Potential friend-shoring in the Indo-Pacific: why a value-based approach to trade will set Canada back on its Indo-Pacific strategy

As Canada's geopolitical tensions with Russia and China continue to rise, a friend-shoring framework that calls for trade relations only with fellow democracies has gained traction. In addition to upending basic market principles, friend-shoring threatens to derail the government's ongoing Indo-Pacific Strategy by hindering the formation of trade agreements with regional countries that do not share Canada's democratic values. Furthermore, states in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have long maintained a neutral foreign policy of hedging between major powers irrespective of ideology, making them unlikely candidates to partake in friend-shoring. As opposed to a value-based foreign policy, Canadian engagement in the Indo-Pacific should thus focus on consensus-building among ideologically different parties.