Canada is set to reveal its China strategy. For a sneak peek, look to Washington
CBC
Canada's long-awaited strategy for dealing with China and the broader Indo-Pacific region might finally be released within days.
It's taken a while. But two sources say the Trudeau government hopes to have the paper completed and out in public before the prime minister heads to Asia later this month.
Advance clues of some of its themes, however, are available in a place where public officials have spent years obsessing over this issue: the United States.
It's no accident that Canadian ministers have been travelling to Washington lately to talk about trading more with allies or even decoupling from China.
It's a textbook example of preaching to the choir. Or, to stick with the musical metaphor, it's an example of singing from a common hymn book.
Political Washington under the last few administrations has been increasingly seized with girding itself for a generation of competition with China.
And the U.S. has made clear, for some time, that it's eager to know where Canada stands in the century's biggest geopolitical rivalry.
The U.S. already has strategy papers and books from current and past government officials and numerous trade actions, from tariffs on Chinese imports to several export bans forbidding certain high-tech products from being sold to China.
Sources say the Canadian policies won't entirely replicate U.S. ones, but that one U.S. politician's speech, in particular, resembles Ottawa's thinking on China.
The speech was delivered earlier this year by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and it advocates two concurrent paths in working with China.
Track one: to keep trading with China and co-operating where possible, like on mutually beneficial issues involving public health and the environment. Yet some trade will be curtailed.
There's the second, more antagonistic track laid out by Blinken. It involves limiting trade with China in a pair of areas: cutting-edge technology and vital goods where Chinese state-backed companies are pursuing a global monopoly.
Blinken mentioned semiconductors, steel and pharmaceuticals as examples.
"To the people of China: we'll compete with confidence; we'll co-operate wherever we can; we'll contest where we must," Blinken said in the speech earlier this year. "We want trade and investment as long as they're fair and don't jeopardize our national security."
