Carney’s ‘Maple MAGA’ moment sends the wrong message on defense

On May 28, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the Economic Club of New York and told the crowd that “Canada Strong will help make America great again.” 

It was meant as an olive branch, dressed up in Trump’s own slogan — rhetorical jujitsu that flatters a counterpart while changing nothing real. Commentators on both sides of the border quickly dubbed it Canada’s “Maple MAGA” moment, and the line got the attention it was built for.

What got less attention is what Ottawa had announced the day before. On May 27, the Carney government named Sweden’s Saab the preferred supplier for Canada’s new Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, passing over the American alternative most analysts had assumed was the safer bet.

Airborne Early Warning and Control is not peripheral. Its value depends almost entirely on how well it talks to everything around it, and NORAD’s everything is overwhelmingly American. Choosing a system whose NORAD integration will now have to be proven rather than assumed, the day before flattering Washington in a speech about strategic partnership, is not subtlety. It is two strategies operating out of the same prime minister’s office. 

This would have been a one-off embarrassment if it had happened in isolation. But it had not. Ten days earlier, on May 18, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of Defense for policy, had announced the U.S. was “pausing” the Permanent Joint Board on Defense — the oldest continuous defense consultation mechanism between the U.S. and Canada, dating back to 1940 — to “reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.” 

Colby was blunt about why: Canadian........

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