China is knocking at the trans-Pacific trade door - Canada must not swing it wide open

Opinion piece by Ed Fast, Canada's minister of international trade from 2011-2015, who led free trade negotiations with the European Union, the Trans-Pacific Partnership countries, South Korea, and Ukraine. He was directly involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations.

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Here is the same article in The Hub.

A Canadian parliamentary delegation returned last month from Beijing bearing glad tidings: China wants in on the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Senator Clement Gignac, co-chair of the Canada-China Legislative Association, reported that his Chinese counterparts were eager for Ottawa’s support in Beijing’s long-stalled bid to join the CPTPP. He even suggested that Canada had helped China join the World Trade Organization once before, so why not again?

With respect to Senator Gignac, this framing fundamentally misunderstands what the CPTPP is, what it was designed to do, and why China’s admission would undermine the very architecture that makes it valuable.

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The TPP was never merely a tariff-reduction exercise. It was a strategic initiative—one conceived in large part as a counterweight to China’s growing economic dominance in the Asia-Pacific region and its serial violation of the rules-based international trading order. Let us be honest about that, even if diplomatic convention sometimes discourages saying it plainly.

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Beijing has used state-owned enterprises as instruments of industrial policy, flooding global markets with artificially subsidized goods in sectors from steel and aluminum to solar panels and electric vehicles. It has systematically stolen intellectual property through cyber-espionage and coercive technology transfer requirements imposed on foreign firms seeking access to the Chinese market. It has erected non-tariff barriers—regulatory harassment, discriminatory licensing regimes, arbitrary customs delays—that effectively nullify market-access commitments made under WTO agreements.

When the WTO Dispute Settlement Body has ruled against China, Beijing has minimally complied with the findings. When trading partners have pushed back on specific abuses, China has deployed economic coercion—cutting off exports of critical raw materials, imposing punishing tariffs, and leveraging market access as a geopolitical weapon.

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Canada has been on the receiving end of exactly this treatment: China’s retaliatory suspension of Canadian canola imports in 2019 was a textbook example of trade as a cudgel rather than commerce.

This is the country now seeking to join a trade agreement built on enforceable rules.

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The TPP negotiations were painstaking precisely because we were trying to achieve something genuinely difficult: a high-standard trade agreement that would set enforceable rules across a diverse coalition of like-minded trading nations. “Like-minded” is the operative phrase. The partners around the table were countries that, whatever their political differences, shared a commitment to the rule of law, to market-based competition, to transparency in regulatory processes, and to meaningful enforcement mechanisms.

This architecture works because the partners trust that the commitments on the other side of the ledger are genuine. Admit a country whose governing philosophy is incompatible with those disciplines, and you do not expand the CPTPP—you hollow it out.

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Senator Gignac invoked Canada’s support for China’s WTO accession as a precedent for backing its CPTPP bid. The comparison flatters neither institution. China’s WTO accession was premised on the optimistic theory—now thoroughly discredited—that integration into the rules-based international order would gradually liberalize China’s economic and political system. After nearly a quarter-century of evidence, we know that this theory was wrong.

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Moreover, the WTO decision was made at a moment when the geopolitical landscape looked very different. China today is not the China of 2001. It is a more assertive, more economically coercive, and more politically repressive state than the one that made WTO accession commitments. Its trade practices have grown more, not less, predatory. Its willingness to weaponize economic relationships for political ends has been demonstrated repeatedly and unmistakably.

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The CPTPP is one of Canada’s most valuable trading assets. When the agreement came into effect, it provided preferential access to 11 economies representing roughly 580 million people and 15.6 percent of global GDP. The CPTPP is anchored in disciplines that reflect Canadian values: transparency, rule of law, fair competition. Opening its doors to a country that treats those disciplines as optional would risk degrading the agreement that our negotiators worked so hard to build.