With the release of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor held hostage by communist China, an expert panel says Canada must now look at widening its strategic partnerships, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, to deal with what it calls Beijing’s coercive diplomacy. The group of international affairs experts came together in an Oct. 6 webinar to discuss the “hostage diplomacy, economic coercion, and overt threats” employed by Beijing and to outline strategies Canada and like-minded nations can collaborate on to address the regime’s antagonism. “We need to broaden our partnerships. We need to be more multilateral in our engagements,” said Stephen Nagy, senior associate professor in international studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, at the event hosted by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “When economic coercion does happen, or other forms of coercion, … we can rely on those partners and those economic networks and the strategic partnerships to put collective …