Carney reverses stance on China, says countries “align in many areas”
Ottawa has rapidly reversed its stance on China, despite Beijing’s interference in past elections, with Prime Minister Mark Carney now saying he’s “focused on how Canada and China can work together.”
Ottawa has rapidly reversed its stance on China, despite Beijing’s interference in past elections, with Prime Minister Mark Carney now saying he’s “focused on how Canada and China can work together.”
The Carney government appears to be distancing itself from the Liberals’ 2024 foreign policy assessment of China, which called Beijing an “increasingly disruptive” global force.
While that assessment may have been from 2024, Carney said during the last federal leaders’ debate only eight months ago that “the biggest security threat to Canada” was China.
However, Foreign Minister Anita Anand refused to answer whether the Liberals still stood by their previous assessment when asked repeatedly by reporters on Wednesday.
Instead, Anand suggested that Carney’s election brought a new Canada-China relationship to the table, with a “new foreign policy.”
“This is a new government with a new Prime Minister, a new foreign policy, and a new geopolitical environment,” said Anand. “In this moment of economic stress for our country, it is necessary for us to diversify our trading partners and to grow non-U.S. trade by at least 50 per cent in the next 10 years.”
Carney and several ministers are currently in Beijing for the first official visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2017.
“Canada and China have a long-standing relationship that has created opportunities for the people of both our countries,” wrote Carney in a post to X on Thursday. “In a more divided, uncertain world, we’re focused on renewing that relationship and building toward a stronger future.”
He also said that Canada and China “align in many areas, such as clean energy, agriculture, and finance.”
However, the Liberals’ 2024 assessment noted that “China’s rise, enabled by the same international rules and norms that it now increasingly disregards, has had an enormous impact on the Indo-Pacific, and it has ambitions to become the leading power in the region.”
The report also noted that China was making large-scale investments to establish “offensive military capabilities and advanced technologies.”
“China is looking to shape the international order into a more permissive environment for interests and values that increasingly depart from ours,” it reads.
In September 2024, Carney was named the chair of a task force on economic growth by former prime minister Justin Trudeau and subsequently met with the deputy director of the People’s Bank of China.
A few weeks after their meeting, Carney’s former company, Brookfield Asset Management, allegedly secured a $250 million loan from a Chinese state-owned bank while he was still serving as vice-chair of the company.
Corporate documents later revealed that Brookfield maintains over $3 billion in politically sensitive investments with Chinese state-linked real estate and energy companies.
While serving as Liberal party leader, Carney and nine other current and former Liberal cabinet ministers were accused by two veteran law enforcement officers of ignoring foreign interference, mishandling national security files, and allowing the RCMP and CSIS to abuse spyware against unionized officers and innocent Canadians.
The allegations were made in an open letter dated April 12 2025, addressed to Carney and signed by Sgt. Peter Merrifield, a current RCMP officer, and retired Vancouver police detective Paul McNamara.
“The Liberal Cabinet Ministers named herein past and present, some now working in your Prime Minister’s Office, have directly and by intent permitted serious breaches of Canadian Law,” the letter reads.
The law enforcement officers alleged that the named ministers failed to act on serious national security threats, engaged in apparent malfeasance, and placed Canadians at risk of retaliation by Chinese intelligence agencies.