Ongoing tariff disputes have hurt Canadian exports like canola and fueled internal political tensions, especially between prairie provinces and Ontario.
Mark Carney is flying to China next week to sit down with President Xi Jinping to get trade talks going again and try to pull Canada out of the economic pressure cooker Trump created.
This will be the first time in nearly 10 years that a Canadian prime minister has landed in China. Last time ended in a disaster.
Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou from Huawei back in 2018 on a U.S. warrant. China answered by detaining Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Nobody forgot. They only got out after Meng cut a deal with U.S. prosecutors in 2021. That broke everything. Now Carney is trying to fix it.
Carney aims to fix trade fights and pitch oil and canola
Carney’s not going for small talk. His team said he’ll talk trade, agriculture, energy, and security. Tariffs have been flying since last year. Canada raised taxes on Chinese electric cars, steel, and aluminum, just to keep pace with Trump.
China hit back by taxing Canadian canola and other crops. That pissed off western provinces. Prairie leaders are accusing Ottawa of sacrificing farmers to protect factories in Ontario.
The U.S. slapped 50% tariffs on foreign steel, and Carney followed up by cutting off Chinese steel shipments. It didn’t stop the bleeding. Carney now wants to double Canada’s exports outside the U.S. over the next ten years.
China is already Canada’s second-biggest trade partner. In 2024 alone, they traded C$118 billion worth of goods. That number could grow if Carney gets this right.
He met Xi back in October at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea. Carney called that meeting “a turning point” and said he was invited to visit. Since then, Canadian ministers have been making trips to China, lobbying for this Xi-Carney meeting.
Carney juggles pipeline plans, tourism thaw, and Trudeau’s frozen legacy
Carney sees oil as a way back in. The Trans Mountain pipeline to the west coast just got expanded. That already led to record oil exports to China. He’s now trying to cut through red tape for a second pipeline to ship more. Trump’s actions in Venezuela just made that plan more urgent. Canada needs buyers. China needs oil.
Retail is also on the table. Carney said Canadian brands like Lululemon and Canada Goose could gain if trade improves. His goal is to open up “a much bigger set of opportunities for a bigger range of Canadian businesses.”
He also wants to end travel limits between the countries. In November, China announced that group tourism to Canada would return after being shut down in 2020.
This reset is happening while Trudeau’s record with China still stinks. Trudeau tried to land a deal back in 2016 and 2017. Then Meng got arrested. China retaliated. Everything froze.
By 2022, Melanie Joly, Trudeau’s foreign minister, called China a “disruptive” force. A year later, Trudeau ordered an inquiry into Chinese election interference. The report said China and others tried, but elections weren’t changed.
Carney’s playing this differently. “We’re starting from a very low base and we can build quite a bit before we hit anything sensitive,” he said after his meeting with Xi. Nobody lifted tariffs that day. Carney said that wasn’t the point. “People sometimes simplify it down, to give this for that,” he told reporters. “That’s not the way it works.”
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