Tasha Kheiriddin: Mark Carney must wake up to fact China is no friend

It's official: Canada's counter tariffs kicked in at 12 a.m. Tuesday, slamming an eclectic list of goods that includes dairy products, cosmetics, haircare, softwood, steel rods and window frames. All will cost between 25 and 50 per cent more, in response to U.S. tariffs that show no sign of going away any time soon. To the contrary, U.S. President Donald Trump is just getting started, sending a stream of over 60 posts on Truth Social Monday in which he threatened to ban aerospace giant Bombardier from selling aircraft in the U.S. As he has done with other major developments in the trade war, Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a national address on his YouTube channel, Forward Guidance. It was posted Tuesday morning, and since most Canadians will not devote 15 minutes to watching it, I did. And it delivered several important clues about the government's strategy going forward. The first is that Ottawa will continue to frame the Canada-U.S. relationship as adversarial. Carney cited John A. Macdonald's building of the railway as a response to "American aggression" and talked of U.S. president William McKinley imposing 50 per cent tariffs on Canadians exports in 1890. In other words, we are just following in our ancestors' footsteps, legitimizing the narrative that today's trade war is part of a continuum, not a Trumpian blip. The second is that the government will continue to push diversification to reduce trade dependence on the U.S. market. Here, Carney highlighted two sets of relationships: Europe and China. He chose to give a detailed example of a western farm whose owners now get higher prices on their canola, thanks to Ottawa's deal last year with Beijing to lower tariffs on agricultural products in exchange for Canada cutting tariffs on Chinese EVs. What Carney didn't mention was that the deal set off alarm bells both here and in Washington, which takes a dim view of any increased coziness between Canada and the Middle Kingdom. The third reveal was on energy. Carney talked about diversifying Canadian exports toward Asian markets and said, and I quote, "we're going to build a new pipeline connecting Alberta's resources to Pacific ports." That will be sweet music to western petroleum producers, but there's one small hitch: the pipeline has not yet been approved by the Major Projects Office and it's facing serious opposition from a slew of First Nations. Yet Carney talked of it as a fait accompli. Put the pieces together and Carney's "forward guidance" is clear: a long-term, permanent economic decoupling from America, accompanied by an embrace of other nations, some of whom represent a worse threat to Canadian sovereignty than the current U.S. administration, namely, China. China gains when western alliances fray. It gains when Canada sells more commodities into its markets. It gains when Ottawa feels it has fewer reasons to defer to Washington. And it certainly gains when military-to-military contacts between Ottawa and Beijing, frozen after years of bitter relations, resume — as they did last week. On Sept. 4, Canadian and Chinese defence officials held their first formal Defence Coordination Dialogue in more than eight years — a fact glowingly reported by the Chinese press, but curiously absent from any announcements from Ottawa. Instead, when pressed, a defence official downplayed the meeting as a "routine dialogue" to exchange views on regional and global security matters. Carney is right that Canada needs alternatives to American dependence. But we must resist the temptation to confuse diversification with friendship. China remains an authoritarian state whose interests conflict directly with ours. Ottawa continues to cite concerns about Beijing's military pressure around Taiwan, its ambitions in the Arctic and its conduct in the South China Sea. In contrast, the U.S. may not be very friendly today but it has been in the past. Carney would do better to remind Canadians of the high points of our relationship, rather than the lows. Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia's national politics columnist.