Monday, July 20, 2026
Independent briefings and analysis on Canada’s global security, economy, migration, development, and Arctic policy.
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 sixty-eight years Canada and the United States have guarded a single sky through NORAD. Now they are spending tens of billions to rebuild it, a quiet act of shared sovereignty the trade fight hasn't touched.
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.
Open early, open late, open to everyone. In a big, cold, spread-out country, the local Tims has quietly become the public living room where Canadians actually gather: retirees at dawn, hockey teams at dusk, and most of the nation in between.
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.
Ottawa has picked Germany's TKMS to build 12 submarines, turning down South Korea's Hanwha Ocean on the eve of the NATO summit.
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%.
CAE builds the simulators where pilots learn before they ever touch a real cockpit, a quiet Canadian champion that has become the world's training house for aviation, defence, and medicine.
The Montreal planemaker finished 2025 with its turnaround complete and a record backlog, and its fastest-growing business is now outfitting allied militaries with mission aircraft built on Canadian airframes.
The binational command at the centre of Canada–U.S. continental defence: what it does, how it is run, and why its modernization matters now.
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.
Nutrien mines the mineral that grows the world's food. A war 8,000 kilometres away turned its Saskatchewan reserves from a commodity into something closer to leverage.
It moved $378 billion in goods last year and let a weaver in Ghana sell straight to a customer in Berlin. It is also a Canadian champion the country has never learned to claim.
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.
The trade agreement that governs roughly three-quarters of Canada’s exports: how it replaced NAFTA, what changed, and why its 2026 review matters.
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.
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 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.
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.
Canada’s international engagement deserves closer scrutiny. From Arctic security and Indo-Pacific strategy to trade, migration, diplomacy, and development, decisions made abroad increasingly shape life at home, just as Canada’s domestic politics, economy, and society shape how it engages with the world. Global Canada provides independent, evidence-based reporting and analysis that connects these developments to the broader strategic picture.
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