I wrote the following in my book Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada:
“An economic slump in the U.S. was going to affect Canada’s financial health, and so trade diversification again became a driving consideration. But instead of diversifying trade with like-minded democracies, Canada went begging at the doorstep of the Communist state that had been engaged in foreign interference and espionage against Canada and the U.S. for the past 30 years.”
Mark Carney’s deal to allow Chinese electric vehicles to enter Canada with a low tariff rate will make trade talks with the U.S. tougher, the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association says.
Brian Kingston, the organization’s chief executive officer representing Canadian auto plants of the Detroit-based General Motors, Stellantis and Ford, said the Prime Minister’s decision last month to remove the 100% tariff on EVs and replace it with a 6.1% most-favoured-nation rate “further complicates” trade talks later this year.
Lynd’s warning comes just a month after Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a new ‘strategic partnership’ with China
OTTAWA — While Russia remains a military threat in the Arctic, Canada’s security officials told a House of Commons committee this week that they remain primarily focused on China’s threats to economic security in the North.
“Russia has a tremendous interest and focus in the Arctic,” Paul Lynd, assistant director at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told the foreign affairs committee on Thursday. “However, they are of less concern than, say, the activities of China and other hostile state actors at this time.”
OTTAWA — Ten Hong Kong diaspora organizations—spanning Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe—have issued an extraordinary open letter to the Government of Canada expressing “deep fear and anxiety” over Mark Carney’s deal on law enforcement cooperation signed between the RCMP and the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China.
As part of his trip to Beijing last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney met with Zhao Leji, the third-ranking member of the 20th Chinese Communist Party Politburo and chair of the standing committee of the National People’s Congress.
The readout that emerged from the meeting said they talked about the importance of ongoing parliamentary exchanges and “opportunities for enhanced understanding and communication” between the two countries.
A disturbing new investigation detailing the expansion of Beijing’s overseas influence infrastructure reveals there are now more than 2,000 organizations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany that the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing to advance its agenda.
Recent attention has focused on Greenland as a focal point of Arctic strategy, a reminder that geography once treated as peripheral now sits squarely within the logic of continental defense. A similar shift is unfolding elsewhere in the Arctic, though with far less public notice. The Northwest Passage—the network of sea routes threading Canada’s Arctic Archipelago between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—has moved from a seasonal curiosity to a corridor of growing strategic consequence. As activity increases, questions long treated as theoretical, including the legal status of those waters, are being pushed toward practical resolution.
Beijing’s Hidden Army: How 2,294 United Front Cells Advance China’s Interests in Four Leading Democracies
WASHINGTON/OTTAWA – A groundbreaking study has mapped 2,294 organizations with proven links to the Chinese Communist Party’s “united front” influence apparatus across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany—with Canada exhibiting nearly five times the per-capita penetration rate of the U.S. and the highest density of CCP-linked organizations among all four democracies.
“The question is no longer whether this is happening. The question is whether Canada is prepared to respond with the seriousness that the evidence demands.”—Christopher Coates
MLI’s Director of Foreign Policy, National Defence, and National Security, Christopher Coates, speaks… pic.twitter.com/uFTbjKMEaF
— Macdonald-Laurier Institute (@MLInstitute) February 11, 2026
President Donald Trump is taking an important page from World War II’s Manhattan Project, when the United States raced to secure supplies of the rare element uranium needed to create the war-winning atomic bomb. When strategic amounts of the element were found in Africa, deep in mines in the Belgian Congo, a “cover” entity called the Combined Development Trust was created by the U.S. to purchase all supplies and thereby deny Nazi Germany access to the coveted uranium.
The 21st Century has changed the concept of the types and amounts of strategic minerals that will be required to protect the nation’s future –and few recognize that need more acutely than Trump.
OTTAWA/TORONTO — In this episode, I catch up with columnist Brian Lilley to unpack Prime Minister Mark Carney’s emerging trade and cooperation agenda with the People’s Republic of China — and why I argue these agreements could accelerate Canada’s decline on multiple fronts.
Before we get into Ottawa’s electric vehicle deal — which I argue risks introducing foreign surveillance platforms onto Canadian roads while aggravating our most important trade partner, the United States — we step back and ask: what is Carney really trying to accomplish?
Ottawa May Be Delaying Taiwan Trade Deal to Avoid Upsetting China, Taipei’s Envoy Says
Taiwan’s ambassador to Canada says Ottawa may be delaying the signing of a trade agreement with the island nation as it’s seeking closer ties with Beijing.
Harry Tseng, head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada, said in an interview with CBC’s French arm Radio-Canada that Taiwan has been left with the impression that Canada is seeking to improve its relations with China at the expense of its relationship with Taiwan.
“Trojan horses.”
That’s shaping up to be the most useful way of describing several mostly overlooked elements of the “strategic partnership” Prime Minister Mark Carney entered into with Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. It wasn’t all about canola and cars.
China and Carney will be the death of Canada.
Conservative MP and democratic reform critic Michael Cooper is raising concerns about Ottawa’s new agreement with Beijing on cooperation between law enforcement agencies, saying China poses a security threat to Canada.
Cooper asked Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, as he was testifying before the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs committee on Feb. 5, whether China is a rule of law state and whether it has an independent judiciary.
“I’m not here as a foreign policy expert, nor an expert on China,” Anandasangaree responded.
The federal government will take steps to ensure that imported Chinese electrical vehicles cannot be used to spy on Canadians, a parliamentary committee heard Thursday.
Testifying before the procedures and House affairs committee, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said Ottawa will put safeguards in place to make sure that Chinese EVs do not have “the capability to transmit information” back home.
He was responding to questions from Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin, who raised concerns that Chinese EVs could become “little spies on the road that could record our calls and take pictures of where we are going.”
It is doubtful any country has ever been in quite the national security dilemma Canada now finds itself in: with so much land and so few people to defend it; wedged between two expansionist superpowers, one of which was until very recently our best defence against the other, but which has since become more or less aligned with it.
The dilemma is particularly acute in light of our charmed history. A country that had always considered itself invulnerable to attack – because of the oceans that surround us, because of the forbidding climate in our North, because of the Americans – wakes up to discover that it has suddenly become peculiarly vulnerable.
Coyne alert!
