Democracies have a bad habit of ignoring warning signs. We convince ourselves that provocative language is intended for domestic audiences, that aggressive laws are largely symbolic, and that economic interdependence will ultimately moderate authoritarian regimes. History tells us that when powerful states begin constructing legal and political justifications for actions beyond their borders, we should pay attention.
Canada should reject that principle clearly and unequivocally. Chinese law does not determine the political loyalties, speech, or democratic rights of Canadians of Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Taiwanese, or any other ancestry. Canadian sovereignty means Canadian law governs Canadians in Canada, and there should be no ambiguity about it.
There is also a larger strategic warning. Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin spent years constructing an argument based on history, language, culture, and ethnicity that questioned whether Ukraine was truly separate from Russia. In 2021, he publicly argued that Russians and Ukrainians essentially belonged to one historical nation, and months later Russian forces crossed Ukraine’s borders.
China is not Russia, and a new Chinese law does not mean that conflict over Taiwan is inevitable. But authoritarian governments often tell us how they see the world before acting upon that worldview, and democracies should take those statements seriously. That matters enormously when China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, a self-governing democracy of approximately 24 million people, while refusing to renounce the use of force to achieve unification.
Canada should stop treating security in the Taiwan Strait as a distant Asian problem. Taiwan sits at the centre of the global semiconductor economy, producing advanced chips essential to telecommunications, artificial intelligence, automobiles, aerospace, and modern defence systems. A major conflict in the Taiwan Strait would disrupt global trade and supply chains on a scale that would reach Canadian businesses and households almost immediately.
There is another lesson from Ukraine that should guide us: deterrence works best before war begins. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and seizure of Crimea in 2014 brought condemnation and sanctions, but economic relationships continued and Europe remained heavily dependent on Russian energy. Moscow could conclude that Western outrage had limits, and that calculation ultimately proved disastrous.
As Canada tries to engage with China in areas such as trade and diplomacy, it cannot mean pretending that fundamental disagreements over sovereignty, coercion, and the international order do not exist.
Canada and its democratic partners should also reduce dangerous dependencies on authoritarian controlled supply chains. That means strengthening access to semiconductors, critical minerals, energy, telecommunications technology, pharmaceuticals, and the industrial capacity required for national defence. Canada possesses enormous strategic advantages of its own, including oil and natural gas, uranium, critical minerals, mining expertise, agriculture, advanced technology, and access to both Atlantic and Pacific markets, and these are assets we should develop rather than apologize for possessing.
Taiwan can be part of that economic strategy. Supporting its deeper participation in international economic institutions, including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership, would strengthen economic relationships among democratic partners and reduce vulnerabilities to coercion. Canada should simultaneously make clear that any change in Taiwan’s status must occur peacefully and that force cannot be accepted as a legitimate instrument for determining its future.
The broader principle is straightforward, but increasingly important. Sovereignty matters, borders matter and democratic peoples have the right to determine their future without another country claiming authority over them through ethnicity, language or history. Canada should also say clearly to its own citizens that no foreign government gets to determine their political loyalty because of where they, their parents or their grandparents were born.
For a generation, Western countries assumed that economic integration would gradually encourage authoritarian powers to behave more like democracies. Instead, we have discovered that authoritarian powers can use economic integration, technology, and even law to advance their interests beyond their borders. Canada should deal with China confidently and pragmatically, but we should also listen carefully when Beijing tells us how it sees sovereignty, national unity, and Taiwan.
History rarely sends an engraved invitation announcing what comes next. More often, the warnings are visible long before the consequences arrive, if we are prepared to recognize them. The responsibility of serious countries is to recognize those warnings early enough to ensure that deterrence succeeds and war never begins.
