Much has been written about China’s rise. Far less attention has been paid to a more important question: whether China’s economic model can sustain it.
For more than three decades, China achieved one of the most remarkable economic expansions in modern history, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and transforming itself into the manufacturing centre of the world. Yet beneath that success lies a growing structural weakness that Canadian policymakers should watch closely: debt.
One of Ontario’s biggest and most reliable automakers is warning Canadians not to take its presence here for granted.
“Companies don’t automatically keep building vehicles in the same country just because it’s always been that way,” Honda Canada president Dave Jamieson told an industry summit convened by the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association in Vaughan this week.
It wasn’t a throwaway line. Jamieson spent almost his entire speech — one of his first since taking the job last year — making the case that Canada is at a policy crossroads that could determine whether his company keeps investing in its manufacturing base in Alliston, Ont.
OTTAWA/ISTANBUL — On June 12, Dr. Gulshan Abbas turns 64. She will mark the birthday, as she has marked the last seven, inside a Chinese prison — serving a 20-year sentence her family says was manufactured to punish her sister for speaking out.
That sister, Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, joined the Bureau Podcast from Istanbul this week to discuss her memoir, Unbroken, and to deliver a blunt warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: Canada is walking the same road the United States walked decades ago and only really corrected course over the past decade.
Podcast – “I Wonder How Many People Mark Carney Has Around Him That’s Actually Working for China”: Rushan Abbas, author of Unbroken.
OTTAWA — Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs and author of the memoir Unbroken, joined The Bureau Podcast from Istanbul, in the middle of a tour that has carried her from the Oslo Freedom Forum to the halls of the U.S. Congress — where, she says, countering Beijing is now one of the only things uniting Republicans and Democrats.
Diversification beyond the U.S. automobile market is “not an option” for Canada and Ottawa should scrap a trade deal with China that is seeing Chinese electric vehicles enter the Canadian market, a group representing three of the biggest U.S. automakers in Canada said on Tuesday.
The standing committee on international trade in the House of Commons heard from Brian Kingston, the president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, a group that represents the operations of Ford, General Motors and Stellantis in Canada.
This ought to go over well in Washington.
China’s EV maker BYD is gearing up to enter the Canadian market… US adds BYD to list of firms with alleged Chinese military ties
OTTAWA — In January 2026, the RCMP signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), renewing a framework for police cooperation with the same arm of the Chinese state that prosecutors in two democracies have now tied, in open court, to the surveillance and intimidation of dissidents on foreign soil — and, in one of those jurisdictions, to a notorious triad. It is a development that corroborates recent United States Treasury sanctions and Washington Post reporting pointing to deepening ties between Beijing’s security services and transnational Chinese mafia proxies.
Federal documents show Ottawa has agreed to grant Chinese manufacturers access to a volume of electric vehicle imports equivalent to roughly half of Canada’s battery electric vehicle market, despite previous government claims the arrangement represented only a small share of sales.
Blacklock’s Reporter says details tabled in the House of Commons reveal the federal government has committed to allowing 49,000 Chinese-made battery electric vehicles into Canada this year, with the quota rising to 63,037 vehicles by 2031.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says he isn’t surprised by the Trump administration’s plan to slap import levies on goods allegedly made with forced labour.
A report released from U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s office on Tuesday listed dozens of countries, including Canada, as having varying degrees of ineffective enforcement rules around goods made with forced labour.
The report accused Canada and a handful of other countries of failing to “effectively enforce” import bans on such items. As a result, the U.S. government will hit goods not compliant with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement with a 10 per cent levy.
Canadians pay a premium for dairy products because they have been told that supply management protects Canadian farmers, strengthens domestic production, and safeguards our food sovereignty. Whether one supports the system or not, that has always been the bargain: Consumers pay more in exchange for stability, predictability, and a secure domestic food supply.
That is why newly released government records related to Canada Royal Milk in Kingston, Ont. deserve far more attention than they have received.
US President Donald Trump’s administration is proposing additional tariffs of 10% or more to be imposed on its trading partners following a probe into countries importing goods allegedly made with forced labor.
In a report released Wednesday, the US Trade Representative (USTR) said it had found that 60 economies had failed to “impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor,” calling it a “burden” to US commerce.
… An additional 10% tariff will be imposed on imports from Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Pakistan, the UK and EU nations. These are countries which, according to Washington’s investigation, impose a forced labor import prohibition, that have undertaken commitments on forced labor or have partially prevented the import of forced labor goods.
OTTAWA — On May 6, Guangming Daily — not just an official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, but allegedly the favored mouthpiece of the world’s largest intelligence agency — published an admiring essay under a headline that reads “From dependence to autonomy: how the Carney government is reimagining Canada–U.S. relations.” The piece, which approvingly amplified Carney’s odd choice to flourish a figurine of the British general Isaac Brock, famed for repelling an American invasion in 1812, does not report on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rupture with Washington so much as celebrate it.
SAIPAN – The irony was almost too neat, and Jim Kingman felt it land as he sat in the gleaming, barely used federal courthouse on Saipan in the summer of 2024 and watched the United States government close the book on Julian Assange.
They had come a very long way to do it. The head of the Justice Department’s national security division flew in that morning; by early afternoon the WikiLeaks founder had pleaded guilty to a single Espionage Act count over the disclosure of Bradley Manning’s classified files, been sentenced to time served, and was gone — three hours, beginning to end, the federal lawyers not bothering to feign curiosity about the island they had chosen as the stage.
Pete Hegseth has told America’s allies in Asia they cannot “freeload” on defence and must increase spending to counter China’s military build-up.
The US defence secretary said the United States would no longer subsidise their allies, echoing Donald Trump’s message to Nato leaders to shoulder more of the military burden and reduce reliance on Washington.
The Pentagon chief told a security conference in Singapore: “The era of the United States subsidising the defence of wealthy nations is over.”
The eyes of the world were on President Donald J. Trump and Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping at their high-profile summit in Beijing earlier this month. But behind the sunny scenes of cheering children and marching soldiers, China’s economic mischief continued in the shadows.
White House science advisor Michael Kratsios has accused China of “industrial scale” theft of U.S. artificial-intelligence technology. In an April 23 memorandum, he added: “There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the innovations of American industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open models that are derived from acts of malicious exploitation.”
WASHINGTON/OTTAWA — In this episode I connect with Grace Jin Drexel in Washington, as she pleads for the release of her father — and, almost in spite of herself, becomes a target of the same regime that imprisoned him.
WASHINGTON — In 2017, as Donald Trump launched a campaign to decouple the United States from a system of economic entanglement with China that a generation of American officials had come to see as quietly corroding the nation’s security and wealth, the son of a Texas Republican was living in Beijing under a borrowed name — and, that year, was introduced to a man who, he came to understand, communicated frequently with Xi Jinping himself.
