Canada is uniquely unprepared for the dire national-security crisis we are now in

Andrew Coyne

Prime Minister Mark Carney, centre, during a tour of a Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ont., in August, 2025.

It is doubtful any country has ever been in quite the national security dilemma Canada now finds itself in: with so much land and so few people to defend it; wedged between two expansionist superpowers, one of which was until very recently our best defence against the other, but which has since become more or less aligned with it.

The dilemma is particularly acute in light of our charmed history. A country that had always considered itself invulnerable to attack – because of the oceans that surround us, because of the forbidding climate in our North, because of the Americans – wakes up to discover that it has suddenly become peculiarly vulnerable.

We have no experience with this, psychologically. Other countries have long lived in the shadow of invasion, past or potential. Canada is unique, not only in the degree of our exposure, but in our utter unpreparedness to deal with it. It had literally never occurred to us until now that we might be a target.

That psychological unpreparedness is reflected in our security arrangements. Again, what is striking is not just how weak they are, but how uniquely weak. We are an outlier among nations in almost every respect: not only with regard to national security narrowly defined – the military, intelligence and police forces – but in the broader sense of our ability to withstand coercive pressure: things like economic resiliency, political cohesion, and, increasingly, state capacity.

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Let’s go down the list. Canada has, by any measure, the weakest military of any major democracy, certainly one with comparable security needs, alliance responsibilities, and international pretensions. In the most recent fiscal year for which we have actual data, we spent 1.47 per cent of GDP on defence (we may or may not reach the 2 per cent of GDP the Carney government has promised for the current fiscal year). That put us 27th out of what were then 31 NATO members.

We spend less, relative to GDP, than any other G7 country. We spend less than non-NATO democracies like Australia, South Korea and India. You can find countries that spend less than us. But they are smaller, and strategically sheltered: surrounded either by friendly buffer states, as in the case of Spain, Portugal and Belgium, or by oceans, as with the small island states of Ireland, Iceland or New Zealand.

Spending is only one measure. With 68,000 active forces (plus 27,000 reserves) we field the smallest military relative to population of any comparable democracy. A single brigade-level commitment (such as the current mission in Latvia) is about all we can manage. Our forces are chronically underequipped, flying aircraft that are 40 years old or more, sailing rusted-out ships and second-hand submarines, beset by key ammunition and logistical gaps.

The procurement system, what is more, is so bureaucratic, politicized and overspecified – often with requirements that have nothing to do with military capacity and everything to do with regional-development boondoggles and industrial-strategy fantasies – that there is real doubt whether Canada is even capable of getting the money we have promised to spend out the door on a timely basis.

But what did it matter? What did any of it matter? Not only were we invulnerable, but we had, so we imagined, no natural predators. We were so nice, so inoffensive. Many Canadians even imagined we were some kind of neutral power, never considering that in the real world neutral powers are typically armed to the teeth. Because, unlike Canada, they cannot rely on other countries coming to their defence.

Then there is intelligence. Canada is the only major democracy without a strategic foreign-intelligence capacity. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) does its best, but it is primarily confined to domestic intelligence-gathering; while that limitation has been partially relaxed in recent years, its foreign activities are still restricted to countering direct threats to Canadian security – such as terrorism, foreign interference, and so on – rather than the broader national-interest objectives served by other countries’ intelligence agencies. The Canadian Security Establishment (CSE), likewise, is limited to signals intelligence – valuable, but limited.

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In the world we are now in – a world in which war is conducted not just by overt military attacks but by economic coercion, weaponized migration, and disinformation campaigns; a world in which we cannot necessarily depend on the intelligence provided by our “allies” – that is not enough. We need our own full-service foreign-intelligence service, comparable to the CIA or MI6 – or, for that matter, to similar services across the democratic world.

The situation is even worse when it comes to the national police force: the invaluable supplement to the intelligence services, who cannot arrest or present evidence at trial against anyone. No other country saddles its national police force with as many conflicting responsibilities as the RCMP: supplying not only a national police service, but, depending on the province, local and provincial as well (two-thirds of RCMP personnel are contracted out), in addition to border enforcement and protective services. We need a dedicated national police force, comparable to the FBI or Britain’s National Crime Agency – or, again, to other democratic countries.

But as we have lately begun to learn, national security is not only a matter for the military, intelligence or police forces. States can also exercise coercive pressure economically. How does Canada stand up on these measures? Not well. With 75 per cent of our exports going to the United States, we have the highest concentration of trade with one country of any major democracy, with the possible exception of Mexico.

There were good reasons for this. Not only is the United States the world’s largest single consumer market, and not only is it next door, but it speaks the same language as most of us, has a similar culture, similar laws, and so on. So long as the United States had a normal government with normal views of international relations, it was a risk worth taking. But this is not a normal government. (No, John Turner was not “right”: His argument was that free trade itself would inevitably lead to our absorption, not that “some day a complete madman will occupy the White House.”)

We are economically vulnerable in lots of other ways. We have arguably the most dispersed population of any major country, measured not only by overall population density (only Australia’s is lower), but by the distance between city centres, and by the small number of links between them, laid out as we are along a single, relatively narrow axis along the border. With so few choke points, it is comparatively easy to disrupt our roads and rail lines, our pipelines, or our electricity links.

This is perhaps unavoidable. What is not is the degree to which we have contributed to our own balkanization through policy – notably, through the proliferation, 159 years after Confederation, of hundreds of interprovincial trade barriers. The result: We have arguably the least integrated national economy in the developed world. Just 18 per cent of Canada’s GDP is accounted for by interprovincial trade, versus the 65 per cent of our GDP that is traded internationally.

Not only do these take a heavy toll economically – the latest estimate by the IMF puts this at 7 percentage points of GDP, every year – but they contribute to our lack of internal political cohesion. In virtually every other federation on Earth, the task of striking down internal trade barriers is assigned to the federal government. Notionally, it is in Canada, too. The difference is that in most other federations the federal government actually does it. Only in Canada is the task left to negotiations between the provinces – as if between sovereign states.

The result is not merely repeated failure, but to instill the very message that the talks were supposedly intended to counteract: that there is no common national interest, but only our distinct provincial interests, separate and incompatible, to be zealously guarded at all costs. Can a country with no common national interests really be said to be a common national community – that is, a nation?

Or can there be a nation without a functioning national Parliament? Researching my book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy (at better bookstores everywhere!), I was struck, again, by how often we were – quantifiably, in many cases – the outlier: with the weakest Parliament, the most ferocious party discipline, the largest (and therefore weakest) cabinets, the most powerful Prime Minister, the most disproportionate (and therefore regionally divisive) electoral system, and so on.

A political community is formed, in part, by common political institutions, of recognized legitimacy and effectiveness. As Parliament’s relevance dwindles, participation rates decline, until the debate becomes not whether Parliament is answerable to the people, but whether there is any longer a people to answer to.

A last, perhaps most telling point of weakness: We are one of the very few countries on Earth that provides for its own dismemberment and destruction. The constitutions of most other democracies declare, expressly or by implication, that they are permanent and indissoluble. The United States does it. France does it. So do Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Ukraine, among a long list.

Canada, almost uniquely, does not – with entirely predictable results: the constant threat of secession, punctuated by repeated referendums, now approaching the reductio ad absurdum of simultaneous referendums in two provinces, with the gleeful support of the Trump administration. As I’ve said in other contexts: Leave a loaded gun lying around, someone is bound to pick it up – especially if it can be used to blackmail the rest of the country.

We have framed the national-security debate, in short, too narrowly. National unity is a matter of national security. The economy is a matter of national security. Democracy is a matter of national security. On all these fronts and more, Canada has left itself exposed and vulnerable, to a degree no other democratic state would tolerate.

We have been almost suicidally complacent. We thought no bad things could ever happen to us – or that if they could, we did not have to do anything to stop them. Not if it involved sweat, or sacrifice, or saying no to anyone – even to those who were trying to break apart the country. We need to think again.