Christopher Coates: Carney's long-awaited national security framework contains nothing new - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Prime Minister Mark Carney, centre, speaks at the Fort York Armoury in Toronto in 2025. (Cole Burston / Getty Images) By Christopher Coates November 4, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. Last week, the federal government issued “The Plan for a Stronger Canada – National Security for Canadians.” In his message to Canadians, Prime Minister Mark Carney was right to highlight that, “It has been over 20 years since Canada last published a national security policy.” Unfortunately, last week’s update may not qualify as breaking that streak of inaction. The plan was published but it fails to provide many of the elements necessary for a serious national security framework.

In fact, the bulk of the document seems to be little more than a collection of previously released statements by the federal government. The desire to diversify Canada’s trade relationships, modernize the Canadian Armed Forces and invest up to five per cent of GDP in defence, create a robust defence industrial base, implement the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act, create a new Financial Crimes Agency, strengthen both the Communications Security Establishment and CSIS, invest in artificial intelligence and a secure cloud, and enhance foreign information manipulation detection are all points that have previously been announced.

Even if the plan is treated as a framework for further security policies, it fails by not situating the nation’s security objectives in an overarching worldview and not describing the domestic and global forces driving the security challenges that Canada faces. It claims that, “Once distant threats are now proximate and immediate,” yet completely fails to name, identify or define those threats. As others have already noted, “Only in Canada can you write a national security strategy without mentioning the specific malign actors that seek to threaten Canadian security and interests. China and Russia are omitted altogether.”

The security plan lists the government’s priorities but contains nothing that would help resolve conflicts or tensions between competing activities. Further, the security plan does not identify the failures of Canada’s national security, law enforcement and justice institutions to address the converging nature of threats from hostile states, non-state actors, criminal organizations and sophisticated criminals themselves.

The security plan seeks to modernize legislation, within a year, and to conduct a review of the national security enterprise in time for an update of the strategy four years from now. This is a new announcement and while such a review is necessary, the threats and challenges are present today, thus action and changes are needed immediately, not after a review and update in four years.

The plan rightly identifies economic strength and sovereignty as critical components of national security. This comprehensive approach to security is welcome, but economic security should not be mistaken as a primary means to achieve national security. Defence and security are themselves critical to the economic viability and prosperity of Canadians — the relationships are reciprocal.

Notably, the strategy states that Canada’s interests include a collaborative relationship with the United States. To achieve the necessary security relationship with the U.S., Canadians need to move towards a productive partnership, and leave behind the extremes of either a combative elbows up or an excessive dependency on the U.S. For such a partnership, Canada will need to become a net contributor and provider of continental security and defence.

The plan speaks of first ministers meetings, deeper collaboration with provinces, territories and Indigenous governments, and direct engagement with industry, academia and labour. Such meetings are clearly necessary, but they are neither sufficient nor a guarantee that action will be taken to deal with ongoing threats to Canada’s borders, infrastructure and democratic institutions. An effective strategy needs more details than promises of collaboration and lists of meetings.

In the absence of the national security framework providing an overarching worldview and specified threats, there is the potential that each of the follow-on ministerial security policies will take their own course, or that they will remain largely performative and lacking in specifics, as the framework itself is.

As the Privy Council Office noted, “The Government of Canada’s first priority is to protect the security and prosperity of our country and our people.” Canada needs a national security policy capable of protecting Canadians from a range of immediate threats and a world that is bringing more to our borders.

In a world that is truly more dangerous (as the prime minister has often said), the government needs to do more than rehash already-announced policies under a national security umbrella and then look forward to meetings and increased collaboration.

The nation needs a strategy that provides specifics and a security enterprise that protects democracy and keeps Canadians safe.

Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Christopher Coates, former deputy commander of NORAD, is the director of foreign policy, national security and national defence at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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