China Trying to ‘Wedge’ Canada Away From US, Kovrig Warns

Michael Kovrig stands as he and Michael Spavor are recognized before an address by U.S. President Joe Biden in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 24, 2023. Mandel Ngan/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig says China’s recent calls for Canada to set aside “normal” differences and align with the communist regime in pushing back against U.S. tariffs is an attempt to drive a wedge between Ottawa and Washington to advance Beijing’s strategic goals.

Kovrig appeared on CTV News’ Power Play on May 15, where host Vassy Kapelos asked him why China’s ambassador to Canada, Wang Di, would choose to deliver such a message through the outlet “at this point,” given that the Chinese Embassy had been declining interview requests from CTV for years.

“Short answer, because China is in a bad position right now,” Kovrig said, referring to the interview Wang gave to CTV’s Question Period, aired on May 11. “They’re struggling with their domestic economy, and they’re under extreme pressure from the U.S. administration’s very high tariffs.”

In April, U.S. President Donald Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent, prompting Beijing to hit back with a 125 percent levy on American goods. On May 12, the two nations agreed to a 90-day reciprocal tariff reduction, with the United States lowering its rate to 30 percent and China to 10 percent.

Kovrig said Wang’s interview with CTV was a calculated move by Beijing, made “in the context of a much broader strategic rivalry and growing cold war between China and the U.S.”

“He’s looking to wedge Canada away from the United States, and this is a campaign that the Chinese are waging all around the world,” Kovrig said. “So it’s not just Canada. I’ve seen his counterparts in Europe trying to deliver the same message.”

In the CTV interview, Wang said Canada and China should move past what he characterized as “normal” differences and should “bring our relationship back onto the right track” and “seek common ground while resolving differences in a constructive way.”

The ambassador’s comments had a tone similar to what he told The Canadian Press on April 23, where he said Beijing and Ottawa should work together to push back against U.S. “bullying” and tariffs and to rally other countries to stop Washington from undermining global trade rules.

‘Rewrite’ International Order

Kovrig, who was arbitrarily detained in China for over 1,000 days between 2018 and 2021, warned against acceding to Beijing’s requests.

“China is not a friendly country,” Kovrig said. “[Wang’s] words are friendly. His smile is friendly, but the actions of his government are ultimately harmful to Canada’s interests and values. And it’s the same story in Europe.”

Canada’s relationship with China was put on ice after the RCMP arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in 2018 over a U.S. extradition warrant for fraud. In apparent retaliation, Beijing detained Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor days later on espionage charges, which both men denied. The two spent nearly three years in prison before being released in a deal that saw Meng allowed to return to China.

Kovrig said “not enough people are sufficiently aware” of the risks posed by China in terms of the regime’s worldview, ideology, and agenda. He noted a “huge gap” between what the public knows and understands about these risks and what is known and understood among specialists, experts, and intelligence analysts inside the government as well as researchers and scholars outside government.

“One of the things that I keep trying to do is close that gap, because we need a wider Canadian public, European public, and Australian public to understand the challenge we’re dealing with, because we are running out of time,” he said.

“[The Chinese authorities] want to rewrite the international order. The Chinese Communist Party wants to dominate East Asia and carve out a sphere of influence in the region where every country in the region defers and first looks to Beijing before they make a policy move to make sure that China will be OK with it,” Kovrig said

“And they want to ultimately erode that system of rules and norms that Canada has benefited from for so many years.”

Kovrig said China has been undermining the international system ever since it became a member of the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

“Why [do] we have all these problems with the United States? Why the world is in such a disorder is ultimately because the system that the United States and other Western powers built after World War II is fracturing, and the key source of that challenge is the rise of China and strategic rivalry, and China’s undermining and free riding and exploitation of that system. It starts in Beijing.”

‘A China Strategy’

Asked what the federal government under newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney could do regarding Canada’s foreign policy on China, Kovrig said Carney and his cabinet should prepare the country for a “much harsher geopolitical environment.”

“China is the primary driver of that shift, and so we need a China strategy, a whole-of-government strategy, where every cabinet minister is on the same page and the Chinese are not able to try to find cracks and exploit them in various ways,” the former diplomat said.

During his election campaign, Carney had said China poses one of the biggest foreign interference threats to Canada and is “becoming an emerging threat to the Arctic.”

In March, officials from the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force had also warned that with the launch of the federal election, Chinese officials and their proxies were “likely to conduct foreign interference activity using a complex array of both overt and covert mechanisms.”

A final report released by the Foreign Interference Commission in January similarly stated that China is the “most active perpetrator” of foreign interference targeting Canada’s democracy, and the regime views the country as a “high-priority target” due to its large Chinese diaspora and membership in important defence alliances.

Kovrig said a full reset of Canada’s relationship with China is not possible, noting there might be “a temptation” among ministers in a new government to think, “I can be the one to crack the China problem and reset relations.”

“I think that’s going to get a cold shower. It’s not feasible,” he said.

“What is feasible is to work within that space, [and] build stable, respectful diplomatic relations with senior Chinese officials from the Prime Minister on down, so that when there are problems and disagreements—and there are likely to be many—we can at least manage them diplomatically and constrain the likelihood that China will take even more harmful measures.”

Kovrig warned against businesses turning to China in an attempt to diversify their risks from U.S. tariffs. He said while some commodities could still be traded, the key question is what Beijing ultimately wants to achieve from that trade and how it would influence Canada’s economy.

“China wants to dominate global supply chains, to control things like critical minerals and high technology. It wants to master the commanding heights of the 21st-century economies—AI, batteries, solar panels, electric cars, all of those things,” he said.

Matthew Horwood, Noé Chartier, and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.