Susan Sontag observed that being a spectator of calamity elsewhere is a defining modern experience. Her point in Regarding the Pain of Others was that images can command attention, but attention alone does not amount to understanding or responsibility.

Climate disasters have immediate triggers and local causes. Yet floods, landslides, droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat increasingly occur within a climate system destabilized by continued fossil-fuel extraction and combustion. Responsible witnessing therefore requires more than circulating images or issuing condolences. It requires support for emergency relief, locally led recovery, climate adaptation, loss-and-damage finance, and faster emissions reduction.

For Canada, this raises a difficult but necessary policy question.

Are Canadian climate policies primarily intended to make ongoing oil-and-gas production less emissions-intensive? Or are they designed to build an energy system that can genuinely reduce dependence on fossil fuels—through clean electricity, renewables, storage, grid interconnections, energy efficiency, low-carbon transportation, and a fair transition for workers and communities?

The answer cannot be indifferent to the people most exposed to climate risk. Nepal should be represented not merely as a recipient of international assistance, but as a meaningful participant in shaping global climate policy, alongside the Alliance of Small Island States, least-developed countries, Indigenous peoples, and other climate-vulnerable communities.

Canada should apply the same principle domestically. Northern and remote First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities are already experiencing the consequences of climate disruption through wildfire evacuations, smoke, damaged infrastructure, housing pressures, and displacement from land and cultural networks. They must be recognized as rights-holders and full partners in decisions on emergency preparedness, resilient infrastructure, energy, adaptation, and national climate policy.

The practical challenge is to replace episodic compassion with durable public policy. Canada should re-examine policies that sustain long-term fossil-fuel dependence while protecting and accelerating renewable-energy development, clean-electricity generation, storage, and interprovincial grid connections. It should support workers and fossil-fuel-dependent regions through a fair transition, rather than leaving the costs of change to communities and individuals. It should invest in resilient housing, transportation, communications, and emergency capacity in northern and remote communities. It should expand accessible climate finance, adaptation support, and loss-and-damage assistance for vulnerable countries. Above all, it should ensure that the countries and communities most affected by climate disruption have a meaningful role in making the decisions that will govern their futures.

Sontag wrote that “compassion is an unstable emotion.” Climate leadership must therefore be measured not by how strongly we react to devastating images, but by whether we build policies capable of reducing the likelihood and unequal human cost of the next catastrophe.

On July 17, National Defence quietly announced the end of Canadian participation in peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, Cyprus, South Sudan, the Sinai, and the DRC — 50 to 60 personnel reassigned to “higher-impact” work closer to home. No drama, no press conference. Just a quiet funeral for what remained of Canada’s identity as a peace-minded middle power.

The decline is staggering. In the early 1990s, Canada was the largest contributor to UN peacekeeping, with over 3,300 personnel deployed. By 2019, that was down to roughly 150. Today, it’s in the low dozens.

The official line — scarce resources, risky missions, NATO and NORAD priorities — doesn’t hold up under a government that just committed over $80 billion to defence and hit NATO’s 2% target. This isn’t about money. It’s about strategic vision, or the lack of one.

Our military brass have modelled defence priorities on U.S. doctrine for two decades: combat over peacekeeping, deterrence over diplomacy. Stephen Harper and then,CDS Rick Hillier began gutting our peacekeeping capacity, presiding instead over a failed mission in Afghanistan. If that wasn’t proof enough, 2026 offered more: 900 U.S. strikes on Iran in twelve hours achieved tactical success and strategic failure; Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting war of attrition has no political end-state in sight. Over-reliance on air power, weak allied consensus-building, and a mercurial White House produced the miscalculation. Canada’s brass seem determined to emulate it anyway.

We used to understand something the Americans don’t: security comes as much from containing conflict, protecting civilians, and addressing root causes — inequality, poverty, weak governance as from firepower. A massive defence buildup that ignores human security isn’t strategy. It’s incoherence. If Canada can afford F-35s and submarines, it can afford peacekeepers and for a generation looking for meaningful careers, keeping the peace is a real one.

War itself has changed too. The UN already uses drones for round-the-clock monitoring in the DRC, AI for early warning, satellite imagery for ceasefire verification. Canada’s aerospace and AI sectors could supply the technology and doctrine to modernize peacekeeping into a proactive, tech-enabled asset rather than walking away from the field entirely.

This isn’t NATO versus the UN. It’s a choice between copying a failed American playbook and reclaiming a role that once made Canada respected. Parliament should be debating this. Right now, it isn’t.

That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. Climate change is no longer a distant environmental concern. It has become an economic and political reality that reaches into nearly every Canadian household -in wildfire smoke, evacuation orders, dangerous heat, rising insurance premiums, overcrowded emergency rooms, and growing public costs.

This summer has underscored the point once again. Wildfires swept across Northwestern Ontario, the Prairies, and British Columbia. Heat alerts blanketed much of the country. Floods erased rural roads .Entire communities, many of them Indigenous, were forced to evacuate. At the very moment Canadians were counting the costs, Canada’s largest oil companies were reporting another round of substantial profits.

The contrast should give us pause.

In the second quarter of 2026, Cenovus reported profits of $2.87 billion, while Imperial Oil earned $2.19 billion. Canadian Natural Resources posted adjusted net earnings of $2.45 billion in the first quarter, and Suncor has continued its own strong financial performance. Together, Canada’s largest producers are generating roughly $20–30 billion in annual profits.

Meanwhile, the costs of climate-related disasters continue to mount. Insured losses from wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather this spring and summer are already estimated in the billions of dollars. Once uninsured losses, emergency response, infrastructure repair, business interruption, and lost productivity are included, the total economic burden will be far higher.

Behind those numbers are human lives. Families have lost homes. Communities have been uprooted. Hospitals have struggled through prolonged heat events. Smoke has affected the health of millions of Canadians. The damage is measured not only in dollars but in diminished quality of life and, in too many cases, lives cut short.

Of course, no single wildfire, flood or drought can be attributed to climate change alone. Forest management,industrial agriculture practices . weather patterns, and other factors all play a role. But the overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that a warming climate is making fires and extreme weather more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. That reality can no longer be treated as background context. It is part of Canada’s contemporary economic equation.

Yet governments continue to subsidize the very industry whose products contribute significantly to that warming. Ottawa provided at least $10.2 billion in fossil-fuel subsidies and public financing during 2025. Since 2020, federal support has exceeded $85 billion, with billions more committed this year.

The result is a troubling imbalance. Profits remain largely private. Increasingly, the costs are borne by everyone else.

Climate change has become a massive transfer of financial risk from corporations to taxpayers, from shareholders to communities, from today’s profits to tomorrow’s repair bills.

Politics has not yet caught up. The Natural Resources minister touts the fossil fuel expansion. The federal government retreats from climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Why not give consideration give to a different approach : a targeted levy on excess fossil-fuel profits dedicated exclusively to climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Revenues could strengthen emergency response, rebuild damaged communities, improve heat resilience, support Indigenous communities facing repeated evacuations, and assist workers and regions.Perhaps the new funds could even be dedicated to support Renewable energy projects seeing as governments and corporations have substantially reduced their investments .

This is not about punishing success or denying the continuing importance of energy to the Canadian economy. It is about applying a principle we already recognize elsewhere: those who profit from activities that impose significant public costs should contribute to addressing those costs.

The polluter-pays principle should not stop at the gates of the fossil-fuel industry.

Mother Nature is presenting Canada with an ever-larger invoice. The real political question is not whether the bill exists. It does. The question is who should pay it.

Continuing to ask ordinary taxpayers to shoulder the burden is neither economically sound nor morally defensible.

That decision helped establish Canada’s reputation as a country committed to non-proliferation and restraint. But over time, that tradition has weakened. Today Canada speaks firmly against adversaries, grows cautious with allies, and too often falls silent when principle would require risk.

Consider NATO. In 1998, Parliament did not simply accept the government’s position on the Alliance’s Strategic Concept. It held hearings across the country, listening to Canadians, experts, and international voices. The result was a serious democratic examination of nuclear dependence, and Parliament pressed NATO to reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War world.

That kind of scrutiny has faded. Canada remains outside the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and hovers at the margins of disarmament diplomacy. It supports the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but often in ways that preserve the system rather than challenge its contradictions. Canada speaks as if the nuclear order is stable, even as norms weaken and arsenals grow.

Which brings us to today. The United States and Saudi Arabia have reached a civil nuclear agreement that would allow Saudi Arabia to build reactors using American technology and, according to reporting, to enrich uranium as well. That is exactly the kind of capability that raises proliferation concerns. At the same time, Washington has used military force against Iran’s nuclear program, reinforcing a message that restraint is demanded of some while relaxed for others when strategic interests intervene.

Canada has said almost nothing. That silence is not neutrality. If enrichment is too dangerous for Iran, it is too dangerous for Saudi Arabia. If latent weapons capacity is unacceptable in one context, it cannot be tolerated in another simply because the recipient is a partner.

Canada also knows from experience how quickly peaceful nuclear cooperation can become strategically dangerous. After India’s 1974 nuclear test, which relied in part on plutonium from Canadian-supplied technology, Canada strengthened its safeguards and export controls. That episode remains a warning: intent can change, safeguards can erode, and today’s partner can become tomorrow’s proliferator.

A serious Canadian response would begin with one simple standard: civilian nuclear cooperation must be judged by the same rules everywhere. That means strong safeguards, intrusive verification, and full transparency. It also means Canada should launch a new parliamentary inquiry into nuclear policy, because the world has changed. Nuclear rivalry is back, arms control is fraying, and civilian nuclear deals are again becoming vehicles for strategic ambiguity.

Canada does not need to abandon its alliances to recover its voice. It needs to recover its judgment. The country that once chose not to become a nuclear weapons state should not now stand silent while others normalize nuclear pathways under the banner of peaceful use. Parliament should help it reclaim that standard.

Based on an article that appeared in the Toronto Star last week

Last week marked the 28th anniversary of the International Criminal Court.

It should’ve be a moment to celebrate one of the world’s most important institutions for holding war criminals accountable. Instead, the United States has launched an unprecedented campaign to weaken and intimidate the Court.

Canada cannot remain on the sidelines.

We helped create the ICC. Canadian diplomat Philippe Kirsch chaired the negotiations that produced the Rome Statute, and Canada was the first country to incorporate its mandate into domestic law. Defending the Court is not simply good foreign policy, it is part of our national legacy.

When judges are sanctioned for doing their jobs and international justice is treated as optional, every victim of war crimes and every defender of the rule of law has reason for concern.

Together with Allan Rock, I argue that Canada must move beyond statements of support and take concrete action to defend the Court, protect Canadian Judge Kimberly Prost, and uphold the rules-based international order

I hope you’ll read and share our article.

Canada,for,its part has not handled the boreal with the seriousness it deserves. Our governments have too often approached it as a resource base to be used, not a climate system to be defended. That mindset has left us trailing the science, underestimating the risks, and failing to prepare for a hotter, drier, more fire-prone future.

A central failure has been the persistent sidelining of Indigenous knowledge and practice. Indigenous peoples have understood the boreal as a living landscape for generations. Their science, stewardship, and fire practices are not ornamental additions to public policy. They are foundational to it. Yet too often they have been treated as consultative afterthoughts instead of partners and leaders in boreal management. That is not just a failure in being a good steward ,it is a practical one.

The same can be said of the public institutions responsible for forest monitoring, research, and response. Governments have cut budgets, weakened capacity, and too often behaved as though climate risk could be managed on the cheap. At the same time, Canada has continued to push fossil fuel expansion while moving too slowly and too inconsistently on renewables, electrification, and emissions reduction. That is the contradiction at the heart of our climate policy: we keep adding to the conditions that intensify heat, drought, and fire while acting surprised when Mother Nature responds.

And this is not just a Canadian problem. It is a North American one. Smoke does not respect borders. Neither do heat, drought, or the conditions that make forests more vulnerable to fire. That is why border politics are such a misconceived response to a continental climate reality. It is always easier to assign blame than to build serious cooperation. But blame will not clear the air.

What is needed is a more honest approach from both countries. Canada needs to restore public capacity, put Indigenous knowledge at the center of boreal stewardship, and align land-use and energy policy with climate reality. The United States should stop treating Canadian smoke as a tariff opportunity and start treating it as a shared environmental and security problem. If Washington and Ottawa want to reduce the costs of this crisis, they should invest in prevention, resilience, and cooperation, not punishment.

The boreal is not a border issue. It is a climate issue. And until both governments start governing it that way, the smoke will keep coming, the excuses will keep thinning, and the politics will keep getting worse.

The Ankara summit came and went with the usual arguments about burden-sharing and leadership. But a more consequential issue was largely sidelined: energy.

Ukraine has exposed a real vulnerability in Russia’s war economy. Strikes on refining capacity and existing sanctions have created pressure—but not enough. Russia is still earning the revenue it needs to sustain the war.

What was missing in Ankara was urgency—especially from the United States. With the notable exception of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, there has been little sustained American push to treat energy as a central front in weakening Russia.

NATO could have acted: tighter enforcement on sanctions evasion, a faster phase-out of Russian LNG, and coordinated efforts to block Russia’s ability to rebuild its refining sector. Canada was well positioned to press this case.

Instead, the alliance settled for incrementalism. Unity was preserved, but a key opportunity to more seriously constrain Russia’s war effort was left on the table.

An Anishinaabe elder in Manitoba once told me, “When you mess with Mother Nature, she’ll get even.”

Those words came back to me this Canada Day as I stood at our apartment window watching sheets of rain, fierce winds, and rolling thunderstorms batter the trees along the river. The storm was powerful enough to cancel the afternoon and evening celebrations that normally fill the capital with music, performances, and a reminder of the values we like to think define us as Canadians.

What unfolded outside my window was a small reflection of a much larger story.

Across Canada and around the world, this same day brought record-breaking heat, raging wildfires, mass evacuations, water shortages, catastrophic flooding, and mounting evidence of agricultural collapse in parts of the world least responsible for fossil fuel emissions. These are no longer once-in-a-generation disasters. They are becoming the new pattern, and each year the pattern grows more dangerous.

Perhaps this is exactly what that elder meant. Through a succession of misguided political choices, we keep provoking Mother Nature and she responds with increasing force.

The timing made one announcement especially jarring. On the eve of Canada Day, the Prime Minister acknowledged that Canada will not meet its emissions commitments, citing affordability and threats to national unity. That may be politically convenient, but it is economics wrapped in doublespeak.

Consider the proposed pipeline championed by Alberta’s premier. It is presented as nation-building, yet its underlying assumptions deserve far more scrutiny. Peter Nicholson, the former Deputy Minister for Policy in the Privy Council Office, has circulated a paper asking the obvious question: where will the additional oil and gas actually come from? Expanding the oil sands enough to fill such a pipeline would require staggering investments that, so far, no major fossil fuel company has shown any willingness to make. A project promoted today as a nation-building triumph could easily become tomorrow’s stranded asset.

The Prime Minister also argued that moving away from fossil fuels would raise costs for consumers. But what is already driving costs higher?

Donald Trump’s trade war with Iran has contributed to volatility in global energy markets—a conflict Mark Carney himself described as “worth doing,” a remark that received remarkably little attention. More significant still are the soaring costs of climate disasters themselves. Every wildfire, flood, evacuation, and reconstruction effort places another burden on taxpayers. Insurance premiums climb. Housing becomes scarcer and more expensive. Public budgets strain under the weight of repeated emergencies.

How many more Fort McMurrays, Jaspers, and Lyttons must burn before we recognize that the real economic risk lies in clinging to fossil fuels?

The alternative is hardly speculative. Organizations such as the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada have repeatedly shown the economic potential of renewable energy in Alberta. Wind and solar are now among the least expensive sources of new electricity generation. Before recent policy reversals, Alberta accounted for nearly three-quarters of all renewable energy projects built in Canada. Since 2019, those projects attracted almost $5 billion in investment and created thousands of jobs.

Then the momentum stalled.

According to the Business Renewables Centre-Canada, corporate investment in Alberta renewables has collapsed by 99 percent compared with 2023. Investors have pointed to government-created regulatory uncertainty, including the 2023 moratorium on renewable development and new financial burdens such as solar panel recycling fees.

This is no longer simply an argument about energy policy.

It is a choice between evidence and ideology. Between preparing for the future and defending the past.

Perhaps that Anishinaabe elder understood something we’ve been reluctant to admit. Mother Nature always has the last word.

Let’s hope that by next Canada Day we’ve begun at last, to make peace with Mother Nature instead of daring her to get even.

Prime Minister Mark Carney would have been wise to heed that principle before telling CNN that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran was justified by its outcome. That is a contestable judgment to defend when no final agreement had yet been reached and the long-term consequences remained unknown.

What do we know?

The war has left thousands dead or wounded, beginning with the still-unexplained strike on a girls’ school that killed 120 civilians. Iran has suffered an estimated $270 billion in damage, with factories, ports, bridges, power plants, hospitals, schools and homes destroyed. Reconstruction will take years.

The costs have also been enormous for the United States. Pentagon figures place spending at roughly $29 billion since late February, while independent estimates project that replenishing weapons stocks, repairing damage and caring for injured service members could ultimately push the bill toward $1 trillion.

These losses are particularly sobering because negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were already underway before military action began. Rather than producing regime change, the conflict appears to have strengthened hardline elements in Tehran while increasing Iran’s leverage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Contrary to what Carney said were positives its now recognized even by Republican politicians that the deal been a major set back for the USA weakening its standing in the Middle East and causing problems in the global economy .

To call this a “game changer” risks normalizing war as a preferred instrument of diplomacy. Declaring such devastation “worth it” before diplomacy had run its course sends the wrong message about Canada’s commitment to international law and peaceful conflict resolution.

Canada once earned respect for preventing conflict, protecting civilians and supporting negotiated settlements. That tradition now risks giving way to a transactional approach in which success is measured simply by whether a deal emerges after the bombs stop falling.

Carney was not alone. G7 leaders largely endorsed President Trump’s narrative. Yet Canada could have taken a different path. Our Prime Minister might simply have welcomed the ceasefire while insisting that negotiations, not military force must produce a durable settlement and that violations of international law cannot be ignored.

That would have been genuine leadership.

A year into this government, Canadians still have no comprehensive foreign policy or defence strategy before Parliament explaining how our security and sovereignty will be protected. Instead, we hear improvised comments in international interviews.

Norway offers a different example. Its government has publicly set out a strategy for promoting peace and conflict resolution in a dangerous world.

Canada would do well to study that example before making war the measure of successful diplomacy.

There are times when you feel the ground shift beneath you. That was my reaction watching Louise Arbour installed as Canada’s 31st Governor General.

What made it remarkable wasn’t the pageantry or the 21-gun salute. It was the passage itself: from a soft-spoken, forceful Inuit woman to a convent-bred Montrealer who has spent decades on the front lines of history. Arbour prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, helped give birth to the International Criminal Court, investigated atrocities in Darfur, chaired an UN global summits on refugee rights, and exposed sexual abuse in our armed forces. Every chapter of her career is a marker of achievement, integrity, and distinction.

A powerhouse Canadian now brings that immense depth of experience into the governance of our country at precisely the moment we need it most. She is uniquely positioned to counsel ministers, activate civil society on human rights, and bring instant credibility to the table with foreign governments.

Canada’s comfortable assumptions about Peace, Order, and Good Government are under serious strain. The long-held belief that sharing a continent with the United States was safe has vanished. The recent election was fought entirely on who could best meet the Trump challenge. Voters chose Mark Carney, whose government has pursued a muscular economic agenda paid for by deep cuts to social programs, culture, diplomacy, and development. These are not mere line items. They are the essential soft-power tools of our foreign policy, and their erosion matters.

Governor General Arbour addressed this directly, invoking Kofi Annan’s three pillars: no security without development, no development without security, and neither without human rights. Who better to hold that standard? She has the unique power to convene, to listen, and to give voice. She can remind us of Canada’s legacy on the UN Human Rights conventions, the Ottawa Treaty, and the Montreal Protocol, while pushing for vital new frameworks on climate, AI, and autonomous weapons. None of these challenges can be solved by hard-power thinking alone.

Her closing words to young Canadians who have lost faith deserve to be heard:

“Together, we can harness our extraordinary resources, the breadth of our talent, our collective know-how and our boundless imagination. The world is watching us; not to copy everything we do, but to draw inspiration from a country striving to embrace the future with greater security, prosperity and dignity for all.”

On Monday morning, for a moment, it felt possible.

( A revised version of a Toronto Star Saturday Op Ed )

Security cannot be measured only in ships, missiles, drones and fighter aircraft. It must also be measured in wars prevented, civilians protected, famine averted and peace processes sustained.

That is why Canada needs a renewed human security foreign policy alongside military renewal.

Human security begins with a simple idea: the safety of states depends on the safety of people. Famine, mass displacement, sexual violence, climate instability and attacks on civilians are not secondary humanitarian concerns — they are central security issues.

Sudan demonstrates the cost of forgetting this lesson. The country’s devastating civil war has produced famine, atrocities and mass displacement while outside powers fuel the conflict through money, arms and proxy interests. It is a stark reminder of what happens when the international community abandons prevention and diplomacy.

Canada once helped lead on these issues through the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by the United Nations in 2005. Its principle was clear: sovereignty carries responsibilities, and when populations face genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity, the international community has a duty to respond through humanitarian, diplomatic and peaceful means.

Sudan is exactly the kind of crisis this framework was designed to address.

Canada cannot end the conflict alone, nor replace African leadership. But it can help build and support an African-led, Sudanese-owned peace effort. That means appointing a senior envoy, making Sudan a diplomatic priority at the United Nations, supporting women mediators and civil society, pressing for humanitarian access, and demanding accountability for atrocities.

It also means ensuring consistency at home by tightening loopholes in Canada’s arms export system.

Canada does not need to choose between defence and peace. But defence spending without a human security purpose will leave Canada less influential, less principled and ultimately less secure.

Sudan is where Canada can show that the Responsibility to Protect still has meaning.

When China’s ambassador warned Canadian parliamentarians away from Taiwan and called our naval transits “harassment,” Ottawa should have done the obvious: called him in. Made clear that Canadian MPs choose their own travel. That international waters belong to everyone, including Canadian destroyers. That sovereignty isn’t negotiable in backroom conversations.

Instead: pragmatism. Mountains of it. Principle? Harder to locate.

There’s an old line about diplomats, that they’re sent abroad to lie for their country. Harsh, maybe. But useful. An ambassador explains his government’s position; he does not dictate Canada’s. Not if Canada remembers what it is.

We’ve seen this before. With China, Ottawa softens language on forced labour, Taiwan, pressure tactics—all in service of some imagined reset. With India, we chase trade and nuclear deals while CSIS identifies Indian interference and the Nijjar case rots unresolved. With the UAE? Silence. Emirati money fuels Sudanese atrocities. Human rights groups document it. Media investigates. Canada says nothing.

Then Washington arrives. Trump’s people paused the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (that body Mackenzie King and FDR created in 1940) claiming we haven’t made “credible progress” on defence spending. It’s not really about spending. It’s about hemispheric alignment. About fitting into an American frame. The Prime Minister should take this seriously.

Managing great powers is necessary. We need Chinese markets. Indian partnerships. Gulf capital. American defence cooperation. That’s real. That’s unavoidable.

But there’s a difference. The difference between managing relationships and surrendering to pressure in the dark.

Sovereignty lives in small moments. When an ambassador oversteps and you push back. When an ally bullies and you say no. When a trading partner interferes and you name it. When a friendly autocracy fuels atrocities and expects your silence, and you refuse to provide it.

If “principled pragmatism” means engagement without illusion-honest dealing with eyes open, it’s defensible. If it means lowering your voice every time a deal hangs in the balance, that’s not principle. That’s something else.

Chong’s visit was theatre. Yes.

But the government’s response, the careful nothing, that’s the more revealing performance. It answers a question Canada should be asking itself.

Are we becoming Canada the prudent? Or Canada the supine?

At first hearing, the language may appear practical. It suggests Canada is preparing for a more dangerous and fragmented world by strengthening supply chains, energy security, critical minerals, defence production, Arctic surveillance, and economic resilience.

Few Canadians would object to that.

But the phrase is also strategically ambiguous . Different audiences can hear different things in it.

Fortress North America” may sound like a plan to strengthen national resilience and reduce dependence on unreliable global The same language however may be understood as openness to deeper continental integration in areas such as defence production, missile defence, cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, Arctic surveillance, and NORAD modernization.

Geography alone makes continental cooperation unavoidable. NORAD has served both countries well for decades. The Arctic is becoming more strategically exposed. Missile and drone threats are real.

The issue is not whether Canada should cooperate with the United States. Our economies, intelligence systems, defence industries, and military operations have long been intertwined. The real question is whether emerging forms of integration particularly digital and technological ones could gradually shift practical decision-making power away from Canadian institutions without Canadians fully recognizing the implications.

In the modern world, sovereignty is no longer exercised only through borders, flags, or military deployments. Increasingly, it depends on who controls the systems through which information flows, decisions are made, and operations are conducted.

Modern defence architecture now relies heavily on cloud computing, integrated command systems, satellite networks, artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, and real-time data sharing. These systems create enormous operational advantages, but they also create new forms of dependency.

The federal government itself has acknowledged that data managed by companies operating under foreign legal authority would be subject to foreign laws even when physically stored in Canada. National Defence has also acknowledged using American cloud-service providers for important operational functions, including readiness, planning, coordination, and situational awareness.

It underscores the need for clarity about where continental integration may be heading next.

These questions become even more pressing given the increasingly unpredictable character of American politics itself.

For decades, Canadian governments could reasonably assume that deeper continental integration carried relatively low political risk because the United States remained broadly committed to stable alliances, open trade, and predictable rules-based cooperation.

That assumption no longer applies

We are see sharp swings in American policy, growing protectionism, repeated trade disputes with allies, and at times openly coercive rhetoric directed even toward close partners, including Canada.

In that environment, Canada should think carefully before embedding too much of its defence, digital infrastructure, Arctic surveillance, or critical supply chains inside systems over which it may ultimately exercise limited independent control.

Prudent countries do not concentrate every strategic dependency in a single relationship, even an important one.

That is particularly true in the Arctic, where much of any future continental defence architecture would likely be concentrated: radar systems, communications infrastructure, ports, airfields, sensors, satellites, and critical mineral corridors.

Canadians and especially Indigenous governments and northern communities deserve to know whether these developments are being designed primarily around Canadian priorities or broader American homeland-security objectives.

Canada should also be exploring broader partnerships with other democratic allies with Arctic interests and technological capacity, rather than assuming future northern security arrangements must evolve almost entirely within a U.S.-centred strategy.

If “Fortress North America” is evolving into a major framework for economic, digital, and defence policy, the government should explain clearly what that means in practice. What commitments are being considered? What role would American firms and technologies play? What safeguards would protect Canadian legal authority, operational independence, and democratic oversight?

Parliament should debate these issues openly. Northern and Indigenous communities should be consulted early, not after infrastructure decisions are effectively locked in.

The greatest risk here is probably not a loss of sovereignty through some single formal agreement. Democracies rarely change that way. The larger risk is gradual drift: a steady expansion of integrated systems and shared infrastructures that slowly narrow Canada’s room for independent decision-making without any clear public conversation about where the country is headed.

Canadians deserve that conversation now.

Last week in Santa Marta, Colombia, more than fifty countries gathered for the first international conference focused on phasing out fossil fuels. It was exactly the kind of coalition Canada once helped lead through the Ottawa Process to ban anti-personnel landmines: middle powers, civil society, scientists, Indigenous nations, and international institutions working around great-power blockage.

Yet Canada sent no minister, no MP, and no senator.

At the same time, Ottawa was confirming new fossil fuel subsidies and leaving open the use of federal public money for a major Alberta-to-Pacific bitumen pipeline.

Orwell used “doublethink” to describe the capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and accept both. Canada now risks doing exactly that on climate policy.

We tell the world we support the energy transition, while subsidizing the opposite at home. We praise middle-power diplomacy, while absenting ourselves from the rooms where it is being practised. We speak of Indigenous economic agency, while using Indigenous financing tools as political cover for fossil fuel infrastructure.

This is not strategy. It is climate doublethink.

Canada’s international standing is not inherited. It must be re-earned by showing up, convening others, and matching words with budgets.

It comes at the right time. The chaos in the delivery of oil products from the Gulf states has exposed the vulnerability of the existing energy supply system and underscored the urgency of shifting to renewables.

Canada was at Santa Marta, but conspicuously in a low-key role. Ottawa sent negotiators but no minister, despite being the largest oil and gas producer in the room, with the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia absent altogether.

At almost the same moment the conference opened, Canada’s energy minister approved the extension of a $10-billion pipeline project.

Read that choice alongside this one: Canada’s International Climate Finance Commitment, our $5.3-billion pledge to help developing countries face a crisis they did not cause drops from $846 million in 2025–26 to zero the following year.

These are not separate stories. They are one. The empty ministerial chair in Santa Marta, the pipeline approval in Ottawa, and the vanishing line in the Estimates reflect the same decision, taken three times.

Santa Marta is a quintessential Canadian kind of gathering: a coalition of the willing, driven by middle and smaller powers that have concluded waiting for consensus is a form of surrender. It echoes the Ottawa Process on landmines, the Oslo Process on cluster munitions, and the Humanitarian Initiative on nuclear weapons.

These are the venues where Canada once did its most consequential work not because we had the heft of a great power, but because we had the diplomatic habit of showing up early, convening others, and funding the scaffolding that turned declarations into instruments. That tradition now belongs to Colombia, the Netherlands, and Vanuatu. We are observers at a process we should have helped design.

The absence of a minister is not an oversight. It is the logical outcome of a budget that has already made the choice. You cannot credibly claim leadership in Santa Marta while zeroing out the climate finance that gave Global South partners a reason to take Canada seriously. You cannot invoke the Pearsonian tradition while driving official development assistance to 0.17 per cent of GNI ,its lowest level since 1964, a $2.7-billion cut over four years.

Without money, diplomacy has no instrument. Without diplomacy, money has no direction. Remove both in the same fiscal cycle, and the delegation list writes itself: negotiators, not ministers. There is nothing for a minister to announce.

Canadian foreign policy has long rested on three legs: a credible development contribution, active middle-power diplomacy in rules-making coalitions, and a defence posture that takes alliances seriously without pretending to great-power reach. The last leg is being reinforced. The first two are being dismantled.

What is replacing them is narrower and more transactional: a foreign policy organized around trade, energy exports, military procurement. Climate, development, human rights, and multilateral convening, the files on which Canada once punched above its weight are now treated as discretionary. The first to be cut when budgets tighten. Gas and guns have moved to the centre stage of our economic strategy .

This is not simply a shift in priorities. It is a redefinition of the country’s role, carried out not through a white paper but line by line, approval by approval, absence by absence.

Meanwhile, the Global South is organizing on climate loss and damage, on fossil fuel transition, on the ICJ advisory opinion that frames climate obligations as legal ones. These are precisely the partners Canada will need for Arctic security, ocean governance, and any serious reform of multilateral institutions. We do not recruit them by cancelling the cheque, approving new pipelines, and skipping the meeting.

A producer country that zeroes out its climate finance while expanding fossil infrastructure and declining to send a minister to a global transition summit will be read, accurately, as disengaged or worse, as having chosen a side.

Governments are entitled to reorder priorities. They are not entitled to pretend the reordering has not occurred. Canadians can weigh military procurement against climate adaptation, pipelines against climate diplomacy, continental trade against multilateral engagement. But they should be asked to do so openly in Parliament, on the record.

Santa Marta did not cause the shift. It revealed it. An empty chair, a signed pipeline approval, and a zero on a budget line are the same sentence, delivered in three different forms.

The task now is to decide , deliberately and publicly wether the shift underway is the course we choose to follow

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For all of my adult life I’ve been a Liberal believing in the defence of rights, the constraining of power, an equitable society and an independent foreign policy. It’s been a narrative that many Canadians have strongly believed and supported. Since 1982, the Charter gave us a core liberal centre that wasn’t really about party, it was about courts that could check governments, refugee protection as something we owed people, reconciliation as a shared obligation, gender equality, tackling poverty international law, building an activisit role to counter Realpolitik .

These weren’t just policies. They were identity.

That story is being re-written.

The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the “rules-based order,” Canada’s role as a constructive middle power. But watch what’s actually happening, and a different picture emerges: human rights moving steadily from the centre of public policy toward its edges, increasingly, poverty and homelessness being ignored.

Take asylum. Canada once had a system based on independent hearings, a reluctance to turn people away. What we’re building now is something different: pre-screening that cuts off claims before they reach the Immigration and Refugee Board, paper-only departmental reviews, a one-year time bar that can block a full hearing regardless of how someone’s situation has changed. The people affected aren’t abstractions. They’re students, workers, people whose circumstances evolved and who face real harm if sent back.

Meanwhile, the promised end to using provincial jails for immigration detention turned out to mean opening a “temporary” facility inside a federal prison in Quebec. UN experts have called on Canada to abolish immigration detention. We relocated it instead.

The Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S. still stands, even as the assumption underlying it that the American system offers meaningful access to protection becomes harder to defend by the week. The agreement persists because it works as a filter. That’s the point.

This is what “system integrity” looks like when it replaces protection as the goal.

Similar logic runs through domestic spending. Budget cuts to Indigenous services look modest on paper, but over time, against inflation, they compound into real gaps—in housing, clean water, basic services. When treaty obligations and constitutional commitments already exist, choosing not to fund them isn’t neutral. It’s a political decision to treat reconciliation as discretionary.

In corrections, “streamlining” is the frame—but prisons were already struggling to provide rehabilitation, education, culturally appropriate programming. Indigenous and Black Canadians are still overrepresented inside. Rights don’t mean much if institutions can’t uphold them.

On climate: Canada once had architecture, carbon pricing, emissions caps, clean electricity targets. Much of it has been weakened or dropped. The government now openly acknowledges it will miss its 2030 and 2035 targets, even as it promotes new LNG projects and expanded oil and gas production. At the same time, defence spending has become a centrepiece of economic policy. Tens of billions to hit NATO’s two percent target. A defence industrial strategy that positions arms production as a jobs driver.

None of that is necessarily wrong. The problem is the trajectory : more fossil fuels, more defence production, weaker climate commitments, tighter borders, trimmed social programs. These things reinforce each other. The more the political economy depends on them, the easier it becomes to treat rights and climate obligations as handicaps.

Abroad, the gap between rhetoric and action keeps widening. When the U.S. sanctioned ICC officials (including a Canadian judge) for their work on investigations in Afghanistan and Palestine, Canada’s response was muted concern. No sustained defence of the institution it had long championed. When queried on the criminal behaviour of big powers the response of Global Affairs is that its up to them to decide the legality. The signal was clear: even committed states step back from international law when it becomes inconvenient.

Diplomacy and International Development are being downgraded at the very time that aiding in collaborative networks to seek peace and support democracy is crucial

The Liberal convention in Montreal confirmed the direction. Delegates were asked to endorse a platform centred on security, defence, and major project, and to reject a resolution on election reform.

The political map is reshaping: a governing party pulled toward corporate and security priorities; an Opposition rooted in populist conservatism; a weakened NDP struggling to matter.

Small-l liberals, people who still think of the Charter as a living thing, who care about refugee protection, Indigenous justice, gender equality, international law—are running out of political space .

Their values haven’t disappeared. The party that used to carry them is just moving on.

There are still occasions when, to borrow from Abraham Lincoln “The better angels of our nature” make a showing.

Start in Hungary. The long-entrenched rule of Victor Orban has finally been broken, not by outside pressure but by a surge of domestic civic energy; a coalition that cut across age, gender, and ideology. It is a reminder that even heavily tilted political systems are not immune to organized, determined citizens. The interventions of Donald Trump and J.D.Vance only underscored what was at stake, and likely helped drive turnout.

There will be a long road back for Hungary’s institutions. But Europe is now spared a persistent spoiler inside both the EUand NATO, a leader who too often blocked support for Ukraine while indulging the ambitions oF Vladimir Putin. The so-called model of “illiberal democracy” has taken a hit. That matters, not just in Europe, but in Washington as well.

Second, a word about moral clarity. Pope Leo in a moment that should not pass unnoticed, spoke plainly against the dangerous drift toward sanctifying war. At a time when elements within the U.S. political class dress up geopolitical adventurism in the language of faith, his intervention was both necessary and bracing.

Religious conviction, at its best, is a restraint on power not a licence for it. To hear that stated without equivocation was a reminder of what leadership can sound like when it is anchored in principle rather than polling. It also exposed, by contrast, the hollowness of those who prefer euphemism and evasion while the stakes grow ever more grave.

And yes, one might ask quietly but insistently, why others in positions of authority, including at NATO, have found such clarity harder to summon. Would someone please donate a spine for Secretary -General Rutte

Finally, a moment of grace from orbit. Canada has a habit of producing astronauts who double as poets. A pantheon of Roberta Bondar, Marc Garneau , Chris Hadfield to name a few. This week, Jeremy Hansen joined that company.

There is something about seeing the Earth whole, unpartitioned, unarmed, that seems to clarify what matters. Hansen spoke of a “joy train,” of shared purpose, of the simple but profound bond of doing meaningful work together. And then he turned the lens back on us: what we admire in those who venture into space, the capacity for cooperation, for curiosity, for care is not alien to us. It is already here, if we choose to use it. For young Canadians especially, it was an invitation to imagine a future defined not by division, but by discovery.

None of this cancels out the darker currents shaping our politics. But it does suggest that they are not uncontested. And in a moment when cynicism is cheap and cruelty is organized, that may be the most defiant fact of all

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Governments that see themselves as defenders of the rule of law cannot dismiss language about destroying “an entire civilization” as mere rhetoric. When figures like Donald Trump invoke such terms, the implications are serious, brushing up against the legal and moral boundaries associated with the gravest international crimes.

Genocide and related atrocities are not abstract concerns. Under principles such as universal jurisdiction, those who incite or enable them can be held accountable beyond their own borders, and institutions like the International Criminal Court exist to pursue justice where they can.

This places a clear obligation on states: to call out dangerous language and intended action early and ensure their own conduct remains firmly within international humanitarian law.

Canada has not always met that test. At moments when clarity was needed, its voice has been cautious, even muted -more that of a careful neighbour than a principled one confronting the warning signs of potential atrocity.

The question for Canada is unavoidable: what do we have to say about this madness?

Easter is supposed to turn our eyes toward life and hope. This year, it has also exposed a stark divide in how the world’s leaders speak about war.

In recent days, foreign ministers from more than 40 countries met to discuss the Strait of Hormuz. Their statement was measured, technical, and precise: concern for “freedom of navigation,” stability in energy markets, and the security of vital shipping lanes. Tankers were counted. Trade routes mapped. Risk was calculated in terms of supply disruption and insurance rates.

Barely mentioned were the men, women and children being killed and maimed as the war in Iran grinds on.

At almost the same moment, faith leaders were speaking in a different register entirely. Pope Francis in his Easter message, called for an immediate ceasefire and urged the world not to become “accustomed to war,” insisting that “every human life is sacred.” the world Council of Churches spoke of “the unbearable suffering of civilians” and the moral impossibility of treating human beings as collateral damage. In Canada, the Canadian Council of Churches and other faith communities called the strikes illegal and demanded renewed diplomacy, humanitarian access, and respect for international law.

They began not with shipping lanes, but with suffering. Not with markets, but with lives.This is more than a difference in emphasis. It is a difference in moral language.

The language of power is managerial. It speaks of stability, deterrence, flows and risk. It counts what can be measured and managed. The language of faith is human. It speaks of dignity, suffering, and the irreducible value of each life. It insists that what matters most cannot be reduced to metrics.

On Easter, that difference becomes impossible to ignore. Easter also carries a quieter, more personal logic: the possibility of turning the page. It invites a release of what has hardened—grievances, fears, the habits of escalation—and opens space for something not yet fully visible. In that sense, it is less about triumph than about trust: the belief that even from trial and loss, something better can emerge, if given the chance. That instinct—toward renewal rather than repetition—sits uneasily in the language of war, but it is not irrelevant to it.

For Christians, Easter is not a metaphor but a claim: that violence and death do not have the final word. It is, at its core, a refusal to accept that the destruction of human life can ever be justified as a mere instrument of policy. That is why churches, mosques and synagogues are not issuing abstract statements. They are naming what is happening in plain terms: the killing of civilians, the destruction of homes, the shattering of communities.

By contrast, the near-silence of political leaders on these realities is not neutral. It reveals priorities. When official statements dwell on the fate of tankers in Hormuz while passing lightly over hospital wards and refugee columns, they tell us, inadvertently but unmistakably, what counts, and what does not.

That contrast should be a wake-up call for Canada.

When major Canadian denominations publicly question the moral and legal basis of our alignment with U.S.–Israeli strikes, they are not engaging in private theological debate. They are reminding elected leaders of a tradition Canada once claimed as its own.

We were, once, peacekeepers.

From Lester B Pearson’s initiative during the Suez Canal onward, Canada helped build a model of international engagement rooted in ceasefires, civilian protection, and the patient work of making space for politics. More than 125,000 Canadians served in UN operations. Over 130 died in that service. Even in Bosnia in the 1990s, under NATO command, Canadian soldiers often performed the quiet, difficult tasks of peacekeeping: patrolling fragile lines, escorting aid, sustaining the possibility of dialogue.

I saw some of that work at close range. It was not dramatic. It did not lend itself to headlines. But it saved lives and, more importantly, it made peace imaginable.

Over the last twenty years, that vocation has been steadily dismantled. A self-conscious “warrior” ethos redefined the Canadian Forces around combat missions, most notably in Kandahar. Talk of our job being “to kill people” was not just rhetoric; it marked a shift away from consent-based peace operations toward counter-insurgency and alliance warfare. The skills, doctrine and imagination required for peacekeeping were allowed to atrophy.

The current war, and Ottawa’s ambiguity toward actions that bend or break international law, shows how far we have drifted.

Easter invites us to imagine a different path.

To take that path seriously would not mean retreating from the world. It would mean re-engaging with it on different terms: rebuilding peacekeeping capacity, investing in civilian protection, mediation and de-escalation, and adopting rules of engagement that prioritize restraint. It would mean aligning our foreign policy not only with allies, but with the deeper instincts voiced by those closest to the human cost of war.

Those voices are not marginal. Across Canada, faith communities run food banks, sponsor refugees, and support the displaced and traumatized. They see, every day, how distant conflicts echo at home—in hate crimes, in refugee flows, in strained communities. Their call for ceasefire and diplomacy reflects a broad and deeply rooted moral intuition: that human life must come before the preservation of systems, including those built on fossil-fuel dependency.

In the end, the question is simple, even if the answer is not.

Do we speak the language of power, or the language of humanity

Do we measure success in secure shipping lanes, or in lives spared?

On this Easter Sunday, the answer offered by the world’s faith leaders is clear. The question is whether our political leaders, and we ourselves, are prepared to hear it.

Individually, these moves may seem pragmatic, even necessary. Taken together, they point to something larger: the steady wiring of Canada’s economy into the business of war. The question isn’t just whether that’s strategically smart, but whether it aligns with the kind of country Canada has long claimed to be.

The first flaw is the mandate. “Defence, security and resilience” sounds flexible; it is also an invitation to mission creep. A permanent, capitalized institution with a brief that loose can justify almost anything. Border surveillance, offensive cyber tools, intrusive data systems - all can be recast as “resilience.” The real shift is institutional: decisions about what Canada finances move from Parliament to loan committees and risk departments. MPs won’t vote on new categories of militarized technology. They’ll be told this is what security now requires.

The second problem is more concrete. Canada maintains a longstanding loophole in its arms-export regime: military goods bound for the U.S. cross under a general permit, bypassing the human-rights assessments required elsewhere. Once inside integrated North American supply chains, Canadian components are folded into U.S. systems and shipped far beyond Canadian scrutiny. Efforts to close this gap have failed; earlier this year,Jenny Kwan’s private member’s bill to apply equal scrutiny to U.S.-bound exports was defeated by Liberal Members, with some noble exceptions and the Tories .

The proposed bank would scale up production along precisely these integrated supply chains. Layering a powerful financing institution on top of an export regime with a gaping blind spot doesn’t just preserve the risk of indirect complicity, it amplifies it. Rather than loosening our dependence on U.S. systems, we deepen it.

The third problem is structural. Multilateral banks are technocratic by design. Their authority rests on financial models and portfolio logic, appropriate for railways or clean energy, far more fraught when the assets are weapons systems and militarized infrastructure. In practice, power will sit with the bank’s board and management: deciding which sectors expand, which partners benefit, and how to balance strategic risk against financial return. Democratic oversight,the occasional parliamentary statement, the annual report, won’t keep pace.

Underlying all three is a deeper dynamic.

Economic lock-in is real. Once factories are retooled, workers retrained, and capital aligned with long-term defence demand, the pressure to sustain it intensifies. At that point, asking hard questions about end-use, human-rights risk, or Canada’s broader foreign policy becomes harder, not easier.

None of this denies a more dangerous world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rising authoritarianism, and new domains of conflict make the case for credible capabilities among democracies. But they do not answer the harder questions: what Canada should finance, for whom, and under what safeguards to honour human rights commitments.

A Defence, Security and Resilience Bank layered onto a rapidly expanding and still loosely defined defence agenda is a consequential choice. Without clear limits on what it can fund, without closing the export-control loophole, and without meaningful democratic oversight, Canada risks a quiet but lasting shift: from a country that champions human rights and international law to one whose prosperity depends on the expansion of the systems that strain them.

👉 Note:My thanks to Jill Glessing for bringing the DRSB meeting to my attention .