Economists worry growing conflict with China will make Canada and the world poorer

Canadian domestic politics have helped magnify the most recent dispute between Beijing and Ottawa into a full blown tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats.

While some experts who track relations between China and Canada play the spat down — one called it "pretty trivial" — it's one more crack contributing to a far more dangerous long-term rupture.

Labelled "global fragmentation," the issue was raised at a recent International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, D.C. The current Canadian dispute may represent a further fracturing of the world into competing trade blocs that will not only make us all poorer, but impede crucial talks on shared global threats, including climate change and artificial intelligence.

Critics of the Canadian government's handling of threats against Conservative MP Michael Chong's family in Hong Kong would not see the issue as trivial.

While far less significant than previous disputes with Beijing that in the past led to the long-term imprisonment of innocent Canadians and may have contributed to persistent trade sanctions, the latest Canada-China spat is only one sign of hostility between the world's free-market democracies and what appears to be an emerging alternative bloc. 

"Even as we need more international cooperation on multiple fronts, we are facing the spectre of a new Cold War that could see the world fragment into rival economic blocs," warned IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva earlier this year. "This would be a collective policy mistake that would leave everyone poorer and less secure."

Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem raised the issue in testimony to the Senate standing committee on banking, commerce and the economy last month after discussions in Washington.

"The reality is we have all benefited tremendously from an increasingly integrated global trade and investment system and if that goes in reverse, that will certainly have a cost to global growth," Macklem told senators.

"From Canada's perspective, as a small open economy and a democracy, we always have had an interest in this rules-based multilateral international order, basically, and that's kind of an imperative for us," said Goldfarb in a phone conversation this week.

Goldfarb, who is also a fellow with the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation, said that until a few years ago, Canadian policy on China by both the current governing Liberals and the Conservatives before them assumed that welcoming the growing giant into global networks would make rules-based trade stronger. 

"But we're seeing something different now," said Goldfarb.

As Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland outlined in a Washington speech last year, the failure of autocracies like Russia and China to follow what western countries considered free and fair trade rules means democracies must reshape their strategies.

"You can't simply disengage from the second largest economy in the world," she said, pointing out that China is already beginning to develop policy in the important area of generative artificial intelligence that others, including Canadian AI leader Geoffrey Hinton, say demands global cooperation. 

Canada and its allies know it is essential to keep the door open on "global public goods" including AI policy, climate change and avoiding nuclear conflict, said economist Dane Rowlands at Carleton University's Patterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa. But he said relations with China have never been so bad.