In June of last year, a tanker slipped out of Kitimat, British Columbia, riding low with the first cargo of liquefied natural gas Canada had ever exported at scale. One of the companies with a stake in the terminal it left behind was Mitsubishi. A share of the cargoes that have followed is bound for Japan. It is a small, physical fact — a ship, a stake, a destination — and it is as good a place as any to start understanding what Canada and Japan have quietly been building.
Because the ship is not really about gas. It is about a bet.
Six months earlier, at Davos, Mark Carney had described the post–Cold War order as having entered a “rupture.” It was an unusually stark word for a Canadian prime minister, and he has spent the year acting on it. In March he flew to Tokyo and signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae — a single framework knitting together defence, energy, technology, economic security and trade. It was the centrepiece of an Indo-Pacific tour that also took him to India and Australia. The message beneath the handshakes was not subtle: if the American anchor can no longer be relied upon, a country needs other places to tie up.
Japan is the sturdiest of those moorings, and the partnership has been filling in with startling speed.
Consider what has been signed in a matter of months. A defence Equipment and Technology Transfer Agreement, which entered into force in June, lets the two countries co-develop and trade advanced military hardware and intellectual property — and has already produced a marquee result, with a Montreal firm, MDA Space, building the payload for Japan’s next-generation defence satellite. A critical-minerals push that saw the largest Canadian trade mission ever sent to the Asia-Pacific land in Tokyo this June, some three hundred companies deep, and come home with more than a billion dollars in agreements to pool gallium, graphite and rare earths — the very materials China can choke off. An Economic Security Dialogue, now standing up, to coordinate the two countries’ investment screening and protect sensitive technology. And underneath it all, a trade relationship a decade in the deepening: Japan is Canada’s fifth-largest merchandise partner, and two-way trade has grown nearly a fifth since the CPTPP took effect in 2018, carrying Canadian canola, pork and seafood into a country that imports most of what it eats.
The logic on both sides is the logic of the “rupture.” Japan and Canada are two middle powers that spent decades sheltering under American guarantees and are now, warily, learning to provide for themselves — and for each other. Japan needs energy and minerals from suppliers that are not China and not chokeable. Canada needs markets and partners that are not the United States and not a single point of failure. Each is, for the other, exactly the kind of stable, democratic, resource-or-technology-rich friend the moment demands. That is not romance. It is arithmetic.
None of which means the partnership does everything its architects imply.
Look closely and you find the seams. The critical-minerals pact is a non-binding memorandum, not a treaty — policy direction and matchmaking, not an enforceable guarantee of supply. The great symbol of defence cooperation this year is a satellite Canada won; the great absence is a submarine it lost, because Japan chose not to bid on the largest procurement in Canadian history, which went instead to a German yard. The Comprehensive Strategic Partnership is real, but a strategic partnership is a frame, and frames are cheap. What hangs inside them is the test.
There is a deeper question, too, the one this whole series keeps circling. A middle power hedging in every direction at once — Japan, India, Australia, Europe, even a tentative agreement-in-principle with China — is buying options, but options have a cost. Diplomatic attention, negotiating capital and political will are finite. It is possible to end up not with one strong alternative to Washington but with five half-built ones, and a country that mistakes motion for strategy can look busy while getting nowhere.
Still, of all the moorings Ottawa has thrown a line to this year, Japan is the one that looks least like improvisation. The two countries have been converging for a decade; the CPTPP did the quiet groundwork; the values, the anxieties and the industrial complementarities line up almost too neatly. If the “rupture” is real — and Carney is betting his foreign policy that it is — then a partnership with Tokyo is close to the model of what a serious hedge should look like.
This is the second installment in a Global Canada series on the relationships remaking the country’s place in the world. We began next door, with the United States. We turn now to the Pacific, and to a partnership that is either the smartest bet Ottawa has made in a generation or a well-dressed way of hoping the old world comes back. The tanker has already left Kitimat. We will find out at the other end.