Canada-China Relations in the Age of Great Power Competition: An Assessment of Canadian Foreign Policy Decision Making and Strategic Outlook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has, so far, awkwardly navigated the current U.S.-China geopolitical competition undertaking an ambiguous position, often labeled as inaction in policy circles, that has rendered any foreign policy decisions difficult to assess from a strategic perspective.Despite bilateral frictions that saw Sino-Canadian relations brought to their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1970, the Canadian government has yet to embark on a policy direction that would see it in strategic opposition to China regardless of the path its closest ally and current hegemon, the United States, has set for itself.The Canadian government has, in fact, adopted a hedging approach to the U.S.-China rivalry.Canadian foreign policy decision making, despite being in contradiction to traditional international theories that would see it balance with Washington, is consistent with Canada's policy of engagement towards China which emphasizes the need to work constructively with Beijing and the irrationality of containment for Canadian interests.Structural level theories, in treating middle powers like Canada as policytakers in the same manner as lesser powers, forgo their very role as supporters and builders of the Liberal International Order and, hence, their strategic commitment to enforcing its core tenets even in the absence of an American buttress.The current state of Canadian foreign policy exhibits an approach to great power competition anchored in the established order that recognizes the drawbacks of both balancing and bandwagoning in light of the framework Washington and Beijing have adopted to their rivalry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".