The Government of Canada is planning to soon publish a new national security strategy. Once it appears, it will be only the second such document ever released in Canadian history, following the first in 2004. At that time, the government was responding to a new world of global terrorism threats and a need for institutional change following 9/11. A 2026 strategy will be responding to an even more volatile security environment, the age of “rupture,” as Prime Minister Mark Carney has deemed it. The core principles of the national security strategy must be sovereignty enhancement; integration of government effort and sound decision making; and transparency with Canadians.
The importance of a new national security strategy cannot be overstated, given the dangerous state of the world we live in and the efforts under way to make Canada a more consequential power. Without updating the means and methods of national security, Canada cannot become either a better fortress or a stronger international partner.
There are two big challenges to laying down its principles and objectives. A new national security strategy must help align all aspects of government policy for protecting and enhancing Canada’s sovereignty — including defence, foreign policy, economic security and the protection of Canadians. The times demand that the practice of siloed approaches and discrete problem solving must end.
A second major hurdle is that any new Canadian vision must reach diverse audiences. Within the ranks of government, policy direction must be set. A Canadian public audience has a right to expect clear explanations about the nature of the threats we face and our response to them. A national security strategy has to offer a compelling picture of an independent but cooperative stance toward our allies and partners, including adaptation to a vastly changed relationship with the United States. It also must send an unmistakable message of fortitude and deterrence to our adversaries.
The Carney government’s notable skills in the wordsmithing of major pronouncements for a global audience will be tested. But at the same time, it should keep uppermost in its mind that its most important audience, at the end of the day, is the Canadian public. It must not fail that test, either with the strategy itself or with the ways it is communicated to Canadians. The current polycrisis we face offers an opportune moment to explain how national security serves the national interest and how “values-based realism” applies.
Such transparency is essential. As the government continues to increase defence spending to levels unseen for decades and as it seeks to diversify its intelligence, security and defence partnerships globally in response to growing fractures in our relationship with the United States, Ottawa needs to have buy-in from Canadians by clearly explaining its policies.
There are some urgent fixes to our national security capabilities that we believe must be made. Some of these involve organizational changes; many are about ensuring Canada has the knowledge base and tools to support its sovereignty.
Our recommended fixes include ideas for strengthening capabilities in four key areas: economic security and technological innovation; intelligence; national security; and space security.
Strengthened economic security and advancement of technological innovation:
- Enhance resiliency by prioritizing a public-private partnership between Canada’s intelligence and security community and strategically important Canadian businesses and research institutions, to share threat information and best practices.
- Establish a clear path for sustaining innovation and investment in Canadian defence capabilities. A rapid prototype and investment model based on the United States’s IQT and the United Kingdom’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund must be considered.
- Place a clear priority on technological sovereignty when it comes to major defence procurement, including the sensor networks that will be required for greater situational awareness to protect Canada.
- Strengthen our economic statecraft tools, including our economic intelligence capabilities, to advance Canadian interests, especially as we emphasize building at home and diversification of our trade relations.
Enhanced Canadian intelligence capabilities:
- Develop a greater capacity to collect human intelligence abroad, either through the creation of a new foreign intelligence service or a build-out of existing capabilities.
- Significantly enhance the ability to understand global threats, in particular by greater investment in and coordination of intelligence assessments. Assessment of pan-Arctic threats should be at the top of the agenda, to support the defence priority and the protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s northern flank.
- Embrace the need for a strong open-source intelligence capability, with appropriate guardrails to protect privacy and democratic rights.
Reinforced National security:
- Conduct a comprehensive reform of federal policing, to ensure that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has the capacity to prosecute complex national security threats.
- Improve national capacity to monitor and mitigate against foreign interference threats to our democracy, especially those that stem from foreign-influence disinformation, that extends to all levels of government.
New attention to space security:
- Emphasize increasing our sovereign capabilities in space with clear linkages between sovereign space launch, innovation in rocket and satellite manufacture, increased space observation capabilities for both civil and military/intelligence purposes, and attention to space domain awareness.
We offer these ideas and recommendations as a checklist to set against the published strategy. A national security strategy must identify its principles and objectives, and offer real solutions, which a government must be transparent about and accountable for. Budget allocations will be required. A national security strategy is not cost-free.
We welcome the long-overdue publication of a national security strategy. We hope it offers a good road map for action. We hope that Canadians will see it as important to our renewed public discourse about what it means to be Canadian and what we expect of government when it comes to the fundamental duty to defend our sovereignty and the national interest, protect a Canadian way of life, and engage with the world.
We look forward to joining with others in debating the new strategy’s details, once it emerges from its shell.
