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Canada’s Spies Have a Trump Problem

We’ve long relied on US intelligence to spot threats. Now that dependence is a threat of its own

If you were ever the recipient of messages stamped “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY,” you belonged to the ultimate secret club.

The classification was eventually shortened to “Five Eyes (FVEY).” It stands for the world’s most powerful intelligence partnership, linking Canada with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. In the natural world, praying mantises and honeybees can have five eyes, but in the world of global power politics, FVEY is a unique species and has no rivals. It has existed for seventy-plus years but is now being tested and weakened from within by the Donald Trump administration.

Canada has benefitted enormously from being one of the eyes. The FVEY is critical to our ability to anticipate and respond to threats—from terrorist plots to espionage and foreign interference. In 2025, for example, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, joined intelligence services from allied countries in warning about a Chinese state-linked cyber campaign targeting telecommunications networks around the world. As a smaller player within the group, we are dependent on the capabilities of the biggest (by far) of the powers, the US. Membership has helped Canada devote the bulk of its intelligence resources to domestic security. We didn’t need, for example, a foreign intelligence service when we could rely on reporting from MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency.

FVEY grew out of the wartime fight to crack Nazi communications, with British and American codebreakers working side by side. The partnership was formalized in 1946, then widened to include Canada three years later after Ottawa signed an intelligence-sharing agreement with Washington. Australia and New Zealand joined in 1956, producing the current structure. FVEY initially focused on signals intelligence, or SIGINT: the interception and analysis of adversaries’ phone calls, radio transmissions, emails, and satellite communications. Its remit has since expanded considerably, with the five countries co-operating across virtually every domain of national security, constituting a dense web of partnerships between agencies.

Canada’s involvement in the Five Eyes has weathered many storms, including disputes over US McCarthyite practices, which ensnared Canadians such as diplomat E. H. Norman, and bouts of antagonism between Canadian prime ministers and US presidents. The depths of Diefenbaker–Kennedy and Pearson–LBJ friction were almost as bad as Trudeau–Trump or Carney–Trump. Intelligence sharing outlasted Canada’s refusal to join the Vietnam war as a combatant in the 1960s and, more recently, the Iraq war in 2003. Canadian distrust, even disgust, over US practices after 9/11 in its global war on terrorism didn’t fundamentally shake it. Major spy betrayals, such as the case of Canadian Jeffrey Delisle, who provided Russian intelligence with FVEY (mostly US) secrets, were patched over.

Five Eyes officials even joined together in February 2022 in an unprecedented, collective, last-ditch effort to warn Russia against launching any war on Ukraine.

But the foundations of the partnership are now being threatened in unprecedented ways by internal disruptions to the US intelligence community and by the country’s antagonistic policies toward allies, including those directed at Canada.

The impacts are mostly sub rosa and never the subject of official confirmation from any of the Five Eyes partners. On the one occasion when a Trump administration official, Peter Navarro, was reported to have threatened to use expulsion from FVEY as a lever against Canada, there was some immediate back-pedalling. Navarro, a senior counsellor on trade in the White House, a man close to Trump, known for his animus against Canada, denied he had ever suggested any such thing, calling it “crazy stuff” and elaborating that “we would never jeopardize our national security . . . with allies like Canada.” Even right-wing influencer Steve Bannon weighed in with a comment about Canada being the US’s “best ally.”

Senior Canadian spy chiefs are unequivocal about the ongoing strength of the Canada–US intelligence partnership. CSIS Director Dan Rogers told the CBC in an interview earlier this year that the relationship is “excellent and productive” and added that the two countries still have a “tremendous amount of common interest” in facing key national security threats, including espionage, cyberattacks, and terrorism.

The sentiment is echoed across the other members of the Five Eyes.

The UK is the........

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