Is 'friend-shoring' the solution to global supply chain woes?

Nada Hayek/The Globe and Mail During a much-watched speech in Washington this past October, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland touted a new post-globalist way of thinking about trade. "Democracies must make a conscious effort to build our supply chains through each other's economies," she said. She talked a lot about her government's twinned foreign policy preoccupations—the war in Ukraine and China's "increasingly aggressive wolf diplomacy"—and worked in a shout-out to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is credited with coining a buzzy term for this desired shift in global trade relations: friend-shoring. The idea, which has its critics, is that Western…