Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Also in focus
Beneath the Quarrel, a Continent That Works
The tariff war owns the headlines. The deeper Canada–US relationship (in orbit, on the grid, under the Great Lakes) is quietly thriving.
Two Middle Powers Bet the Old Order Is Over
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.
Northstar · Canada Observatory
Canada’s alliances are widening faster than its economic options.
Track national capacity, public-goods delivery, international relationships, current signals and the research shaping the debate.
Open Northstar → Assessed capacity judgment 64 ACJ · six dimensions
A Global Canada Series
Bilateral Series
Canada & The Caribbean Canada Was the Caribbean's Banker for a Century. That Era Is Ending.
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.
2 more inside
Canada & India Ottawa and New Delhi Fell Out. Nobody Told the Diaspora.
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.
More from the desks
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Canada's Arctic Case Rests on the Inuit. They Are Done Being an Afterthought.
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.
Canada Is Building a Rocket Pad in a Town of a Few Hundred People
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.
Canada's Big Asia Bet Blew Up Before It Was Even Staffed
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 Isn't Trying to Build GPT-6. It's Trying to Write the Rules for It.
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.
Canada’s NATO Spending Debate, Explained
Ottawa has finally hit NATO’s 2% defence target. The alliance has already moved the goalposts to 5%.
Economy
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Canada Hasn't Sent a Foreign Minister to Pakistan in 20 Years. Anand Ends That This Week.
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.
Ottawa Has Signed the Deals. The Mines Are Another Matter.
Canada has spent eighteen months turning its mineral wealth into diplomacy. Whether any of it becomes a working mine is the harder question.
This Canada Day, Canada Faces Bigger Question Than CUSMA's Survival
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.
The Country That Runs the World's Mines Is Losing Control of Them
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.
The Superpower Canadians Don't Know They Have
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.
Canada Spent a Decade Widening the Door. It Is Closing It Fast.
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.
Migration
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Which Emergencies Canada Still Answers
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 Reserve Split by a Border Nobody There Drew
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.
International Development
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Manitoba Reopened a Global Consultancy Most Canadians Never Knew It Had
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.
Canada Exports Superstars and Almost No Culture
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.
Environment & Arctic
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The Fire Reached Collins in Under an Hour. The Rebuild Will Take Years.
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.
How Canada's Arctic Stopped Being a Domestic File
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.
Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty Claims, Explained
What Canada claims in the North, where its claims are contested, and why the Northwest Passage sits at the centre of the dispute.
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Defence, alliances, and Canada’s strategic posture.
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Trade, investment, supply chains, and economic diplomacy.
Migration
Immigration, students, labour, and diaspora.
International Development
Aid, humanitarian work, and multilateral engagement.
Environment & Arctic
Climate diplomacy, clean tech, and the North.
About
Read more →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.