by Zac Morgan

    As China escalates interference in Canadian elections, the US must defend its closest ally’s democracy, economically and digitally, or risk weakening the liberal order from within.

    The United States is currently embroiled in the early stages of a trade war with Canada, one of its largest trading partners. President Donald Trump has made plain, perhaps in jest, perhaps in earnest, that Washington’s aim is an expiry date on Canadian independence itself, fulfilling a new manifest destiny by bringing Canada into the Union as the fifty-first state. 

    As the final report from Canada’s public inquiry into foreign interference in its last two elections shows, however, this is a moment for Washington to be defending and protecting Canada’s sovereignty, not challenging it. 

    China Meddles in Canada’s Elections

    In 2019 and 2021, the Chinese state interfered in Canada’s elections and the public inquiry’s concluding report reaffirmed that “the People’s Republic of China is the most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canada’s democratic institutions.” 

    Indeed, “[t]he PRC views Canada as a high-priority target,” no doubt because of its NATO membership, involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing system and general alliance with the United States, the very power that Beijing hopes to displace as the world order’s agenda-setter. With a new federal election scheduled in Canada for April 28 of this year, one can reasonably expect more of the same from the People’s Republic against our northern neighbor.

    While the inquiry’s conclusions and recommendations have garnered the most attention, an underappreciated portion of the report involves a road that Canada has not taken. While Canada has, for instance, imposed sanctions against Chinese officials for human rights violations or issued tariffs against China to protect its domestic industries, it has not leveraged its economic relationships “to counter foreign interference targeting” its democracy. 

    Nor did the report suggest that Ottawa engage in such a policy, instead recommending measures such as a duty-to-warn policy for targets of “credible threats of serious harm potentially attributable to a foreign entity, directly or indirectly, made to any Canadian or any person within Canada” or considering the formation of a government body “to monitor the Canadian online information environment to identify foreign-based disinformation campaigns that may affect federal democratic institutions, including electoral processes.”

    The decision not to regularize economic sanctions as an anti-interference tool may be due to the Canadian state’s assessment that the PRC would not course-correct in response to such measures. Fair enough: there’s no reason for Canada to pursue efforts to build deterrence against Beijing’s chicanery that Ottawa itself believes will be fruitless. It may well be, however, that Canada believes some such sanctions could be beneficial on this front. 

    Still, the country acknowledges that it cannot act effectively without significant support from great powers.

    Canada Is Economically, Politically and Geographically Connected to the United States

    Consider that the entire Canadian economy is roughly the size of New York’s. And while a significant chunk of Canada’s wealth is dependent on the US-Canada trading relationship, which accounts for “more than two-thirds of all Canadian trade,” Canada’s number two trading partner is none other than China. 

    Publicly available statistics suggest that China’s economy is approximately eight times the size of Canada’s. If China were to turn off the taps of all its exports to Canada, it would hardly feel the pain of a responsive Canadian embargo. 

    Indeed, China has recently begun firing off tariffs against Canada in response to Ottawa’s protective tariff on electric vehicles, signaling that Beijing certainly has no fear of being unable to manage further escalation, especially while the United States is committed to conducting a trade war against the same target. No wonder the public inquiry’s final report delicately noted that “while public measures such as… imposing sanctions on a diplomat or country may help deter or counter foreign interference, they can also come at significant cost to Canada.”

    And who could blame the Canadian government for coming to this conclusion? The People’s Republic has demonstrated that it is willing to ruthlessly throttle economic relationships when a democracy chooses to challenge Beijing’s policy against Taiwan or regarding the origins of COVID-19. 

    Thanks to dollar dominance, a world economic system created mainly by the US itself and the sheer, staggering size of the American economy, only Washington could stand in our ally’s shoes to impose measures on Ottawa’s behalf or if Canada wishes to strike alone, provide economic assistance to Canada to help it absorb any counterpunch by the PRC. 

    For that matter, even if the US and Canada decide that financial sanctions are not the correct path to re-establish deterrence, the United States still should take advantage of its communications, technological, or other comparative advantages to send a signal to Beijing on Ottawa’s behalf. This type of informational warfare defense arrangement could also be scaled up to apply to the Five Eyes countries in general, all of which are targets of Chinese political espionage.

    After all, helping to secure Canada’s political system and those of our sister democracies from nefarious interference ultimately aligns with America’s security interests. The United States is currently waging an unfriendly competition against China and its loose coalition of revisionist partner states in Russia, Iran and North Korea. This competition has an unavoidable ideological tinge, primarily because Beijing and other autocracies will seek to promote their systems by discrediting competing forms of government both at home and abroad. 

    Protecting Canada Is in America’s National Interest

    Failure to protect Canadian sovereignty, however, might come to China’s aid on this front. Playing defense relinquishes the pace of competition to one’s opponent: China will always initiate the first move, prodding Canadian social media diets, engaging in transnational repression against diaspora communities and advancing its foreign policy aims through Canada’s domestic affairs. This is a problem because this type of political warfare undermines the state’s ability to protect its citizens and choose its leaders.

    Moreover, such a passive defense naturally lends itself to embracing a policy designed to harden civil society against foreign intrusion. This choice can be corrosive to the very thing being defended, democratic institutions and the electoral process, because it invariably counsels expanding the shadow of the state over more and more domestic civic discourse, an invitation for “public authority” to “assume [e] a guardianship of the public mind.” 

    This can inculcate cynicism and apathy at home while allowing hostile states to plausibly posit that liberal democracy is nothing more than manufactured consent. In short, the defensive strategy unnecessarily raises the risk of discrediting liberal democracy itself through self-sabotage, inadvertently doing China’s work for it.

    It may strike some as incongruous to promote a more tightly knit US-Canadian relationship at a time when the current administration is waging a trade war against Ottawa. However, if we prioritize American national security interests, annexing Canada is not the solution; ensuring that it can defend its democracy is.

    About the Author: Zac Morgan

    Zac Morgan is an attorney specializing in First Amendment and campaign finance law. He previously worked for the Institute for Free Speech and currently serves as counsel to Commissioner Allen Dickerson of the Federal Election Commission. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not express an official view of the US government.