JUSTIN TRUDEAU, Canada’s prime minister, set off for China on December 2nd amid speculation that the two countries would start free-trade talks. Canada needs new markets because the United States is turning inward. China wants to gain better access to Canada’s commodities and technology and to set a precedent for talks with other G7 countries. Although they have been talking about trade for more than a year, Mr Trudeau will return with no agreement to start negotiations.

Mr Trudeau’s Liberal government has suffered other recent setbacks on trade. At a meeting in Danang, Vietnam, last month, Japan blamed Canada for delaying a new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement from which Donald Trump withdrew the United States. The snag was Canada’s request for protection of its culture. Renegotiation of the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Mexico is going badly. For a country whose trade is the equivalent of 64% of GDP, that is worrying.

Mr Trudeau thinks one way to counter a backlash in the West against globalisation would be to make trade agreements include strict standards for labour, the environment and human rights. The European Union agrees, and signed a comprehensive trade agreement with Canada last year. But other trade partners, whose standards, unlike Europe’s, are very different from Canada’s, want to keep trade deals simple.

China wants a plain-vanilla agreement similar to the one it concluded with Australia in 2015. “Beijing is unyielding that non-economic factors have no place in trade deals,” wrote Charles Burton, a scholar of China, in an assessment of the talks. The United States is receptive to labour and environmental standards (as a way to blunt competition from Mexico), but is uninterested in Canada’s ideas for incorporating indigenous rights into trade deals and making labour laws more union-friendly.

Mr Trudeau is not the first Canadian leader to deal with disappointments in trading relationships by seeking out new ones. When Britain removed preferential treatment for exports from colonies in 1846, Canada sought a deal with the United States. Mr Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister on and off from the 1960s to the 1980s, pursued a “third option” to supplement trade with the United States, which had raised tariffs, and Britain, which had entered Europe’s common market. Canada ended up doubling down on trade with the United States. A bilateral trade agreement, which took effect in 1989, was superseded by NAFTA.

Last year the United States bought three-quarters of Canada’s goods exports. It will remain Canada’s main trading partner, admits François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s trade minister. But, with “the most protectionist government since the 1930s” in Washington, “there has never been a better time to diversify.”

Changes in Canada’s economy make that more urgent. Things look good for the moment: GDP is expected to grow by 3% this year and unemployment is 5.9%, near a ten-year low. But oil and cars, which have sustained growth for more than a decade, face harder times. Mr Trump is using protectionist threats to grab jobs and investment back from Canada and Mexico. Alberta’s oil, which is costly to produce, faces growing competition from gas and renewable energy. The industries of the future probably include food, hydro-electricity and artificial intelligence, but none matches the importance of cars and oil.

Freer trade would help. But Mr Trudeau finds himself chasing deals with big countries like China, which reject labour and environmental add-ons that would make such pacts acceptable to Canadians. He may remain a disappointed suitor.