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Opinion
Mild-mannered Canada shows the world how to take the fight to Trump
When a nation as inherently moderate as Canada is driven to a trade war with its closest neighbour, the world should take note
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Zhou Xiaoming is a senior fellow at the Centre for China and Globalisation in Beijing and a former deputy representative of China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva.
For anyone who has spent time living in Canada, the country’s default posture towards its southern neighbour has long felt almost hard-coded: polite, deferential, almost allergic to confrontation.
I saw this first-hand as a visiting scholar in the country in the early 1980s, when I met locals who embodied the national stereotype of moderation in all things. Canadians preferred compromise even when they had a right to push back, treating their far larger ally as a partner to be accommodated, not challenged.
This was not weakness but a deliberate choice rooted in geography, history and a belief that good relations with the United States were essential to Canadian prosperity. This is why Canada’s recent decision to walk away from talks and impose counter-tariffs on American goods landed like a thunderclap.
On August 22, after the US applied 50 per cent tariffs on US$20 billion worth of Canadian goods, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would impose matching tariffs on American exports of the same scale.
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