Trudeau’s postnational Canada, Carney’s new global order, and Beijing recast from security threat into strategic partner.
A country with no core identity is easier to reposition. A country treated as a platform is easier to rebrand. A country whose leaders speak more fluently about global systems than national interest is easier to move away from its old alliances, industries, and foundations while telling citizens it is all being done in the name of sovereignty.
That worldview has consequences.
When a country has “no core identity,” national interest becomes negotiable. When sovereignty becomes a communications theme, policy can drift in the opposite direction while the flag remains in the frame. When patriotism becomes branding, citizens are asked to applaud the symbols while ignoring the substance.
Sovereignty as Slogan
There was something almost too perfect about the image: Mark Carney, speaking from a controlled online platform rather than Parliament, holding up Isaac Brock as a symbol of Canadian resistance to American pressure.
The message was unmistakable. Brock, the War of 1812 commander associated with defending Upper Canada from American invasion, was not there by accident. He was there to summon memory, pride, defiance, and fear. He was there to tell Canadians: we have faced American pressure before, and we must be ready to face it again.
It was clever. It was polished. It was emotionally loaded.
And it should make Canadians uneasy.
Not because Canada should be naïve about the United States. We should not. America is changing. Its politics are unstable. Its trade policy is more aggressive. Its leaders have become far more willing to use tariffs, threats, and economic pressure against allies. Any Canadian government that fails to recognize this new reality would be asleep at the wheel.
But patriotic symbolism is not a substitute for a national strategy.
That is the problem with Carney’s Brock moment. The symbolism said “sovereignty.” The policy direction raises the opposite question: are we actually increasing Canadian leverage, or are we drifting away from a profitable U.S. relationship toward a deficit-heavy and strategically risky China relationship?
That is the question the toy soldier does not answer.
Carney’s video was described by Reuters as a national video address in which he said Canada’s historically close ties to the United States had become a “weakness.” Reuters also reported that he held up a small toy soldier of Isaac Brock while drawing on the history of resistance to U.S. expansion. AP likewise described the address as a message about reducing Canada’s economic dependence on the United States and diversifying trade.
Fine. Let us have that debate.
But let us have the real debate, not the staged one.
Because the hard numbers do not support the idea that America and China are simply two comparable options on a menu of Canadian diversification. They are not.
In 2025, Canada’s merchandise trade surplus with the United States was $81.6 billion. The U.S. also took 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports. That is not a side relationship. It is the economic spine of the country.
China is different. China may be described as Canada’s “number two trading partner,” but that phrase hides more than it reveals. With the U.S., Canada sells more than it buys. With China, Canada buys far more than it sells. According to the Prime Minister’s own January 2026 release, Canada exported $30 billion in merchandise to China in 2024 and imported $88.9 billion. That is a deficit of nearly $59 billion.
So when Ottawa talks about expanding trade with China, Canadians should ask a basic question: expanding what?
Canadian exports? Canadian leverage? Canadian jobs? Canadian industrial capacity?
Or simply Canadian dependence on Chinese imports?
A trade relationship that produces a surplus is not the same as one that produces a deficit. That does not mean every deficit is automatically bad, or that Canada should not trade with China. Of course Canada should trade where it serves Canadian interests. But politicians should not be allowed to blur the distinction between trade that strengthens national capacity and trade that deepens dependence.
That distinction matters even more when the country in question is not just another market.
In April 2025, Reuters reported that Carney identified China as Canada’s biggest security threat in a leaders’ debate, and later described China as the biggest threat “from a geopolitical sense.” He also referred to Chinese foreign interference and China’s partnership with Russia. Canada’s own Indo-Pacific Strategy describes China as an “increasingly disruptive global power,” citing coercive diplomacy, non-market trade practices, forced labour, militarization in the South China Sea, and foreign-interference concerns.
Yet in January 2026, the Prime Minister’s Office announced a “new strategic partnership” with China. The PMO release said Carney met with Xi Jinping, Li Qiang, and Zhao Leji in Beijing and that the partnership would focus on energy, economic and trade cooperation, public safety and security, multilateralism, culture, and people-to-people ties.
That is not a small rhetorical shift.
From security threat to strategic partner in less than a year is not normal diplomatic fine-tuning. It is a reversal in tone that deserves explanation.
What changed?
Did China change?
Did Canada’s assessment of China’s ambitions change?
Did Beijing’s record on foreign interference, coercive trade, military expansion, forced labour, cyber activity, and support for authoritarian alignment suddenly improve?
Or did Ottawa’s political story change?
These are not fringe questions. They are basic questions of national interest.
The same applies to Chinese electric vehicles. Ottawa previously took a hard line on Chinese EVs, citing concerns about unfair competition, state-backed overcapacity, and the need to protect Canadian workers and critical sectors. Then came the new China opening. Reports and government-linked summaries described a quota allowing up to 49,000 Chinese-made EVs into Canada at a much lower tariff rate than the previous 100% surtax.
Even if one accepts the argument that limited access could reduce consumer prices or encourage investment, the industrial question remains: what happens to Canadian auto workers, tool-and-die makers, parts suppliers, and manufacturers if state-supported Chinese production gains a foothold in the Canadian market?
This is not just about cars. It is about the ecosystem around cars.
Auto manufacturing is not an isolated industry. It supports tooling, dies, moulds, parts, logistics, engineering, steel, electronics, software, and skilled trades. Once that ecosystem is weakened, it is not easily rebuilt. A country that loses industrial capacity does not simply order it back when needed.
That is the part missing from the sovereignty speech.
Sovereignty is not a prop. It is not a slogan. It is not a toy soldier on a desk.
Sovereignty is the ability to feed yourself, fuel yourself, build things, defend borders, control supply chains, protect data, produce energy, maintain industry, and negotiate from strength. It is the ability to say no because you still have options.
If Canada weakens its most profitable trading relationship while deepening exposure to a deficit-heavy relationship with an authoritarian power, that is not sovereignty. That is rebranding dependence.
The great irony of Carney’s Brock moment is that it borrowed from the old Canada — the Canada of territory, sacrifice, loyalty, duty, and hard interests — to sell a vision that often sounds much more like the new postnational Canada.
That new Canada has been years in the making. It speaks fluently about values, inclusion, climate ambition, global leadership, multilateralism, and “new power centres.” It is comfortable on world stages and in investment forums. It is fluent in Davos language. But it often seems less comfortable speaking plainly about borders, energy, workers, regions, manufacturing, national advantage, and the hard material interests of the people who actually live here.
This is not only about Carney. It is part of a longer Liberal tendency to treat Canada less as a nation with concrete interests and more as a values-branded platform in a shifting global order.
Justin Trudeau said the quiet part out loud in 2015 when he told The New York Times Magazine that Canada could be the world’s “first postnational state,” adding that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” The Guardian later described the remark as a governing philosophy that some found “bewildering, even reckless.”
Carney’s version is colder, more technocratic, and more global. In his January 2026 World Economic Forum speech in Davos, he spoke of “a rupture in the world order,” “the end of a pleasant fiction,” and the fading of the rules-based order. He said intermediate powers like Canada could help “build a new order” based on values such as human rights, sustainable development, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
That may sound lofty. But it also raises the central question: when Canada’s leaders talk about a “new order,” who gets to define Canada’s place in it?
The answer appears to include Beijing. Only days before the Davos speech, the Prime Minister’s Office announced a “new strategic partnership” with China, describing China as an enormous opportunity for Canada in a “more divided and uncertain world.” The same release said Canada would allow up to 49,000 Chinese EVs into the Canadian market at the most-favoured-nation tariff rate, and quoted Carney saying the Canada-China partnership reflects “the world as it is today.”
That is the thread: Trudeau’s postnational Canada, Carney’s new global order, and Beijing recast from security threat into strategic partner.
A country with no core identity is easier to reposition. A country treated as a platform is easier to rebrand. A country whose leaders speak more fluently about global systems than national interest is easier to move away from its old alliances, industries, and foundations while telling citizens it is all being done in the name of sovereignty.
That worldview has consequences.
When a country has “no core identity,” national interest becomes negotiable. When sovereignty becomes a communications theme, policy can drift in the opposite direction while the flag remains in the frame. When patriotism becomes branding, citizens are asked to applaud the symbols while ignoring the substance.
That is why the Brock video matters.
It was not merely a strange piece of political theatre. It was a glimpse into the contradiction at the centre of the current government’s message.
Carney wants Canadians to believe he is defending sovereignty. But sovereignty against whom? The United States, our largest market, closest neighbour, primary security partner, and the source of a massive Canadian trade surplus? Or China, the authoritarian state our own documents and leaders have described as a serious strategic threat?
The United States can be difficult, even coercive. Canada should never be naïve about that. But replacing excessive dependence on Washington with deeper exposure to Beijing is not independence. It is a different kind of vulnerability.
A serious Canadian strategy would build leverage in all directions. It would expand energy exports. It would strengthen ports, pipelines, rail, defence, Arctic capacity, critical minerals, manufacturing, and interprovincial trade. It would protect key industries from predatory competition. It would diversify without pretending that all partners are alike.
Most importantly, it would stop confusing emotional defiance with national strength.
Holding up Isaac Brock may stir patriotic feeling. But Brock did not defend a brand. He did not defend a theory of global repositioning. He defended a place.
That is the question Canadians should keep asking.
When Ottawa says it is defending Canada, which Canada does it mean?
The real country of workers, regions, energy, industry, farms, borders, communities, and hard-won institutions?
Or the postnational idea of Canada preferred by global managerial elites — a country less rooted in its own people than in its usefulness to a changing world order?
That is not an accusation of disloyalty. It is a demand for clarity.
Because Canadians do not owe any leader automatic trust simply because he says the word sovereignty while holding a symbol of the past.
Sovereignty is proven in policy.
And right now, the gap between the symbol and the substance is wide enough to drive a Chinese EV through.
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