Freeland crosses Beijing’s red lines with Taiwan speech
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OTTAWA — Former deputy PM Chrystia Freeland raised a few eyebrows and likely blood pressure in Beijing on Tuesday, delivering the keynote speech at a high-level security forum in Taiwan.
Speaking at the Ketagalan Forum in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, Freeland drew direct parallels between Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the growing threat China poses to Taiwan — crossing several of Beijing’s absolute diplomatic red lines in the process.
“Deterrence is not provocation, silence is not prudence,” she said in her speech on Tuesday.
“The peace of the Strait of Taiwan will be kept by the plainness with which the world’s democracies say in advance that we will not accept that peace being broken.”
Maintaining that peace in the face of Chinese aggression, she said, is why democracies need to rally around Taiwan.
“That is why solidarity with Taiwan and recognition of your flourishing democracy is so important,” she said.
Nations that wish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China are — at Beijing’s behest — not to officially recognize Taiwanese sovereignty, and accept that the PRC is the only “China” in the region.
Even as Canada works to improve relations with the communist regime, China has expressed irritation with Canada in the past — most recently a number of transits of the Taiwan strait by Canadian warships , and a high-profile visit to Taiwan by Conservative MP Michael Chong , himself a victim of Chinese harassment.
Comparing Taiwan to Ukraine is ‘red line’ for Beijing
Freeland, who resigned as an MP earlier this year, was a venerable member of former PM Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.
Having served as deputy prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister, Freeland’s high-profile resignation from cabinet in December 2024 — just hours before tabling the government’s fall economic statement in the House of Commons — triggered a series of events that led to Trudeau’s resignation as PM just a few weeks later.
While Freeland’s speech steered clear of Canada’s policies on both Taiwan and China, she spoke at length of her time as a Trudeau Liberal cabinet minister, focusing her references to Canada on broader democratic values and multilateral economic ties.
She did, however, take direct aim at Beijing’s controversial new Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law , specifically slamming Article 63 — an extraterritorial clause that gives the communist regime “power” to target anyone around the world who they say undermines Chinese “ethnic unity.”
Describing the new law as “sinister,” Freeland likened it to Vladimir Putin’s pre-invasion rhetoric justifying his war in Ukraine.
“Article 63 is particularly sinister for me, given its dark kinship with Russia’s malign use of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic ties to justify illegal encroachment on the sovereignty of its neighbors, including the bloody full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” Freeland said.
“Democracies need to state plainly, and in one voice, that a foreign law which assigns political loyalty on the basis of ethnicity has no force on our territories and no application to our citizens — whatever their ancestry, whatever their passport, wherever they or their parents were born.”
Freeland calls for Taiwan to join CPTPP
Beijing strictly opposes any comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan.
While Ukraine is universally recognized as a sovereign country, Beijing’s “One China” principle considers Taiwan a “renegade state,” and any comparisons between the two frames China as the aggressor.
Freeland also called for Taiwan’s entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a 12-nation free trade agreement within and beyond the Asia-Pacific region.
She also called out the world’s dependence on Chinese imports of electronics, manufacturing and semiconductors — a concern for many nations unwilling or legally unable to use Chinese-sourced parts for security-critical applications.
“With your deep strength in semiconductors, microelectronics, and precision manufacturing, Taiwan can play an essential role in de-risking the supply chains of the world’s democracies, and ensuring that authoritarian rulers, whether in Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran, or Pyongyang, cannot hold us economic hostage,” she said.
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