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Will Joe Biden fix Canada’s broken relations with China? It’s about more than Meng Wanzhou
- Arrest of Huawei’s Meng blighted Sino-Canada relations during the Trump presidency – but even if she is freed, US policy will still affect Ottawa
- Next US president may be less hostile than Donald Trump, but he promises a multilateral approach to China that may be hard for Canada to resist, observers say
Reading Time:6 minutes
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Ian Youngin Vancouver
As the Biden administration takes the reins in Washington, the stakes have never been higher for the US relationship with China and the rest of Asia. In the fifth part of a post-US-election series, Ian Young explores how Beijing may face a more united front from Washington and Ottawa, and how detained Huawei Technologies CFO Meng Wanzhou figures into the equation.
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From his first white-knuckle handshakes with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, US President Donald Trump has strained the conventions of Canada’s relationship with its neighbour and most important ally.
For half of that time, a third party – detained Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou – has also loomed over the Canada-US relationship, her unwilling presence under partial house arrest in Vancouver further testing the limits of Ottawa’s ties with another superpower.
Since Meng’s 2018 arrest, Canada has been commonly depicted as the meat in the sandwich between China and Trump, raising the question of whether the US’ transfer of power next month offers an opportunity to reset Canada’s relationship with Beijing, too. Reports last week that the US Department of Justice was in talks with Meng, about a deal to drop its extradition request, have only heightened the speculation.
But despite US president-elect Joe Biden promising a more crafted foreign policy approach than Trump, some observers of the three-way diplomatic dance doubt Canada will get much room to go easy on Beijing, even if Meng were freed.
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The sound and fury of Trump’s go-it-alone foreign policy has been disorderly and distrusted by some allies. But Biden’s promise of a regimented and multilateral tough-on-China policy could force Trudeau to adopt this as a common stance.
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