Saturday, August 22, 2026
Independent briefings and analysis on Canada’s global security, economy, migration, development, and Arctic policy.
Ottawa has built the most powerful Indigenous-equity architecture in its history and, in the same year, a law that can override Indigenous objections. Which instrument prevails will decide whether Canada can deliver the minerals and energy its allies are counting on.
Ottawa has opened negotiations with Germany's TKMS for up to 12 submarines, with South Korea's Hanwha Ocean retained as the reserve supplier.
Enbridge moves most of the oil Canada sells to the United States, the continent's busiest energy link, and lately a pioneer of Indigenous ownership and an all-of-the-above energy strategy.
Canada & The United States The tariff war owns the headlines. The deeper Canada–US relationship (in orbit, on the grid, under the Great Lakes) is quietly thriving.
Canada & Japan Canada and Japan have spent 2026 wiring themselves together: minerals, gas, satellites, food. It is a hedge dressed as a partnership, and a wager on a world that no longer works the way it did.
Canada & The Caribbean As Canadian banks cash out of the region, Ottawa is arriving in new guises: underwriting climate debt, funding a force in Haiti, importing farm labour, watching Guyana boom. The relationship is being rewritten on every front at once.
Canada & India Two governments have spent years at a diplomatic low. The people, the students and the trade underneath the quarrel never stopped, and the gap between the two is the whole story.
Ottawa is spending more than $40 billion to defend the North. The people whose continuous presence underwrites Canada's claim to it are warning that they have other options.
At Akwesasne, Mohawks cross between Canada and the United States to reach their own homes. A 1794 treaty says they can. Canada has never written it into law.
A $200-million lease near Canso, Nova Scotia, marks Canada's shift from satellite user to sovereign launch state. The company that has to deliver it has never launched anything.
The Indo-Pacific Strategy was Canada's most ambitious Asia plan in a generation. Its central relationship (India) ruptured almost immediately. What the strategy has become since is more revealing than what it promised.
Canada helped invent modern AI and then watched the money leave. Its bet now is that the democratic world will trust it to set the guardrails, the way it once helped invent peacekeeping.
Ottawa has finally hit NATO’s 2% defence target. The alliance has already moved the goalposts to 5%.
The first Canadian foreign minister to visit Pakistan in nearly two decades arrives with resumed canola shipments, an investment treaty in progress and an ASEAN seat to fill, as Ottawa widens its economic footing across the Indo-Pacific.
Canada has spent eighteen months turning its mineral wealth into diplomacy. Whether any of it becomes a working mine is the harder question.
Eight pension funds move C$2.5 trillion around the world. Almost none of it is coordinated with anything Canada calls foreign policy, and that is starting to look like a choice worth revisiting.
As Washington signals it may let CUSMA lapse rather than renew it, the 2026 review is becoming the clearest test yet of Carney's bet that Canada can afford to walk away from a bad deal.
Canadian companies mine in over a hundred countries. The bargain that made that possible (extract cheaply, take the profits home) is coming apart, and Ottawa's critical-minerals push is caught in the contradiction.
Canada feeds a large share of the world and controls a third of the mineral that makes crops grow. As choke points and supply shocks multiply, that footprint has become strategic.
Permanent residents capped, study permits halved, and a pledge to push temporary residents below 5% of the population by 2027. It is the sharpest immigration reversal in a generation, and part of the bill will be paid abroad.
Sudan, Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine: the countries Canada resettles from are a map of the crises it chooses to own. That map is being redrawn smaller.
A publicly owned utility firm from Winnipeg advises power grids in more than a hundred countries. It was shut down in 2021, quietly restarted in 2024, and fills a niche almost no one else can.
The country produces musicians, writers and actors at a rate rivalling Britain's, and has almost no strategy for turning any of it into influence. The recurring Eurovision debate is a way into why.
A First Nation with no road out paddled across a lake to escape the 2026 fires. The season keeps proving the same thing: Indigenous communities absorb the losses, then wait for a recovery system that isn't built for them.
For most of Canadian history the North meant Indigenous rights, environment and resources. Since 2024 it has meant NATO's northern flank, a dispute with Washington, and a bill Canada is scrambling to pay.
What Canada claims in the North, where its claims are contested, and why the Northwest Passage sits at the centre of the dispute.
Defence, alliances, and Canada’s strategic posture.
Trade, investment, supply chains, and economic diplomacy.
Immigration, students, labour, and diaspora.
Aid, humanitarian work, and multilateral engagement.
Climate diplomacy, clean tech, and the North.
Global Canada is an independent digital publication covering Canada’s foreign policy, international relationships and place in a changing world. We connect developments across security, trade, migration, development and Arctic policy.