Canada quietly cancelled most of its high-level dialogues and bilateral engagement mechanisms with China and implemented a review process that makes creating new methods of engagement exceedingly difficult.

“Ending engagement makes sense,” writes Michaela Pedersen-Macnab, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “China’s penchant for coercive diplomacy vividly illustrated the failures of an engagement policy for Canada — as well as for other western democracies like Australia and Norway.”

In Canada’s case, China arbitrarily detained Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in December 2018, using the Canadians as bargaining chips to pressure Canada into releasing Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after she was arrested by Canadian authorities acting on an American arrest warrant.

Yet there were also earlier signs diplomatic engagement was failing, including Chinese crackdowns on freedom of expression; China’s rejection of the 2016 South China Sea Arbitration; its illiberal trade practices; human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; and the end to presidential term limits. These and other events should have indicated that nearly four decades of attempting to engage meaningfully with China and encourage it to embrace the rules-based international order had failed.

“Constructive dialogue on issues of common interest such as biodiversity protection and climate change governance must continue,” Pedersen-Macnab says, adding that “Canada may also still find value in engaging with China on issues of profound disagreement, like human rights and foreign interference, to hold Chinese authorities accountable when their behaviour falls short of China’s obligations under international law.”