Why Canada is having stand-offs with India and China

https://ft.com/content/b5d91bce-4e36-427a-8fbd-bfa

Canada has found itself sucked into a series of perilous foreign policy dilemmas that have left it struggling to balance its values, interests and identity. In particular, Canada now finds itself at loggerheads with both India and China — the two most populous nations and the rising powers of this century.

Over the past year alone, Canada has accused China of interfering in its domestic politics and criticised the Chinese military for flying dangerously close to its aircraft over the South China Sea.

One of the new threats — the possibility of an extraterritorial killing by Indian government agents in Canada — returned to the limelight last week when the FT revealed that the US had warned India over a thwarted plot to kill a Sikh separatist on American soil that it believed had possible Indian government involvement.

Jonathan Berkshire Miller, an Indo-Pacific expert at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank in Ottawa, says that successive governments have tended to treat foreign policy as a “luxury item” and have left it to the Americans to “step up to the plate”, or the Japanese and Australians in the Indo-Pacific.

“We’ve had this complacency on foreign security issues for several years,” says Berkshire Miller.

In another example of foreign threats at home, Canada this year expelled a Chinese diplomat for alleged political interference. Canadian intelligence said he was involved in a campaign to intimidate an opposition lawmaker with family in Hong Kong who had slammed China on human rights.