Canada's Prime Minister said that China has been clever in playing Western nations as they compete economically and try to divide them.
He told Canada's Global News that one of the challenges of being a western world is that we compete with each other. We're trying to figure out how to get better access for Canadian beef than for Australian beef.
We're capitalist democracies and we're trying to do well. The rising Chinese middle class has an extraordinary economic opportunity.
How do we access that? We've been competing. "China has been playing us off each other in an open-market, competitive way, from time to time," he said, without specifying any actions from China that prompted his remarks.
He urged the countries in the West to come together.
He said that China can't play the angles and divide us one against the other because we need to do a better job of working together.
Canada's relationship with China has been strained since the arrest of the CFO of the Chinese company, and daughter of the billionaire founder of the company, for violating US trade sanctions with Iran.
China retaliated for her arrest by detaining two Canadians on national-security charges. Both nations had disagreements over China's human-rights record.
Canada and some of its allies, including the US and UK, have decided to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
Trudeau said that "dozens upon dozens of countries signing on to this in a very real way declaring that no, coercive diplomacy is not all right." Those kinds of initiatives make a difference.
The officials behind the calls for a boycott were never invited, so China dismissed the boycotts.
