Chancing to Rise

Last December, in an end-of-year interview with Global News, Justin Trudeau said that China has been “very cleverly playing” democratic countries against each other and that the time has come for the West to “do a better job of working together and standing strong so that China can’t . . . play the angles and divide us.”

The prime minister was referring mainly to trade tactics, and his assessment of China’s behaviour isn’t particularly surprising: other powerful countries have sometimes acted in the same way. The comments were noteworthy, ­however, because they indicated a change in Ottawa’s tone and approach toward China. This shift would have been inconceivable when Trudeau came to power in 2015 and probably still inconceivable as little as two years ago, when Canada sent many tonnes of personal protective equipment to China at the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic. However, as Trudeau noted in the same interview, the country we are dealing with is “no longer the...