Canada’s Liberal Party held a leadership debate on 25 February 2025 in their process to determine the former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s successor. In that debate, Chrystia Freeland, Former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, proposed that Canada work with the United Kingdom and France to form a new, nuclear-armed security bloc against the United States.
“The US is turning predator, and so what Canada needs to do is work closely with our democratic allies, our military allies. I would start with our Nordic partners, specifically Denmark who is also being threatened, and our NATO European allies. I would be sure that France and Britain were there who possess nuclear weapons and I will be working urgently with these partners to build a closer security relationship that guarantees our security in a time when United States can be a threat.”
While such overt hostility from the Canadian government has been rare over the last century, it has deep roots and is becoming increasingly prevalent. Canada, long considered a quiet and reliable partner, is poised in coming years to become a serious and present threat to the interests of the United States.
The seeds of this are buried deep within Canadian history. There were twenty-four British colonies in the New World at the dawn of the American Revolution. The famous thirteen formed the United States, but the revolution had appeal to the northern colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec as well. The English-speaking twenty percent of the northern population was sympathetic to the Patriot cause, deriving from New Englanders who had only recently settled territories conquered from the French in the previous decade. However, the French-speaking supermajority was largely apathetic, and passively acquiesced to British use of their settlements in the Saint Lawrence River Basin as a staging ground for invasions of the United States. Most notably, this included General Burgoyne’s 1777 invasion which led to Saratoga.
The British drew heavily on Loyalists to supplement their forces in America. The intensification of the war after 1777 led to escalating atrocities between the Loyalists and the Patriots. At the conclusion of the war, about fifty thousand Loyalists, rightfully fearing persecution at the hands of the Patriots, fled north into British-held Nova Scotia and Quebec.
That wave of Loyalist refugees permanently altered the demography and politics of what was to become Canada. The French supermajority was reduced to a bare majority, and in a decade became a minority. The previously New England derived and Patriot-sympathizing population of English-speakers was submerged in a flood of Loyalists derived from the mid-Atlantic colonies. Oligarchical governments were established where not already present as democratic government was both feared and despised for its association with the hated Patriots. Canada, not to be born until 1867, was conceived as the anti-America.
Over the following decades the provinces which would become Canada continued to develop as the mirror of the United States. Whereas the United States Constitution guaranteed free interstate trade under the Commerce Clause, Canada created interprovincial trade barriers. Whereas the United States expanded suffrage; Canada codified the political supremacy of a narrow class of churchmen, soldiers, and landholders. Where the United States developed its industry, Canada remained a colony dependent on a handful of raw material exports.
Canada would continue as a strategic adversary into the 19th and early 20th century. In spite of a warming of relations with the United States in the late 1840s and 1850s, Canada was nonetheless supportive of the Confederacy during our Civil War. Halifax in Nova Scotia served as a base for Confederate blockade runners. Confederate spies operated freely in the Province of Canada. During the Trent Affair, the British stationed 14,000 soldiers in Canada and organized 40,000 local militiamen to supplement them in case of war. In 1911, the US Speaker of the House threatened Canada with annexation, an escalation that decided that year’s Canadian federal election.
A Brief Interlude
It was only the outbreak of the First World War which broke the long tradition of animosity and finally led to the warming of United States-Canada relations that is today considered the norm. Following the war, improved relations enabled American investors to develop industries in the Ontario Peninsula, particularly those related to automobile manufacturing. Those economic ties have expanded in fits and bursts over the last century.
Economic ties were accompanied by military and intelligence ties following the outbreak of the Second World War. The Permanent Joint Board on Defense was established in 1940, beginning coordination of US and Canadian military efforts. Canada joined the UKUSA Agreement in 1948, bringing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (predecessor to today’s Communications Security Establishment, CSE) into the signals intelligence sharing framework created during the war. In 1958, Canada joined NORAD, leading to US troops being stationed on Canadian soil and Canadian troops being placed under the command of US officers.
These military and intelligence ties were made with three crucial assumptions. The first was that the Soviet Union, and its ideology centered around global communist revolution, would remain a common primary adversary. The second was that the shared heritage of the United States and former British Empire would enable the countries to work together on even matters of the utmost secrecy. Third was that the democratic systems of government of both countries would bind them together in common interest.
Those assumptions were all well-founded in the 1940s and continued to be into the 1980s. However, they came apart in the 1990s and 2000s. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the shared adversary, and left only scattered bands of Third World terrorists militantly opposing the West. Generational turnover, the rise of multiculturalism, television, and secularization slowly eroded the Anglo-American assumptions so crucial in preserving relations between the Western Allies.
Finally, the imposition of Canada’s 1982 Constitution and the resultant shift in political power away from elected officials changed the nation’s very conception of democracy. Section 27 of the 1982 Constitution and later the 1988 Multiculturalism Act in particular require that the government, business, and civil society actively promote multiculturalism. That goes far beyond the requirements of laws in the United States, which only require non-discrimination.
The results of those policies had two main detrimental effects on the security of the United States. The first was that they bestowed sovereignty upon the judiciary as the interpreter and guardian of a set of expansive entitlements, thereby superseding the traditional democratic belief in popular sovereignty and thus coming into conflict with the democratic-republican ideology promoted by the United States. The second was the development of the “Court Party” – a collection of government-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which work with the bureaucracy and judiciary to shape state policy through political appointment and strategic litigation rather than legislation. Those NGOs ranged from the fairly benign such as the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, a feminist group, to the sinister, such as the Tamil Tigers-linked Canadian Tamil Congress.
Constitutional change, the end of the Cold War, and the erosion of shared cultural norms have weakened the ties which produced the period of partnership. As a result, Canada is returning to its traditional posture as a threat to the US, rather than as a friend. The security ties which we have developed with Canada over the past few decades are transforming from assets into liabilities.
The divergence of post-1982 Canada and the United States first came to public attention during the Second Iraq War in the mid-2000s. The Canadian government, true to its highly legalistic worldview, refused to enter the war despite the United States’ request as it did not have the blessing of the United Nations. While it dissipated somewhat during the Conservative Party government of Stephen Harper, it returned with a vengeance under Justin Trudeau.
Another signal of this shift has been the extent to which Canada’s 1982 Constitution has permitted the transformation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, into a potent threat to the US under the Trudeau premiership. Trudeau rose to power in 2015 with the Liberal Party’s electoral win that year. He is, like the 1982 Constitution, a child of the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1968-1979, 1980-1984). True to his family, he embraced a vision of Canada as a unitary post-national state, defined by its values and multiplicity of its communities. That contrasts with the older understanding of Canada which saw it as a country inhabited by two nations – the English-Canadians and the Quebecois – and whose provinces worked together for common interest while preserving their own local traditions.
While the Court Party had been involved in the United States’ civil society since the first Trudeau, it only took an increased interest in the Canadian military and intelligence services after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. A 2017 anti-discrimination lawsuit filed by several anti-Trump and pro-Trudeau Muslims in CSIS enabled Trudeau to expand the Court Party’s control over CSIS by expanding employment equity in the service.
Employment equity strictly understood pushes for the ethnic and sexual composition of employees to be similar to that of the general population. In practice, it requires that large organizations such as CSIS and the military utilize personnel or human resources departments to find people to act as community representatives – whether they be women, from an ethnic community, LGBT, etc. Those community representatives are expected to act in their community’s interest. In the adversarial context of the common law system, they naturally take the maximalist positions.
This prevents the Canadian government from identifying subversive efforts within its own system at even very basic levels. Just this May, Gary Anandasangaree was appointed to head Canada’s Public Safety Ministry. He began his career as a federally elected politician from a heavily Tamil part of Toronto, and was known to have worked with at least three Tamil Tigers. At the Public Safety Ministry, he oversees the Border Services, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and CSIS among other agencies – many of which have access to information provided by the United States through the Five Eyes intelligence sharing frameworks.
Such officials have become the norm rather than the exception in Canadian politics. Former Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan utilized Canada’s military resources to evacuate non-citizen Sikhs from Afghanistan during the Kabul Evacuation, leaving 1,250 Canadian citizens to the mercy of the Taliban. Canada Border Service Agency superintendent Sandeep Singh Sidhu was closely tied with Pakistani intelligence as well as militant Khalistani separatists, and involved in an October 2020 assassination. Paul Chiang, an MP from Markham, called for bounty hunters to deliver his political opponent, wanted by the Chinese Communist Party, to China. Chiang’s successor candidate, former Toronto deputy police chief Peter Yuen, also has extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party. A regular visitor to China’s Toronto consulate, his promotion within the Toronto police was important enough for him to be honored with a special event hosted by consular officials.
The prominence, access, and power of such people in Canada makes our extensive security ties liabilities rather than assets. That Canada’s employment equity policies encourage them to promote personnel from their own communities in the intelligence services exacerbates the problem. Canadian government institutions are no longer Canadian as such, but increasingly captured by sectarian interests more loyal to adversaries of the US.
The problem is further compounded by Canada’s change in identity following the 1982 Constitution. It has ceased to be a country of two nations, and become a country of scattered communities whose defining features are a handful of judicially defined values as well as their contrast with the United States. It remains to be determined whether or not Canada itself remains a stable and cohesive polity over the long-run as these trends continue to accelerate.
Our Canadian problem was mild enough in the 1980s, but should have been noticed in the 1990s with the near-success of the Quebec referendum as well as the supersession of legislative authority by community rights as the result of judicial decisions. Since Trudeau’s rise to power in 2015, the United States’ decision to ignore Canada’s domestic situation has been one of reckless rather than understandable negligence.
Divergent Paths
The proper approach to our northern neighbor depends on our global strategy. In all contexts, intelligence sharing on sensitive issues should be limited due to the level of penetration into Canadian intelligence. Technological exchanges, particularly between the NSA and the CSE, should be re-evaluated to ensure that they are not subsidizing efforts by our own intelligence services to bypass due process protections for US citizens through Canada. The extent of those efforts is currently unknown, but certainly expanded following the January 6th Riot in 2021 and the Trucker’s Protest in 2022. In both cases, the Canadian government used its anti-terrorism policies to examine the financial records of US citizens, even publicly reporting on US donations to the truckers in the latter case.
However, beyond this, we can no longer assume that American strategy towards Canada will remain the same under all circumstances. Indeed, our posture may vary wildly based on our priorities. If the United States decides that Russia is the primary threat to our interests as the result of its wars in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa; then little more needs to be done in Canada. The Canadian multiculturalism framework was initially inspired by Canada’s Ukrainian community, which continues to wield great influence within Canada through that framework. They have utilized that influence to support pro-Western, anti-Russian movements in Ukraine for decades. The Ukrainian community, represented by people such as the half-Ukrainian former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, has been extremely active in providing support for Ukraine.
There are no influential communities in Canada which are supportive of Russia, and most are extremely hostile. Canada will continue to support the maximalist positions against Russia in all geopolitical contexts, driven both by anti-Russian communities influential in the bureaucracy and parliament as well as by its strong commitment to international legalism.
If the United States decides that China is the primary threat to our interests due to growing strength and totalitarian system of government, considerably more will need to be done with Canada. The inability of CSIS and the RCMP to deal with the increase in Chinese Communist influence forces the United States to step in.
The parts of our intelligence community which handle Chinese Communist affairs should create sub-departments addressing Canada specifically. They would address Chinese Communist influence at the federal level by publicizing the ties of MPs, Native American chiefs, and Court Party factions (particularly any who oppose energy infrastructure development). At least several agents should be tasked with developing relationships with Native American tribal leadership in the western provinces. Tribes such as the Wet’suwet’en and the Shishalh which have already developed ties with the People’s Republic and have de facto sovereignty in provincial legal systems should be of particular focus. Unreliable tribal chiefs have been and can be replaced, particularly when their rivals are backed by wealthier interests.
A new intelligence station should be set up in Point Roberts, part of Washington just south of Vancouver to monitor the large Chinese population there. It should be have two main focuses. The first would be to covertly inspect large commercial facilities in southern British Columbia which could host PRC drones a mere 91 miles away from US Naval Base Kitsap. The second would be financial monitoring. The Chinese Communist Party uses its total control of China to gain leverage over foreign businesses. It has utilized this leverage to influence decisions made by the Wealth One Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Canada. The financial monitors would identify compromised organizations and individuals, then work with groups such as FinTRAC or the US Justice Department if divestment was deemed wise.
The diplomatic requirements of confronting Russia or China preclude overt aggression against Canada. It would be difficult to justify the annexation of resource rich parts of Canada while simultaneously trying to maintain international coalitions against the conquests of Ukraine or Taiwan. However, if the United States decides to pursue a strategy of retrenchment, such concerns become irrelevant. In such a strategy, the United States would come to see the China-Iran-Russia bloc, perhaps with India, as an insurmountable opponent in the core of Eurasia. Rather than attempting to maintain the post-1991 order, the United States would focus on maintaining its control of western Europe and Japan.
The primary threats to US security in that strategy come from factions within the core of the Western bloc – particularly Canada and the United Kingdom – which would continue to utilize their influence to support their favored factions in the United States. They could also potentially realign with one of the Eurasian powers and allow them to project power near core US interests.
In a strategy of the retrenchment, the dismemberment of Canada becomes a wise decision. Rather than allowing it to continue down a path of anti-American antagonism, the United States could support the Alberta and Quebec separatist movements. A successful secession by Alberta alone would cripple the federal fisc, and drive separatism in other regions due to the resultant decline in their equalization payments which comprises such a substantial part of their provincial budgets. In the end, British Columbia and a unified Maritime province would be admitted to the Union as Democratic states while Alberta and Saskatchewan would be admitted as Republican states; ensuring continued balance in the US Senate.
The rump of Canada, left with only one or two provinces, would finally be able to revise its constitution with ease. Under US pressure, the rump could become a freely associated state similar to Palau, with a new constitution reordering society along American lines. In time, perhaps it too could be annexed.
The United States can no longer afford to dismiss Canada as a benign neighbor given its history as an anti-American entity and the trajectory of its political landscape over the last forty-three years. Provocative rhetoric from prominent officials, coupled with the subversion of Canadian institutions by rival interests and the erosion of shared democratic values demonstrate its threat to U.S. national security. Canada’s post-1982 constitutional framework is unlikely to be revised and ensures that the country’s path is set in this detrimental manner. Whether the U.S. prioritizes countering Russia, China, or a strategy of retrenchment, Canada’s domestic instability and anti-American undercurrents demand attention. Ignoring Canadian affairs guarantees that our once-reliable ally will continue to undermine U.S. interests from within the Western bloc. To safeguard our security, the United States must recalibrate our approach to include targeted intelligence operations, diplomatic pressure, structural revisions, and possibly support for regional separatism.
