"It is expected that within three years, this agreement will drive considerable Chinese investment into Canada's auto sector, create good careers in Canada, and accelerate our progress towards a net-zero future."

"For Canada to build its own competitive EV sector, we will need to learn from innovative partners, access their supply chains, and increase local demand."

"We're leveraging each other's strengths, remaining clear-eyed, and focusing on the areas where we stand to make  historic gains, particularly in agriculture and agrifood, energy and finance."

"We fundamentally stand up for human rights, for democracy, territorial integrity, rights to self-determination."

"We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be." 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney 

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaks to the media at Ritan Park in Beijing, China, Friday, Jan. 16, 2026.

"A healthy and stable China-Canada relationship serves the common interest of our two countries. It is also good for the peace, stability and prosperity of the world."

"I am ready to continue working with you, with a sense of responsibility for the history, for the people and for the world, to further advance the relationship in a positive direction."

Chinese President Xi Jinping 

Less than a year ago, Canada's prime minister characterized China as the greatest threat to the national security of his country. In Beijing, Carney was happy to usher in a "new era in the relationship" when he described China as a strategic partner, that Canada is "heartened" by the leadership of President Xi. Carney, referencing "a time of global trade disruption", finds himself recalibrating his earlier assessment of the CCP led by President Xi; presumably that China's abysmal human rights record isn't so bad after all, that support for territorial integrity doesn't include Taiwan.

 

So Canada, happy to invite China to invest in Canada, is now on a pathway to join China's 'Belt and Road' program, eager now to help Beijing achieve its goal of world domination in territorial gains, in access to natural resources, in expanding its already Goliath status as the world's producer of manufactured goods. China, notorious for its appetite for accessing trade secrets, can now be forgiven for destroying Nortel Network Corporation's preeminence in communications so that Huawei could thrive in its place. That Canada's National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg could have its security breached by Chinese agents.

 

Xiangguo Qiu wears a biocontainment suit while working in the containment lab at the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg. Qiu, her biologist husband Keding Cheng, and her students were escorted out of the NML in July 2019. Qiu and Cheng were fired in January 2021. The RCMP is still investigating a possible 'policy breach' reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. (CBC)

 

As for President Xi's noble sentiments of "peace, stability and prosperity of the world", perhaps we should overlook its aggressive  territorial expansion in the South China Sea, claiming land, air and sea rights in claims disputed by the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia.

"China’s sweeping claims of sovereignty over the sea—and the sea’s estimated 11 billion barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—have antagonized competing claimants Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. As early as the 1970s, countries began to claim islands and various zones in the South China Sea, such as the Spratly Islands, which possess rich natural resources and fishing areas. The failure of Chinese and Southeast Asian leaders to resolve the disputes diplomatically could undermine international laws governing maritime disputes and encourage destabilizing arms buildups." Council on Foreign Relations 

 

Chinese Warships and fighter jets in a military display in the South China Sea .. Reuters

  

Prime Minister Carney speaks of this new relationship with China as more "predictable" than that Canada has long enjoyed with the United States in view of President Donald Trump's explosive new tariff regulations imposed world wide and impacting economies around the globe deleteriously, no less than Canada's. But President Trump will be in the White House for another three years. China's government, a dictatorship with a belief in its divine destiny as the sole world power and its most important economy will be there for a trade eternity.

 

The goal, for Canada to be enabled to increase its exports to China; not in manufactured goods, but agricultural products and natural resources; Beijing has no interest in finished products, it is the the bare essentials of raw industrial minerals and above all oil and gas that fixates China's interests, while it is exuberant over exporting its finished products abroad, consolidating its position as the apex of world production. Many of its technologies have illicitly 'borrowed' heavily from advances originating elsewhere. But those it exports abroad as finished products of its own link back to Beijing as listening devices.   

"Prime Minister Carney must explain how he has gone from saying China was Canada's 'biggest security threat' before the [April general] election to announcing a 'strategic partnership' with Beijing after the election."

"His agreement will allow 50,000 EVs onto our streets, jeopardizing our security and auto jobs". 

Parliamentary Opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre  

Mark Carney — pictured with Chinese President Xi Jinping — reached a 'landmark' trade deal with China on Friday, in a trip that marked the first China visit by a Canadian prime minister since 2017. (Sean Kilpatrick/Reuters)