Canada Is Not Hedging on China; It Is Bandwagoning with Washington - Open Canada
Sixteen years of parliamentary statements, defence documents, military procurement, and joint exercises tell a consistent story: alignment with the US comes before independent strategic capacity.
The conventional way to describe Canada’s China policy is to call it cautious, hedged, somewhere between engagement and confrontation. But the evidence does not support that description. From 2008 to early 2024, across two Conservative and three Liberal governments, Canada’s grand strategy converged on a single posture: bandwagoning with the United States. I examined that posture systematically in my research, which reviewed a dataset of 380 parliamentary statements on China from the House of Commons and its relevant committees, 91 ministerial declarations, the major defence strategy documents fromCanada First Defence Strategy(2011) throughOur North, Strong and Free(2024), theIndo-Pacific Strategy, military procurement records from the Military Balance Plus dataset, and Canadian participation in joint exercises. Across five indicators (threat perception, diplomatic signals, military acquisitions, deployments, and exercises) the patterns line up with bandwagoning, not hedging, not balancing. That distinction matters because bandwagoning is not just close alignment. It is a strategic choice that prioritizes status as a reliable ally over independent capability, accepts the dominant partner’s threat assessments as one’s own, and treats power as a means to secure partnership rather than as an end in itself. Hedging would mean maintaining genuine policy options, including operational ties with both Washington and Beijing. Balancing would mean building Canadian capability targeted at China. Canada has done neither. How Threat Perception ShiftedBetween 2008 and 2015, the Harper Conservatives treated China primarily as a market. Statements on security concerns were rare and largely confined to industrial espionage and foreign influence. China was not yet framed as a military threat. The Trudeau Liberals came into office in 2015 attempting a similar engagement track, with state visits in both directions and exploratory free trade talks. The shift came hard between 2017 and 2023. Parliamentary statements characterizing China as a threat rose roughly 350 percent across party lines. Between 2020 and 2023 alone, the increase was 165 percent. What drove the change? The first trigger was the deterioration of US-China relations, including the Trump administration’stariffsand trade war, the political crackdown in Hong Kong, and the pandemic. The second was Canada’sown diplomatic crisisover the 2018 arrest of Meng Wanzhou at US request and Beijing’s retaliatory detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Within the Canadian government and bureaucracy, the language hardened. By 2021, national security adviser Jody Thomas was telling parliamentarians that China has “a voracious appetite and will stop at nothing to feed itself. ” By 2023, the Trudeau-Biden joint statement was committed to the “long-term challenge to the international order posed by the People’s Republic of China. ” The threat framing was not just imported but was an explicit decision to share Washington’s framework. Diplomatic Signals on Taiwan and the South China SeaOn Taiwan, Canada maintains the One China policy and avoids overtly strong commitments that might provoke Beijing. Of 24 relevant House of Commons statements on Taiwan, 54 percent were critical of China, but those were overwhelmingly Conservative interventions from opposition. The governing Liberals began to be ambiguous and grew gradually more critical. Tellingly, the pattern reverses in Parliament itself: only 17 percent of House of Commons statements on Taiwan explicitly backed the US and allied position, while 54 percent were critical of China outright. The government’s formal documents lean toward allied solidarity; its MPs lean toward direct criticism. That gap is itself a signal, since the executive branch, where strategy actually gets made, is the more cautious, more bandwagoning-consistent voice. The South China Sea pattern is similar. The Harper government waslargely silenton the issue at the 2011 ASEAN meeting, where maritime security was central. The Trudeau government, particularly after the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in favour of the Philippines, became more vocal. Of 26 House of Commons statements on the SCS, 65 percent are critical of China, again with Conservatives carrying most of the load. Strategic documents were actually slightly more critical of Beijing (39 percent) than focused on allied solidarity (31 percent), though both readings point the same direction: the government avoids the kind of direct provocation that would signal balancing. The government has consistently chosen alliance solidarity over direct provocation, which is the textbook bandwagoning move. What the Military Record ShowsProcurement and deployment patterns confirm the verbal record. Early procurement during the study period was driven by Afghanistan, but the through-line is interoperability with US forces and allies. NORAD modernization, announced by then defence minister Anita Anand in 2023, was explicitly framed as Canada’s contribution to a continental architecture led by Washington. The 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy committed Canada to more frigates in the region, supporting freedom of navigation, the UN convention on the law of the sea, and collaborative deployments with allies. The2024 defence updatereiterates this, framing forward naval presence as a contribution to a multinational effort. The Royal Canadian Navy now deploys Halifax-class frigates and maritime patrol aircraft to the Indo-Pacific to support UN Security Council sanctions enforcement against North Korea and to support allied freedom of navigation operations. Canada has participated in every iteration of RIMPAC, the largest multinational exercise in the Pacific, since 1971. Joint exercises with China were brief and limited, peaking modestly between 2014 and 2016 during the Harper-era engagement push, and have receded since. A striking finding is that joint exercises with the US have declined since 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic explains some of the 2020 to 2022 dip, but not the broader trend. Canada perceives China as a more acute threat than it did a decade ago, yet operational engagement with the United States has slowed. The most likely explanation is capacity. Canadian military procurement and personnel constraints limit what the country can actually contribute to allied operations, even as the political alignment intensifies. What This Tells UsThe conventional wisdom holds that Canada hedges on China because hedging is the natural posture for a middle power caught between two giants. The empirical record from 2008 through early 2024 does not support that. Canada’s actual posture is bandwagoning, driven less by an independent assessment of the China threat than by the pull of strategic culture and the politics of being seen as a reliable ally. The 2021 AUKUS exclusion landed in Ottawa as a public diplomatic embarrassment because it signalled that Canada’s allies no longer found Canadian assertiveness on China credible. The bipartisan letter from 23 US senators in 2024 pressing then-prime minister Trudeau on the NATO two percent target landed the same way. Both events reinforced the underlying logic, which is that Canada’s strategic decisions on China are calibrated to allied expectations as much as to the threat itself. It’s worth being explicit about the boundary of this analysis. The dataset runs through early 2024. Since then, both halves of the equation have moved. Trump’s second term brought open talk of Canada as a ’51st state’ and broader assertions of hemispheric dominance that Canadians have not had to take seriously as a security concern in well over a century. At the same time, Prime Minister Mark Carney has pursued a notable reset with Beijing, including a January 2026 visit to Beijing and a preliminary trade deal, all while still sending two-thirds of Canadian exports to the US. Whether this amounts to genuine hedging, or a recalibration of who counts as the reliable partner, is a question the next phase of this research will need to answer. There are costs to this approach. Bandwagoning trades flexibility for solidarity: it treats Washington’s threat assessment as Ottawa’s, and limits independent capability because resources flow into interoperability projects rather than into autonomous Canadian options. And it leaves Canada poorly positioned for moments when the United States itself becomes unpredictable, which under a second Trump administration is no longer a hypothetical. A grand strategy whose central premise is alliance reliability has to grapple seriously with what happens when the ally itself shifts the rules. His recent article, “Bandwagoning with the elephant: Canada’s grand strategy in response to China’s rise in a shifting global power landscape (2008–2024),” is published inInternational Journaland availablehere.