Mark Carney visited China this week, the first Canadian prime minister to do so since 2017. Canada is looking to build stronger trade ties outside the U.S. as the Trump administration has thrown the global trade landscape into turmoil.Carlos Osorio/Reuters

Perhaps you know this story. The CBC once held a contest in which the object was to complete the phrase “as Canadian as … ”, in the style of “as American as apple pie.” The winning entry: “As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.”

It was a self-deprecating joke about Canadian nationalism, at the time. Today, it describes a very real existential dilemma: the backdrop to the Prime Minister’s trade mission to China this week.

The trip has occasioned a number of alarmist pieces in the right-wing press, warning against a “pivot” to China and bristling at the implied premise, that the United States is no longer a reliable trading partner or democratic ally. Whatever one may think of the current administration, the argument runs, the United States does not represent anything like the same threat to our interest, our values, or our sovereignty as China.

Canada says it’s open to Chinese investment in energy sector

Leave the latter point to one side, for the moment. Is anyone actually proposing that we should pivot to China – that we should turn away from trading with the United States, our nearest neighbour and largest trading partner by far, and instead go all in on trade with China? Not even the Liberals have suggested this – not at their most delirious stage of infatuation, in the first days of the Trudeau government, and certainly not now.

The proposition, as I understand it, is not either/or – either we trade with the United States or we trade with China – but both/and. Or perhaps, neither/nor: We should neither be overly dependent on the United States nor on China, but should hedge our bets between them. That’s not to suggest any moral equivalency between the two, but it is to recognize that both have the potential to threaten our interests, using trade as a weapon. Trading more with China is in our interest, so far as it reduces our dependence on the United States – and so long as it does not make us overly dependent on China.

Mr. Carney shakes hands with Premier of China Li Qiang in Beijing on Thursday.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

We have had to rethink our approach to trade with China before: The first flush of enthusiasm, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, that trade with China might not only make us rich, but make China more liberal, gave way over time to the realization – crystallized in the Two Michaels affair but evident long before – that, far from luring China into the community of civilized nations, trade was being used to bend us into a shape more to China’s liking.

So we recoiled. Relations froze. A revised federal security policy

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