Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers remarks at dinner hosted by the Canada-China Business Council in Beijing, China on Friday.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s press conference on Friday after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping was chock-full of news, a strange surprise given that the PMO had been spinning everyone toward low expectations before the trip began.

The two countries had struck a deal in which Canada would dramatically lower its tariff rate on Chinese-made electric vehicles and China would slash its levies on canola seed, along with removing tariffs on certain other agriculture and food products, Mr. Carney announced in Beijing.

But it was an existential little scrap of found poetry Mr. Carney offered in response to one tricky question that encapsulates what just happened, and what seems certain to keep happening.

One reporter pointed out the perpetual concerns about human rights abuses and freedom of speech in China, and asked where those issues fit into Mr. Carney’s calculations – are these things Canada can’t afford to think about right now because we have to find new markets?

Mr. Carney deked lightly around the premise, saying that Canada “fundamentally” defends rights of all sorts, and as a result, it calibrates its engagement with other countries to work with overlapping interests and steer around issues of conflict.

“We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be,” he said.

The world as it is, and not as we wish it to be. The year 2026 is still just a newborn thing, and yet those words feel like its epitaph and savage lesson in one.

It explains the strange, clench-jawed triumphalism of Mr. Carney’s announcement of a........

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