Custody Without Protection: How Canada Learned That Enforcing American Power Does Not Buy American Shelter

Canada’s sudden China pivot is not a diplomatic awakening, it is a late recognition that enforcing American power never guaranteed American protection.

When Mark Carney announced that Canada was recalibrating its relationship with China, the language was careful and pragmatic. It was framed as a forward looking adjustment to a changing world, a sensible repositioning by a middle power navigating uncertainty. Yet the timing and tone raise an unavoidable question. How does a country that spent years enforcing American power against China now expect to be treated as a neutral partner? This essay examines that contradiction not as a matter of sentiment or diplomacy, but as a problem of jurisdiction, memory, and consequence, and why China will price Canada not by what it says now, but by what it proved it was willing to do when pressure arrived.

The assumption of shelter

For much of the past decade, Canada operated on a simple assumption. By aligning closely with Washington, it could preserve both access and protection. By enforcing US sanctions law, mirroring American industrial policy, and absorbing the diplomatic costs of confrontation with China, Ottawa believed it was buying shelter under the American umbrella. Loyalty, in this view, functioned as insurance.

That assumption collapsed not gradually, but abruptly, on the floor of Vancouver International Airport.

A moment in transit

In December 2018, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of its founder, was detained by Canadian authorities during a routine stopover, acting on a US extradition request linked to sanctions enforcement. Formally, this was a legal process. Strategically, it was something else. A senior executive of China’s most important technology company was taken into custody in a third country, not because of Canadian interests, but because Canada was prepared to act as an enforcement jurisdiction for American power.

Inside China, the meaning was immediately understood. This was not treated as a narrow compliance dispute or a technical question of banking representations. It was read as a warning: even the most senior figures of a national champion could be seized mid transit if they passed through a Western jurisdiction aligned with Washington. The fact that Meng was not merely an executive but the founder’s daughter sharpened the lesson.

Chinese media and officials described the episode as political persecution and humiliation. The language was sharp, but the lasting effect was quieter and more durable. What changed was not mood, but calculation. Jurisdiction itself was reassessed. Travel routes were reconsidered. Asset custody was repriced. The assumption that Western legal systems operated independently of geopolitical conflict no longer held.

This is where Western commentary often misreads the episode. The focus lingers on outrage or wounded pride. But China’s response was not primarily emotional. It was institutional. The Meng detention taught a clear lesson: when pressed, Canada would subordinate its legal process to American strategic objectives.

Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei. Detained in Canada in December 2018 at the request of the United States, she spent nearly 1,030 days — around 2.8 years — under house arrest while Washington pursued extradition. The U.S. charges were later dropped, and she returned to China on a chartered flight in 2021, where she received a public hero’s welcome.

Lessons that did not fade

That lesson did not fade when Meng returned home in 2021. Jurisdictions do not regain trust by closing cases. They do so by changing behavior.

Canada did not.

Instead, Ottawa reinforced the pattern. In 2024, it imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, explicitly aligning itself with US trade policy. Once again, Canada demonstrated that when pressure flowed from Washington, compliance followed. The underlying assumption remained intact: enforcement would be rewarded with protection.

When protection disappeared

Then the protection vanished.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the relationship shifted from partnership to coercion. Canada found itself threatened with sweeping tariffs, publicly warned against pursuing independent trade policy, and subjected to rhetoric that questioned its sovereignty outright. The same United States whose sanctions Canada had enforced without protest now treated Ottawa not as a protected ally, but as a lever.

This was the moment the illusion collapsed.

Canada had enforced American power abroad without securing insulation at home. Loyalty had bought usefulness, not safety. Enforcement delivered obedience, not immunity, a distinction Ottawa had long preferred not to examine.

A pivot explained after the fact

It is against this backdrop that Carney’s outreach to Beijing must be understood. The rhetoric speaks of recalibration and pragmatism. The substance is hedging. Tariffs were eased. Diplomatic visits resumed. Trade channels reopened. The shift was swift and unmistakable.

This was not reconciliation. It was damage control.

At Davos, Carney supplied the intellectual justification for that pivot. He described the post Cold War rules based international order as a pleasant fiction and acknowledged that countries like Canada had participated in sustaining its appearance while knowing it was selectively applied.

How China will remember it

From China’s perspective, this admission changes little. Beijing is not in the business of forgiveness. It is in the business of pricing risk. The Meng detention established Canada as a jurisdiction willing to enforce US power. The tariff alignment reinforced that classification. The Trump threats confirmed the asymmetry. Together, they form a single pattern: Canada enforces American strategy until American pressure turns inward, at which point it seeks alternatives.

That pattern is now priced in.

This is why talk of a reset is misleading. Resets imply amnesia. What is happening instead is reclassification. Canada is no longer treated as a neutral middle power, nor as a fully autonomous interlocutor. It is treated as a jurisdiction whose independence fluctuates with Washington’s mood.

This does not preclude cooperation. It constrains it.

China can trade with Canada, invest in Canada, and negotiate with Canada while fully accounting for the risk that, under sufficient pressure, Ottawa will once again subordinate its courts, tariffs, and policies to American strategic demands. That is not resentment. It is accounting.

The lesson that remains

Canada’s error was not enforcing American power. States do that all the time. Its error was assuming that enforcement would be reciprocated with protection. The events since have demonstrated the opposite. Enforcement makes a country useful. It does not make it safe.

Carney’s pivot recognizes this reality belatedly. Whether it is sufficient to reprice Canada upward remains uncertain. What is not uncertain is the framework within which China will judge it, a framework shaped less by today’s rhetoric than by yesterday’s compliance with a system Canada itself now concedes was a fiction.