Canada’s partial Pacific pivot

24 August 2021

Like the United States, Canada borders both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. However, Canada’s investment — both physical and psychological — in the Pacific theatre pales in comparison with that of its southern neighbour.

Given its overwhelming dependence on the US, it has been asked whether Canada truly requires a foreign policy of its own. Since its founding in 1867 as a dominion within the British Empire, Washington’s formal recognition of Canadian independence effectively rested upon Ottawa’s acknowledgement of American continental pre-eminence. World War II, which marked the end of Britain’s role as a strategic player in North America, further developed this compact: Canada would preserve its sovereignty by contributing enough to the defence of North America to ensure that it would not become a liability to the US.

The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the signing of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, later expanded into NAFTA during the Clinton presidency. By the early 2000s, the United States accounted for roughly 85 per cent of Canadian exports (although this figure has declined by roughly 10 percentage points in the years since the Great Recession). This reality has led advocates of a more independent Canadian foreign policy to frame their goals through the lens of trade diversification. As such, Canada’s approach toward Asia in recent decades has been disproportionately focused on trade over geopolitics — and on the economic opportunity presented by a rising China instead of a longer-term approach focused on the wider region.

A tougher approach towards China also risks increasing Canada’s dependence on the US, even as the latter demonstrates a growing penchant for unilateralism and unpredictability.

This more tightly focused approach toward Asian issues in the post-Cold War era has allowed Canada to devote the bulk of its foreign policy attention toward other fronts. These included active participation in NATO, in addition to normative entrepreneurship at the global level — spearheading projects such as the Ottawa Treaty on landmines, the founding of the International Criminal Court, and the development of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Yet as the era of “hyper-globalism” has gradually waned in favour of renewed great power rivalry, Ottawa is now forced to confront questions that it has long neglected: how to up its presence in a region that is fast becoming the centre of global competition and how to manage the pressures imposed by a deteriorating Sino-American relationship.

Between a rock and a hard place

In the early years of Justin Trudeau’s premiership, which began in 2015, such questions were not on the radar. In September 2016, before Donald Trump was elected president, Ottawa announced the launch of exploratory talks on a free trade deal with Beijing, which would have made Canada the first G7 country to ink such an agreement with China. However, a trip by Trudeau to Beijing in late 2017 failed to launch formal negotiations, owing perhaps to the Canadian side’s insistence on “progressive trade” stipulations on environmental, gender and labour standards.

At the time, Canada was also renegotiating NAFTA under pressure from the Trump administration. Talks on the newly branded USMCA deal concluded on 30 September 2018 with the surprising insertion of a clause appearing to restrict Canada’s ability to negotiate free trade deals with “non-market” economies, which most observers understood to mean China. Two months later, on 1 December, Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was detained at Vancouver International Airport on a US extradition request, a move which some saw as political given the ongoing trade war between Washington and Beijing.

In a multipolar world, trade agreements and extradition treaties are about more than just commerce and the rule of law: they also have strategic implications. Taken together, these two moves persuaded Beijing that Ottawa had opted to join an anti-China bloc. China subsequently arrested two Canadian citizens on its soil, widely viewed as retaliation for Meng’s detention. As a result, the share of the Canadian public holding a favourable view of China fell to just 14 per cent in 2020, down from 58 per cent in 2005 and 48 per cent as recently as 2017.

In March this year, Canada teamed up with the US, UK and EU to impose sanctions on China over its human rights abuses in Xinjiang. This move was preceded one month earlier by a resolution in the Canadian House of Commons — adopted unanimously — recognising the oppression of China’s Uyghur population as a genocide. (However, Trudeau’s cabinet abstained on the vote and a similar motion in the Canadian Senate failed to pass.) In retaliation, Beijing announced sanctions on a Canadian member of Parliament.

Ottawa and Beijing have also found themselves at loggerheads over the protests in Hong Kong, a trade dispute over Canadian canola exports, and a death sentence imposed on a Canadian citizen by a Chinese court — bilateral standoffs which have all escalated over the past two and a half years. By May 2021, it was reported that Ottawa was quietly drafting an “Indo-Pacific strategy”, akin to those already adopted by other states. Some analysts assert that such a move would not reflect Canadian interests: the term’s implicit association with the logic of containment does not rest easily with Canada’s traditional self-image as a dedicated multilateralist and problem-solver.

A multi-vectored foreign policy?

Nonetheless, the Indo-Pacific concept has garnered momentum in certain Canadian policy circles. Canada now represents the second-largest economy in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trading bloc (following the American withdrawal from the agreement under Trump) and Ottawa has also moved to expand its military cooperation with Tokyo in recent years. However, despite Canada’s belated and partial effort to strengthen its strategic presence in Asia, obstacles continue to block the path toward a more robust investment in the region.

It is not uncommon for the Canadian diplomatic community to cite NATO, perhaps somewhat oddly, as a successful example of multilateralism. This is partly due to the nominal role that an expanded transatlantic community plays in constraining American unilateralism. As a result, Atlanticism plays a disproportionately large role in Canadian foreign policy, discouraging Canada not only from pivoting toward Asia but also from adopting a more independent-minded approach toward a region where Canadian and American interests do not always align.

A trade-dependent country such as Canada would not necessarily benefit from the seemingly growing appetite for zero-sum competition in both Washington and Beijing. A tougher approach towards China also risks increasing Canada’s dependence on the US, even as the latter demonstrates a growing penchant for unilateralism and unpredictability. Moreover, stronger military investment in the Pacific is constrained by the Canadian Arctic — of growing strategic relevance — being more easily accessed by way of the country’s Atlantic coast, due to the presence of Alaska to Canada’s northwest.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau requested a dissolution of Parliament this month, placing Canadians on track for a federal election on 20 September in which he hopes to convert his party’s plurality of seats into a Liberal majority government. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, if he emerges victorious, promises to abandon Trudeau’s efforts at tightrope walking and lead a government that is much tougher on China. Yet irrespective of who sits in the prime minister’s office, structural factors will likely continue to inhibit Canada from playing a leading or term-setting role in a region that it has bordered since British Columbia’s admission to the Confederation in 1871.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Dr Zachary Paikin is a non-resident research fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Toronto and a researcher with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a leading global think tank based in Brussels. He tweets at @zpaikin. Image credit: Wikimedia.