Look for the US and Canada to move farther apart on China policy, even in areas where they were previously aligned, analysts say, days after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a multifaceted deal with Beijing.
In recent years, Washington and Ottawa had drawn closer together when it came to dealing with Beijing, from electric vehicle tariffs and research security to investment screening.
But that convergence is now fraying, analysts say, as Canada signals a greater willingness to pursue engagement with China even where it risks diverging from US preferences.
“Clearly the message from Carney ... is that we are going to try to put things in place for working with China directly, even when some of those seem to contradict American interests and perspectives,” said Paul Evans, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
Last Friday, Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a preliminary deal that paired trade concessions – including lower-tariff access for a quota of Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for relief on Canadian agricultural exports such as canola – with the restoration of previously suspended communication channels.
It also set up a series of new dialogues, including on finance and energy, opened a pathway to future Chinese energy investment in Canada and loosened restrictions on people-to-people exchange.
Speaking in Beijing last week on the first visit by a Canadian prime minister since 2017, Carney called China a more “predictable” partner than Washington and said that the two countries had entered a “new strategic partnership”.
EV shift underscores thaw after rocky period in Beijing-Ottawa ties
Canada-China relations reached a low point in 2018 when Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were detained by Beijing after Ottawa arrested Huawei Technologies executive Meng Wanzhou on a US warrant that year.
The two countries had largely struggled to get their relationship on a stable footing since that episode, despite a gradual resumption of ties.
Guy Saint-Jacques, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2012 to 2016, said the reduction in EV tariffs in particular showed a “major shift” in the US-Canada relationship. In October 2024, Canada had slapped 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese EVs, in line with a similar move by the US a few months prior.
Washington then separately introduced a rule that would make it harder for Chinese EVs to operate in the US even if they were manufactured within American borders.
In opening doors to EV investment and reducing duties, Ottawa was acting in its own self-interest and recognising the limits of aligning with Washington, Saint-Jacques said. “Canada did not get any brownie points by following blindly the US lead.”
Another notable area of Canada-China alignment in the joint agreement was the commitment to multilateralism, analysts said.
Pascale Massot, a political-science professor at the University of Ottawa, called the inclusion a “pleasant surprise” and said it was significant because “we are in a moment where the US is clearly not in favour of a multinational approach to international affairs”.
Massot, a former Indo-Pacific affairs adviser to the Canadian foreign ministry, added that the scope of the deal – going beyond “canola and EVs” – was itself notable because it spoke to the “broader health and functionality of the relationship”.
Evans, meanwhile, pointed to likely divergence between Canada and the US in terms of research collaboration with China, an area not directly addressed in the joint statement but indirectly reflected through the pledge to loosen visa requirements for Canadians visiting China.
“Suddenly there’s a green light, or at least a greenish yellow light, for us to proceed ahead on research collaborations,” he said, noting it was a practice that Canadian universities, in line with American ones, had tightened scrutiny on in recent years.
But while moves like the EV deal were “bold and risk-on” in its invitation of US scrutiny, Philippe Rheault, chair of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, said that Carney’s overall approach should not be read as a “defiance of Washington”.
“It is important to understand that Canada is not choosing between the US and China,” said Rheault, who is also a former Canadian consul general in China.
“It is asserting that diversification and engagement are normal risk management for a trade-dependent middle power.”
What’s driving Canada’s push to diversify trade and diplomacy now?
Canada’s diversification efforts are multipronged. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Carney noted that in addition to recently concluded agreements with China and Qatar, Canada was negotiating free trade pacts with India, the Philippines, Thailand, Asean and Mercosur.
But what may appear to be drastic shifts, analysts say, are better understood as the logical continuation of developments in geopolitics and US-Canada relations over the past year.
In the months leading up to his second term and soon after, Trump had threatened tariffs on Canada and said that the country should become America’s 51st state.
In a similar vein, Trump’s repeated demands to take control of Greenland from long-time US ally Denmark have also made Canadians uneasy.
Polls from the past year have shown that Canadians were cooling on the US and warming to China, its second-largest trade partner after the US, although they remain sceptical of both superpowers.
A September 2025 poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that 27 per cent of Canadians held favourable views of China, up from 16 per cent in January 2025, and that over half of Canadians say Canada should focus on its economic relationship with China.
Meanwhile, fewer Canadians said China should be treated as a threat (34 per cent) than those who said the same of the US (46 per cent).
This means that despite holding only a minority government, Carney is confident that a more diversified relationship with China is “politically saleable and sustainable” in Canada, according to Evans.
Edward Alden, a professor at Western Washington University, agrees. The deal last week was a “pretty strong signal” that the US and Canada are becoming less aligned on China, but it’s “probably the first of many”, he said.
Alden, who is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, pointed to Trump’s muted response to the Canada-China deal – in which he applauded Carney for getting a deal at all with China – as a sign that future divergences could come from the US taking a cooperative approach to China.
“The president doesn’t particularly want to isolate China,” he said, adding that Trump’s remarks reinforce the idea that he had little appetite for international coordination.
“There’s no sort of institutional cooperation of the sort that we’ve seen since World War II – each country just does its own deals.”
That lack of appetite, Alden continued, could make it tough for Canada in the coming review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, even if the Friday deal with China gives Ottawa a slightly stronger negotiating hand.
“Trump simply doesn’t care what Mexico or Canada wants. He cares what powerful US interests want.”
US indifference, Canadian caution shape the next phase of China policy
Even so, analysts emphasised that Ottawa has been careful to draw boundaries around its engagement with Beijing and that Carney faces the task of reassuring Canadians that closer ties will not compromise national security.
Saint-Jacques, who is now a fellow at the Montreal Institute of International Affairs, noted that the deal avoided areas that he argues could threaten North American security, such as defence, the Arctic and artificial intelligence.
Massot, even while noting that the era in which Western countries dictated values unilaterally was fading, said: “We may have China on a climate change coalition, but we certainly won’t work with China on civic rights.”
“Our systems are so different that there’s going to be constant friction,” Evans said. What Carney appeared to be signalling, he added, was a return to an approach in which many disputes, like controversies over alleged foreign interference, are handled “privately, quietly, behind the scenes”.
Evans stressed that some of the elements of Carney’s deal with Beijing remain much aligned with US interests, including Sino-Canadian cooperation on drug trafficking – an issue Washington has made a top priority in talks with China amid concerns over fentanyl flows. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
