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Suppose for a moment that China had been casting about for a symbolic target in its ongoing dispute with Canada. What are the options to strike at Canadian identity? How could China most severely wound the country’s self-esteem?

It cannot likely put together a better Olympic hockey team. What else is iconically Canadian? The North Pole? Chinese influence in the Arctic is tempered by Russia’s. What could Beijing do, really, to disrupt Tim Hortons’ supply chain? Surely its agents have no compromising material on Celine Dion.

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But there is another heel on the Canadian Achilles, a plant so distinctively and proudly Canadian that it represents a diplomatic, economic and symbolic nexus of vulnerabilities even greater than the sugar maple.

News this week of a Chinese ban on new orders of canola seed is not only so potentially damaging to the Western Canadian economy, but so insulting to canola’s origin story in Canadian wartime initiative and frontier agricultural science, that the Chinese could hardly have aimed the dagger closer to Canada’s cultural heart.