Lead Story
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.
Briefing · Canada in the world
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Canada’s NATO Spending Debate, Explained
Ottawa has finally hit NATO’s 2% defence target. The alliance has already moved the goalposts to 5%.
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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.
Latest ProfileAll →
The Most Canadian Brand in the World Is Run From Florida
Politicians reach for Tim Hortons when they want to sound like the country. Its coffee, pricing and global strategy are decided by a company headquartered in Miami — and the irony is getting harder to ignore.
More Explainers
All explainers →Reference pieces on the institutions, agreements, and relationships that shape Canada’s global role.
Canada's Most Powerful Foreign-Policy Instrument Answers to No One in Ottawa
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.
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 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.
More Profiles
All profiles →The Canadian companies and institutions acting on the world — read as foreign-policy actors.
Saskatchewan's Boring Rock Became a Strategic Asset Overnight
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.
Shopify Is the Biggest Canadian Company Nobody Calls Canadian
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.
The Canadian Company That Teaches the World's Militaries to Fly
CAE builds the simulators where pilots learn before they ever touch a real cockpit. Whose pilots it trains, and under what terms, is a foreign-policy question hiding inside a training contract.
Themes
Security
Defence, alliances, and Canada’s strategic posture.
Trade
Supply chains, agreements, and export policy.
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 →Canada’s international engagements are increasingly consequential — and increasingly underreported. Global Canada exists to close that gap: structured, accessible analysis for readers who want to understand what Canada is doing in the world and why it matters. The goal is not to advocate. It is to explain.