Canadian politicians “can’t” say that the USA is the largest security threat, because our market is so highly integrated, and the baby in charge would throw a pant shitting tantrum. Canadian politicans are often bad, but they’re not complete idiots on that front. Carney came so close that it was clear though, in his Davos speech. Spavor and Kovrig’s detention was largely the result of Canada detaining Meng, at the request of the USA. A request that was taken by the USA explicitly to sour relations between Canada and China – which worked for years, until just recently due to the shift in the US posture. So the USA overtly meddles in Canada’s relation with China to sow animosity and disadvantage Canada, but the USA ain’t a big threat huh?

Canada supports Ukraine. Both China and India have been trading with / supporting Russia throughout. Canada has significant trade with India. India has allegedly conducted assassinations on Canadian soil using the Bishnoi Gang as a proxy to go after political dissidents of Modi. Indian students were constantly in the news in the past few years, as the ‘foreign student’ programs were shown to involve significant fraud from that particular region, with an assumption that Canada will just accept the people once they’re in Canada – not exactly the actions of a friendly nation. Especially when a bunch of Bishnoi gang members / Indian foreign agents were likely in that mix too. One report at the time had noted that like 15% of the people from one of the fraud investigations, were shown to be known criminals who should never have been admitted. Even with that backdrop, we’re fine trading with India, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be fine trading with China.

There are risks in dealing with any large nation. But we’re literally next door to the most militaristic nation in history, which has gone authoritarian/fascist, and has made overtures of destroying Canada. Not just overtures, but they’re taking steps to try and achieve that goal by funding separatist movements and sowing discord through our USA-controlled media.

Carney’s Davos speech highlighted how Canada’s approaching trade, and it makes sense given our position in the world. We can’t dictate terms to super powers. We can’t demand that all our trading partners agree with everything we value, nor is it reasonable for Canada to try and dictate the foreign policy of foreign nations in terms of who they trade with, or the actions they take. We can work on smaller deals for specific goods, keeping value-based virtue signaling trade nonsense to a minimum.

Freeland is a relic of Trudeau’s “Virtue signaling” government approach, where the environment minister literally said shit like “Just lie often, lie loud enough, and people will believe you!”. Freelands prior negotiation of the CUSMA stuff was also really weird – in that the initial coverage before the deal listed various items that were ‘critical’ to get in the negotiations, which she failed to do, but they still ended up pretending like she’d done a great job. That again, was part of the Trudeau governments obfuscations – likely done in part because the Liberal brand required that they prop up all of their ‘star’ women candidates, regardless of performance. They moved that environment minister into a cushy high paying ambassador gig – just like they moved the woman who was responsible for the phoenix pay system fiasco into a high paying government gig as a reward for costing tax payers BILLIONS, rather than highlight that she was incompetent at her job. There’re good reasons Freeland didn’t win the Liberal leadership, and why that party’s now veered significantly away from the Trudeau style.

Whine about trade with China all you want. At the moment, they’re more consistent in their actions, leading to more predictable trading outcomes. And when you take a look at what the USA is doing to Minnesota, if you’re wanting to deny trade based on value mis-matches, we should likely also clip all trade with the USA. But that’s pretty much impossible at this point. So you gotta chill with the virtue signaling nonsense, and find win win situations where you can.