Our next PM must find a way to break free from the U.S.

Canada needs to decide how best to assert its place in the world. At some point in the last decade or two, Canadian foreign policy became unmoored. For years, experts have called for a review — it’s been two decades since the last one — but we’ve just puttered along. Now, the country has a new prime minister and faces a potential existential threat from Donald Trump and the United States. The global order is shifting faster than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union, roughly a quarter century ago. It’s time for Canada to make some changes. Having a new prime minister, Mark Carney, is as good a kickstart as any.

For decades, Canadian foreign policy was rooted in the values, actual or purported, of democracy and pluralism. It was fundamentally liberal and cautious, and often hemmed in by American interests — even if we sat out the Vietnam and second Iraq wars. We were wedded to extractive industries, because that’s what we have, and resource exports. We were at times welcoming of refugees — Vietnam and Ukraine, for instance, and Syria, sort of — and at other times far less so, like Gaza. We invested in maternal public health and we sang the song of global human rights, though not too loudly if it would upset trade relations. We tried to do a little of everything.

In 2022, Thomas Axworthy, former principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau, asked whether Canada had “turned the page on foreign policy passivity.” We had recently failed in our bid to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council. We’d been shut out of the defence partnership between the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia – AUKUS. Our trade deals with Europe, the U.K., India, were stalled, underperforming or unlikely to come to fruition at all. Peacekeeping was moribund. We played little to no role as a facilitator, convenor, or go-between as we had in the past. We were embarrassed by China and the U.S. alike in the Meng Wanzhou/two Michaels kidnapping affair. 

As if that weren’t enough, our energy projects looking beyond the seas were dead on arrival – perhaps, in the interests of climate policy, for the better. But the hits were adding up. We weren’t going to scale defence capacity or spending. We slept on Arctic defense as other states encircled the territory. We were thoroughly thought of as a foreign policy appendage of the U.S.: where they went, we followed, mouthing platitudes about the international rules-based order.

In recent years, we haven’t turned many pages in our foreign policy, all too comfortable with riding the protective coattails of the global hegemon with whom we share a continent and a trillion dollar trade relationship — at least for now. It came to look a lot like we didn’t have a foreign policy at all, and it looked like we could get away with it, at least in the short run. After all, there seemed to be no serious consequence for floating as we did from one event to the next, never having to confront the difficult questions of who we wanted to be in the world, to what end, and how we’d get there.

Today, the U.S. is no longer a reliable trade or defence partner. It may become one again, but who’s going to trust it? In light of the change, Canada may be awakening to its foreign policy dilemma – and a new way of doing business. We’re questioning whether to proceed with our purchase of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. We’re looking around the world for new trade partners and ways to expand current trade with non-U.S. destinations. 

Carney made his first visit as head of government to the U.K. and France, not the U.S. On his way home, he stopped in Iqaluit to talk about expanding Arctic defence, with the help of Australian-sourced military hardware. Carney also says trade talks with the U.S. won’t proceed until Trump drops his 51st state talk.

Historian John English’s biography of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Just Watch Me, describes how after coming to power, the intellectual and neophyte prime minister came to appreciate the importance of Canada asserting its interests in foreign policy. Soon after, Trudeau visited Mao and recognized Red China, beating U.S. president Richard Nixon to the punch.  

In Policy Magazine, Trudeau Sr.’s longtime advisor Thomas Axworthy notes a longstanding, cross-partisan foreign policy guideline. He quotes former foreign affairs minister John Baird who said, “Foreign policy is about two things: promoting our values and promoting our interests.” That is true enough, but the question is what are those values and interests? We must define them before getting to the nitty gritty of how to design and execute foreign policy goals.

There’s no shortage of ongoing issues to focus our mind, and goals: the devastating and deadly collapse of global aid and development funding, the carnage in Gaza, Russian imperialism in Ukraine, rearmament in Germany, the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the security risks from climate change and the disintegration of the international anti-personnel landmines treaty we helped bring to life in the 1990s and which is called, informally, the Ottawa Treaty.

History, as they say, is back and events have caught up with us. Canada can no longer coast on foreign affairs, should no longer walk behind and in line with the U.S. We need an immediate, thorough review of our foreign policy grounded in deliberation and debate about our values and interests, tied closely to an assessment of what serves our economic and security needs. We might start that work with a commitment to focus on a few core areas: domestic defense, especially in the Arctic; foreign aid and global public health; and broader trade and diplomatic relations that permit us to act as a convenor and which are premised on a break from our default position, marching in lockstep with the U.S..

We must be conscious of the fact that even a realpolitik-based disposition must not ignore the threat of climate change or the moral and strategic necessity of robust foreign aid, but we should nonetheless proceed aggressively to secure our place in the world — with our elbows up.