The recent confrontation between the United States and China should be studied carefully in Ottawa. It was not merely a trade dispute. It was a warning about what happens when a Western country allows a strategic rival to accumulate leverage while failing to build leverage of its own.
In 2025, Washington imposed sweeping tariffs on China. Beijing responded almost immediately, not only with tariffs of its own, but with export controls on rare earth elements. These are not obscure commodities. They are essential to smartphones, electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing, missiles, aircraft, satellites, and virtually every modern defence system. China dominates global rare earth processing. That gave Beijing a weapon far more powerful than a tariff schedule. The lesson is blunt. Economic dependence becomes strategic vulnerability when it is concentrated in the hands of an adversary.
For years, Western governments told themselves that globalization would moderate China. Trade would create openness. Investment would encourage reform. Supply chains would produce mutual restraint. That theory has failed. China accepted Western capital, accessed Western markets, absorbed Western technology, and then built a system designed to make others dependent on it. This was not accidental. It was strategy.
China identified the pressure points in the Western system: critical minerals, manufacturing, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, industrial inputs, and advanced technology. It used state subsidies, forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, cyber operations, and industrial policy to build national power. Meanwhile, too many Western leaders treated supply chains as a matter of efficiency rather than security.
Canada has made the same mistake.
We are blessed with critical minerals, energy, agricultural capacity, advanced research, and a strategic geography that should make us one of the indispensable countries of the democratic world. Yet too often we behave as though national power is something vaguely unpleasant, rather than something responsible countries must build and protect. We delay projects. We overregulate investment. We frustrate resource development. We speak endlessly about resilience while neglecting the hard work of deterrence. Resilience is not enough. A country that only absorbs pressure but never creates pressure is not secure. It is merely waiting for the next crisis.
Canada needs a China strategy built on leverage. That does not mean reckless confrontation. Nor does it mean severing every commercial relationship or pretending that China will disappear from the world economy. It means recognizing that great power competition is real, that authoritarian regimes understand leverage, and that Canada must stop entering the contest with one hand tied behind its back.
First, Canada should treat critical minerals as a national security priority. We have the resources. What we lack is urgency. Permitting must be accelerated. Processing capacity must be built at home and with trusted allies. Indigenous partnerships should be practical and commercially serious. The objective should be clear: Canada should help ensure that no democratic country is forced to rely on Beijing for the materials that power its economy and its military.
Second, Canada must rebuild its industrial base. Manufacturing is not nostalgia. It is sovereignty. A country that cannot produce key goods, sustain its defence industry, or contribute meaningfully to allied supply chains will find itself dependent when the next crisis arrives. We should be working with the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India to build secure supply chains in defence, energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing.
Third, we must take foreign interference seriously. China’s influence operations do not rely only on spies and cyberattacks. They also rely on elite cultivation, diaspora intimidation, academic pressure, media influence, commercial dependency, and political timidity. Democracies are open societies. That is a strength, but openness without vigilance becomes vulnerability. Canada must expose coercion, prosecute illegal activity, protect citizens and residents from intimidation, and stop pretending that naming the problem is somehow more dangerous than the problem itself.
Fourth, Canada must understand energy as strategic power. The world needs reliable energy. Our allies need alternatives to authoritarian suppliers. Canadian LNG, uranium, hydro power, oil, natural gas, and future small modular reactors should be understood not only as economic assets, but as instruments of national and allied security. When Canada refuses to develop and export its own energy, we do not make the world cleaner or safer. We often leave our allies more dependent on regimes that do not share our values.
Finally, Canada must rediscover seriousness. Strategy is not a slogan. It is the disciplined alignment of resources, interests, and national will. China has been thinking this way for decades. The United States is now relearning the lesson. Canada cannot afford to be the last country at the table. The central question is simple: Do we want to remain a comfortable bystander, dependent on others for our prosperity and security, or do we want to be a serious country that contributes real strength to the democratic world?
China respects leverage. So do all serious powers. It is time Canada built some of its own.
