Hard Choices

The banning of PRC vendors in 5G projects and the creation of the Critical Infrastructure Centre stand out.” In stark contrast, Canada has only “waffled and drifted” over the years, “de- spite not having a free trade agreement with the PRC and being far less reliant on Beijing for prosperity than Australia.” The Government of Canada can no longer adopt foreign policies that are country agnostic wi [...] During the early 2000s, Australia’s then Prime Minister John Howard created a framework that allowed for both the expansion of the Australia-PRC eco- nomic relationship and the continuance of Australia’s military and strategic partnership with the United States. [...] By surveying the landscape of the post-COVID era, this paper will outline the choices that Canada will need to make before it is dragged into a series of ongoing bilateral crises like the 2018 arrest in Canada of Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, and the subsequent arrest in China of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. [...] Shaped by their experiences with conflict and instability in the first half of the 20th century, Canadian leaders in the 1940s and 1950s calculated that the country’s defence and economic interests were best secured within the US-led international order.1 This largely bipartisan view not only proved dura- ble but incredibly beneficial to the well-being of Canada’s citizens. [...] Beset by military, economic, and political fallouts stemming from misadventures in the Middle East and the 2008-2009 global fi- nancial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is only the latest if not the most severe event in the last 20 years to illustrate the relative decline of the US.