European Union that will deeper defence integration, joint procurement and technology development, intelligence cooperation, and coordinated sanctions and export controls. The transatlantic relationship must evolve to a fully operational partnership.

The second pillar is the Indo-Pacific. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand are living on the frontline of Chinese aggression. They face daily cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, maritime coercion, and economic pressure. They are innovating rapidly in defence technology, counter-interference frameworks, and digital resilience. Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy recognized this reality. It now needs sustained diplomatic presence, long-term defence cooperation, and serious economic-security partnerships to match.

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.

For decades, Canada benefited from a world in which the United States underwrote stability, Europe focused on prosperity, and China integrated into international institutions, if with mixed results. That world unfortunately no longer exists. Authoritarian states are now actively contesting the rules, the norms, and the institutions that made Canadian influence and prosperity possible.

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.

It will come from standing firmly, visibly, and consistently with those prepared to shape a political order on which Canada’s sovereignty, prosperity, and freedoms ultimately depend.

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.