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Eight Experts Explain Carney’s New National Security Strategy

Will his plan to Trump-proof Canada work?

The last time Canada laid out a national security strategy, in 2004, Facebook had just launched, trade yoked countries closer, and America was a (sometimes prickly) ally. It was post-9/11 and SARS, so the main test was keeping Canada safe from terrorism and other sundry disasters. Twenty-two years later, that world is gone. Social media gives foreign powers new ways to reach into other nations’ political lives, supply chains are tools of coercion, and the United States, in the words of our prime minister, wants “our resources, our water, our land, our country.”

Last Thursday, Canada dropped a new strategy based on the idea of sovereignty. What do we need to build, buy, or give up to keep it? The strategy takes those questions and fashions a game plan. It rallies the military, intelligence agencies, and diplomats around shared goals. It steers budgets and laws. It warns allies and adversaries about what we consider sine qua non. Basically, it’s an everything document.

Does it deliver? Throughout the weekend, we called on experts to tell us. Their responses are below, sometimes edited for clarity.

“History has arrived at the doorstep. We are being prepped to greet it with more than our traditional politeness.” Patrick Lennox Former Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence manager

The Mark Carney government’s new Plan for a Stronger Canada is the first national security strategy in over two decades. It will be followed in short order by an economic security policy, a defence policy, a foreign policy, a public safety policy, and an intelligence policy. These documents are loaded up inside the bureaucracy and will be released rapid-fire over the coming months. That’s a lot of paper to put before Canadians, but then again, there’s a lot of lost time to make up for and ground to clear.

The reason for the coming deluge of policy papers is straightforward at the same time as it is profound. As the prime minister stated in his now infamous Davos speech at the beginning of the year, we are “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The rules-based liberal international order has been radically fractured, and now countries like Canada, who benefited from the system’s relative stability and predictability, its rule-of-law approach to international relations, its open and transparent approach to global trade and commerce, will have to quickly rethink their security strategies in an effort to preserve their now inherently threatened sovereignty.

With the policy papers, the Carney government is moving from the realm of rhetoric to the realm of policy guidance. The idea, it would appear, is to compel a new calculus into the federal bureaucracy, primarily. But also to demonstrate to Canadians that taking the sign out of the window of the rules-based world order will come at real cost. History has arrived at the doorstep. We are being prepped to greet it with more than our traditional politeness. Rather, we are being introduced to the cold rationale of realpolitik—defend yourself, at all costs.

Canada relied for too long on the notion that the United States would always be a benevolent hegemon, a fellow democracy, an ally against the darker forces of world politics. Turns out, the US has become our worst nightmare: an expansionist, kleptocratic, quasi-authoritarian regime with its eyes on our fresh water, critical minerals, oil and gas reserves, our sovereignty.

The crisis is said to reveal the normal. And this crisis has stripped us naked in a snowstorm to reveal the full extent of our vulnerabilities. They start in the realm of national security and expand across the range of capabilities that all sovereign, self-determining nation states must have in order to survive in a dangerous world. Canada’s reliance upon the United States for many of these functions has been allowed to build up over the decades of increased interdependence, to the point where we are now in a position of acute vulnerability.

This will require us to move forward on a new set of assumptions about the world, which are contained and articulated in the Plan. It is a sound plan that sets the tone for what will be a series of similarly reasoned policy papers grounded in a self-preservation logic as old as the international state system itself.

“This is, in essence, a plan for a plan.” Jessica Davis President and principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence, former Canadian national security and intelligence official

The document released last week is not a national security strategy. It is a framework outlining a series of interconnected priorities, plans to build capabilities in eight critical sectors, and five strategic policies that have yet to be released. This is, in essence, a plan for a plan.

At the same time, the framework outlines a vision of national security that is hard realpolitik. It demonstrates a significant departure from traditional Canadian policy in that it is deeply informed by realist international relations theory that sees the global order as one of anarchic competition between states. There are some remnants of the liberal international order in the government’s plan to co-operate multilaterally, but this is very much a “Canada going it alone” document.

Canadians should not be surprised. This is the vision that Prime Minister Carney has laid out in two core foreign policy speeches at both Davos and Strasbourg, where he talked about the “variable geometry” of Canadian engagement with the world. That variable geometry is now clearer than ever: it is about Canada engaging with partners when it is in our strategic interest to do so and when we have something to gain from it. This is most obvious in Canada’s engagement with some non-traditional partners, including authoritarian regimes like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Türkiye. Those interests will increasingly be defined not by fuzzy Canadian values but rather by hard national security interests.

Essentially, this framework operationalizes a realist interpretation of the world. Unfortunately for Canada, liberalism and institutions, especially multilateral ones, remain important, particularly for avoiding the classic security dilemma that the realist interpretation of the world predicts. These institutions are critical for maintaining trust between states even as the global context changes, hegemons fall (or withdraw), and great-power competition escalates.

Right now, the framework reads as something of a general direction but also a grab-bag of important (and perhaps less important) issues. The real proof of whether this evolves into a true plan will be in the five forthcoming strategies, where we should expect coherent actions and measurable outcomes so Canadians can judge for themselves whether the government is delivering on its promises. Because without action, policies and frameworks are just words on paper.

“This message will meet resistance, above all from those who cannot accept Canada’s relations with the US have been permanently altered.” Wesley Wark National security expert, contributing writer for The Walrus

A government can afford to be bold and ambitious when it has a majority in Parliament and popular support across the country. It can afford to be bold and ambitious when it knows its own mind and is certain of its convictions. The national security framework strategy released on October 29 is a product of this political setting, this moment, and the confidence and........

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