Well over 100 days have passed since Canadian Prime Minister Carney signaled his belief in a new world order at Davos and announced a strategic partnership with China. Since then, the government has never explained how such a partnership is possible with a state that occupies an openly adversarial position toward Canada and its allies. China engages in espionage, political interference, coercion of diaspora communities, cyber intrusion, and intellectual property theft. The list of offenses is long, and the abuse stretches back decades.
Canadians are right to ask how Carney expects to walk this path with China while depending on China’s principal rival, the United States, for much of its economic prosperity and nearly all of its intelligence picture. The decisions Ottawa is making to increase Canada-China engagement will shape the Canada-US relationship regardless of which party holds power in Washington.
For example, Canada’s place in the Five Eyes, the most exclusive intelligence sharing club in the world, is central to its national security and is almost entirely asymmetric — it is the smallest contributor and the most dependent recipient. The Five Eyes is not a treaty alliance like NATO. It is a habit of trust, renewed daily by analysts and liaison officers who decide, case by case, what to share and with whom. Every signal Ottawa sends about deepening ties with the PRC registers in Washington, London, Canberra, and Wellington as evidence that Canadian discretion can no longer be assumed. The partnership was built among wartime allies on the premise that each member’s secrets were safer with the others than with anyone else. That premise does not survive a member entering a strategic partnership with a country the other four spend most of their effort countering.
The integration runs deeper still. Canada and the United States maintain a defence relationship built over more than seven decades, with thousands of agreements and the closest industrial integration of any two militaries in the world. That architecture is already under strain: the United States announced this month that it will no longer participate in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the senior bilateral defence body established in 1940. Ottawa cannot afford to compound that pressure by signaling alignment with Washington’s adversary, particularly as competition over the Arctic intensifies and Beijing declares itself a “near-Arctic state.” How does Canada protect its supply chains and defence-industrial base from the same country the United States is restructuring its entire industrial policy to decouple from? Ottawa has not explained this either.
The development that should worry Canada and our allies the most is the undisclosed law enforcement arrangement Ottawa has signed with the PRC. Arrangements with the Ministry of Public Security are not new; earlier ones centred on Fox Hunt and Sky Net, programs Beijing calls anti-corruption operations, and which Western authorities have identified as instruments for surveilling and coercing dissidents abroad.
The United States prosecutes those who run covert police stations on its soil. Lu Jianwang was convicted in Brooklyn in May 2026 for operating one out of Manhattan’s Chinatown on behalf of the Ministry of Public Security, the same service with which Canada has now signed a confidential agreement.
Will the RCMP be expected to share information with the very same ministry of the PRC that has been shown to commit transnational repression in both Canada and the US? Outside the Carney government, no one knows. Nothing has been said to reassure the Chinese-Canadians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Hong Kongers whose families remain within Beijing’s reach.
The problem running through all of this is the government’s refusal to be transparent with Canadians and with Canada’s partners. None of these arrangements appeared in an election platform, and semantic exercises around the need for diversification do not change that. Canadians deserve an explanation; the government continues to refuse one.
The deeper dilemma is that Canada may believe it is choosing between partnership with Washington and partnership with Beijing. No such choice exists. Beijing is not offering partnership. It seeks access to the United States through Canada, and leverage over Canada itself. Canada is at risk of losing itself. The question is whether the country still knows where it stands in our relationship with an aggressive, authoritarian Beijing, and whether it has honesty and courage to explain why we’ve “partnered” with our adversary.
Dennis Molinaro, a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is a former national security analyst and policy advisor for the Canadian federal government. His latest book Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada, was published by Penguin Random House, 2025.
