The core assumption behind Canada’s China policy was simple: trade and politics could be kept in separate lanes. But China’s tariffs on Canadian canola, imposed earlier this year, show how that separation is collapsing. Markets are being used as instruments of intimidation, leaving middle-sized economies, like ours, to discover just how exposed they really are.

Few people grasp that shift more viscerally than Michael Kovrig. The former diplomat, who spent nearly three years detained in China, has since emerged as one of the sharpest critics of how Beijing uses economic leverage to shape political behaviour abroad. In our conversation, Kovrig steps back from any single dispute to examine China’s methods and long-term ambitions. The question he keeps circling isn’t just what China wants, but whether Canada has fully understood the game it’s already playing.

The interview, held over email, was edited for clarity and length.

Did Canada misread China’s willingness to retaliate?

After Canada, in 2024, imposed necessary import duties on China’s heavily state-supported electric vehicles, steel, and aluminum, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the People’s Republic of China’s government would retaliate by targeting vulnerable agri-food sectors, particularly canola.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2018, when Canada arrested Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, Beijing retaliated by taking Canadian citizens—like me—hostage and, economically, doing the same to agri-food companies by blocking imports. That inflicted losses on them of around $2 billion because they had to sell to other buyers at lower prices.

Canadian canola businesses, such as Richardson and Viterra, apparently dreamed that the 2018–2021 dispute was a one-off. After it ended, they ramped up and sold even more to China, only to now lose most of a $5 billion market. I hope they finally understand that, as long as they have excessive exposure to China, they’ll be targets anytime the Chinese Communist Party wants to coerce changes in Canadian policy and behaviour. As the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”

The CCP has a history of using access to China’s vast market as a disciplinary tool.

Yes, and it’s getting more aggressive. More than a dozen countries have been targeted in recent years: Japan suffered consumer boycotts due to a maritime dispute with Beijing, as did South Korea because it installed an American missile defence system. Norway was no longer able to export salmon to China after a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Chinese dissident, and Australian agricultural products were banned because its government called for an investigation into COVID-19’s origin. Lithuania was excised out of China’s customs clearance system over its relations with Taiwan, and now Japan, again, is the target of economic coercion for stating that its security is intricately linked with that of Taiwan.

Do you believe this is the start of a more dangerous rupture between Ottawa and Beijing?

The current trade dispute is not the cause of rupture. It’s a side effect of a much larger strategic divergence in which Western countries and China are decoupling from each other in critical sectors and adjusting to a new high-tech cold war. It’s also taking place in the intensely fraught context of United States president Donald Trump’s efforts to transform the US economy and role in the world, including capricious tariffs on Canada and reckless dismantling—or at least disruption—of the rules-based international order and Western political and economic alliances embedded in it.

As that order weakens, states are increasingly weaponizing markets and supply chains as instruments for geopolitical control. Without adherence to rules and norms, economic interaction creates opportunities for coercion. The illusion that national security and international economics could operate independently has been shattered. Tariff standoffs with China are now entangled in those dynamics in ways that disagreements before 2017 were not.

How should we understand the logic behind China’s actions?

The CCP’s grand strategy centres on its relentless, solipsistic pursuit of political, economic, and technological supremacy by building up what it calls “Comprehensive National Power.” Key geoeconomic policies, such as “Made in China 2025” and “Dual Circulation,” prioritize production and exports over consumption in a drive to create a complete, self-contained industrial system that dominates the commanding heights of advanced technology and manufacturing.

Can you walk me through an example of that strategy?

For the past decade, the CCP has been hardening China’s own self-sufficiency and cutting dependence on imports, while trying to make others asymmetrically dependent on China. It’s “you have to buy from me, but I don’t need you.” Massive subsidies and other market distortions incentivize many Chinese firms to overproduce and export the surplus, which is subjecting the rest of the world to a Second China Shock. Other countries now face a choice: be relegated to deindustrialized, middle-income suppliers of energy and commodities to the PRC’s manufacturing juggernaut, or band together to maintain a tech stack and industrial ecosystems largely decoupled from China’s.

If Canadian governments do nothing, our export profile with........

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