Canadian attitudes towards China have undergone a dramatic shift – from ambivalence to distrust – since the two countries became locked in a diplomatic dispute in late 2018. This paper argues that these hardened sentiments are unlikely to dissipate and Canada–China relations seem to have entered a new, warier phase.
Acknowledgments
This paper is part of a multi-year project led by the US and the Americas Programme at Chatham House that analyses the foreign policy debate on China’s rise in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the European Union. It benefited from an expert roundtable discussion held at Chatham House in December 2019, as well as supplementary desk-based research. We would like to thank those who contributed to the roundtable discussion and those who provided feedback through anonymous peer reviews.
Chatham House would also like to thank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung) for its generous support of this project.