Marco Navarro-Génie

The Longer Ottawa Delays the Needed Reforms, the Worse It Will Be

Over the past decade, Sweden has undertaken one of the most consequential reversals of immigration and multicultural policy in the Western world. Once celebrated as a moral exemplar of openness, Sweden has moved deliberately toward tighter immigration controls, stricter citizenship requirements, and a civic integration model that places social cohesion above ideological fashion. These reforms emerged not from whim but from a sober political will issuing from social conditions that the Swedish state could no longer manage under existing policy.

Canada today exhibits many of the same underlying conditions that drove Sweden’s course correction, yet its ruling elites lack the wisdom and the courage to change course. Those conditions have been building since at least 2015 and have intensified since the 2020-22 COVID policies. Yet Canada remains immobilized by doctrine, woke culture, ideologically captured institutions, and entrenched incentives that reward delay. The contrast is revealing.

1. Sweden’s Immigration, Citizenship, and Multicultural Reforms

Sweden’s reforms are anchored in the political framework established after the September 2022 election, most notably through the Tidö Agreement. Named after Tidö Castle where the four right-of-centre party leaders negotiated, the agreement set out a program to reduce asylum immigration, tighten family reunification, strengthen enforcement and returns, and raise the threshold for acquiring citizenship. The document runs more than 60 pages and contains nearly 200 reform proposals.

The agreement explicitly targets a “paradigm shift” in Swedish asylum policy. Refugee quotas were slashed from 5,000 per year to just 900. Family reunification rights were reduced to the minimum permitted under EU law. The agreement signals that Sweden will no longer be more generous than its international legal obligations require.

Citizenship reform sits at the centre of this shift. A government inquiry released in January 2025 proposed extending the required period of residence from five years to eight. It introduced stricter self-sufficiency expectations and tightened criminal and conduct standards through an “honourable lifestyle” requirement, which extends the waiting period before an applicant who has committed a crime can be admitted as a Swedish citizen. The proposal also expands citizenship testing to include not only Swedish language proficiency and civic knowledge but also additional areas such as the role of media in society and children’s rights. These legislative amendments are proposed to enter into force on 1 June 2026.

Administrative reforms already require in-person identity verification and expanded documentation for citizenship applicants. Proposals are underway to permit revocation of citizenship in cases of fraud, “system-threatening crime,” or serious national security threats. In September 2025, a government commission proposed revoking permanent residence permits previously granted on asylum-related grounds, requiring affected individuals to obtain citizenship, qualify for a temporary permit, or leave the country by 2027.

Since 2022, approximately 40 legislative proposals have been presented in this restrictive direction, covering naturalization, detention, return, deportation, duration of re-entry bans, and incentive structures for voluntary repatriation. The Social Democrats, the largest opposition party and architects of the 2015-16 policy changes, now advocate a similar migration policy. The political consensus has shifted.

Multiculturalism has not been repealed, but it has been demoted. It is no longer a governing ideology but a social reality managed through integration requirements. Swedish policy now stresses adaptation to Swedish norms rather than state accommodation. Citizenship is treated as the culmination of integration, not a shortcut to it.

2. The Conditions That Forced Sweden’s Hand

Sweden did not change course because restraint became fashionable. It pivoted because conditions became operationally intolerable.

The most visible trigger was organized crime. Sweden experienced a sustained rise in gun violence tied to criminal networks, particularly in urban and suburban areas. Gun violence began increasing in the mid-2000s and accelerated sharply from 2013 onward. By 2022, Sweden recorded 391 confirmed shootings and 63 people killed by gunfire, its bloodiest year of gun violence in modern times. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) reports that Sweden’s gun homicide rate stands at approximately 4 deaths per million inhabitants, compared to a European average of 1.6. In 2023, 53 people were shot dead, the second-highest number ever recorded.

The problem extends beyond shootings. In 2024, police recorded 317 bombings, more than double the number in 2023. Gang-related explosions rose from 149 incidents in 2023 to 317 in 2024. Media estimates suggest that more than 60,000 people may be connected to organized criminal networks. These networks developed the capacity to recruit minors, intimidate witnesses, launder money, and exploit welfare systems. Swedish authorities began describing the phenomenon as “system-threatening crime,” signalling that the problem had moved beyond ordinary policing into a challenge to state authority itself.

Parallel social fragmentation deepened the multicultural strain. Swedish police identified “vulnerable areas” marked by low employment, weak language integration, limited trust in institutions, and the presence of informal authority structures. As of 2024, approximately 65 such areas exist nationwide, housing around 550,000 people, or 5 percent of Sweden’s population. In the most serious “particularly vulnerable areas,” now numbering 19, police report that the situation makes it “difficult or almost impossible” for them to fulfill their mission. Parallel society structures exercise their own form of justice and control. Residents show widespread disinclination to participate in legal processes, and systematic threats and violence target witnesses.

Schools and social services struggled to enforce standards. Emergency services adapted their behaviour by ensuring proper backup, entering areas via alternative routes, or reversing vehicles to enable quick departure if needed. In 2017, police estimated that 40 percent of residents in vulnerable areas had not completed primary education, and less than half of 15-year-olds in Gothenburg’s especially vulnerable areas qualified for secondary education.

Equally important was the collapse of elite credibility. For years, Swedish political and cultural elites insisted that crime and integration failure were unrelated to migration volume or composition. As evidence accumulated, public trust eroded. Immigration policy became inseparable from questions of public order, welfare sustainability, and state capacity.

3. Canada’s Comparable Conditions Since 2015

Canada’s deterioration since 2015 has been real, cumulative, and measurable. It is not identical to Sweden’s experience, but the conditions increasingly rhyme with it.

Crime severity in Canada has risen since 2015, as measured by Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index. After a temporary decline in 2020 due to the initial lockdowns, crime severity rose again, with three consecutive years of increases through 2023. The Index decreased 4% in 2024, the second decrease in a decade. The pattern is not linear, but the direction since 2015 is unmistakable. Canada has not enjoyed the sustained improvement in public safety that many citizens still assume is the norm. Several categories of violent crime increased in the post-2020 period, including extortion, which rose 35% in 2023 for the fourth consecutive year.

Canada’s organized crime problem is extensive and deeply embedded. Unlike Sweden’s highly visible gang warfare, much of Canada’s organized crime operates through fentanyl production and trafficking, large-scale auto theft rings exporting vehicles overseas, money laundering through real estate and trade-based schemes, and human trafficking and labour exploitation. This criminal economy is less spectacular but more corrosive. It fuels addiction, distorts housing markets, normalizes fraud, and erodes confidence that the rules apply evenly.

The opioid crisis illustrates the scale of this harm. More than 53,000 Canadians have died from apparent opioid toxicity since January 2016. In the first half of 2025, an average of 21 people died each day. These deaths are not abstractions. They exert sustained pressure on policing, emergency medicine, hospitals, and social services, while feeding criminal networks that thrive where enforcement is slow and authority fragmented.

Canada’s social services have simultaneously degraded. Housing supply failed to keep pace with demand well before the COVID event. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that restoring affordability levels last seen in 2019 will require between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units per year for the next decade. This represents an approximate doubling of the current pace of home construction. In 2022, CMHC originally estimated Canada needed 3.5 million additional units by 2030 to restore affordability to early-2000s levels; by 2025, the agency had to scale down its target, effectively acknowledging that early-2000s affordability was no longer realistic. Rapid population growth fuelled by migration after 2020 collided with that shortage, producing rising rents, collapsing affordability, and growing homelessness, including among working Canadians.

Healthcare systems face persistent strain. Emergency departments report rising volumes and extended lengths of stay, with staffing shortages exacerbated by draconian vaccination mandates compounding delays. Schools and municipal services struggle with overcrowding, language integration demands, and infrastructure deficits. These pressures are now structural, not temporary.

Immigration acts as a stress multiplier rather than a sole cause. Population growth has outpaced housing, healthcare, transit, and education capacity. Asylum and temporary resident processing inventories have grown substantially in recent years. Integration expectations remain modest relative to the intake scale.

Public trust erodes quietly, but it erodes under the weight of intimidation by ideological and propagandistic smears of racism. Citizens lower their expectations, adjust their behaviour, and accept disorder as background noise. That adaptation is an early signal of institutional retreat.

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4. Canada Remains Paralyzed

Despite these conditions, Canada has not adopted reforms comparable to Sweden’s. The paralysis has multiple, reinforcing causes.

Political entrenchment matters. The same federal party governed from 2015 to early 2025, the period during which many deterioration indicators emerged or intensified, including rising crime severity, prolonged housing unaffordability, growing asylum backlogs, and visible strain across social services. Continuity of power blurs accountability. Structural problems are reframed as inherited, masked as global, or treated as administrative rather than as the predictable outcomes of sustained choices.

Electoral incentives deepen inertia. Immigration policy is closely tied to coalition management in major urban centres in Central Canada, where immigrant communities represent important and growing voting blocs. This is not a claim of illegitimate influence, although serious questions about foreign interference remain unresolved. It is at least electoral arithmetic. Policies perceived as restrictive or enforcement-oriented carry political risk in constituencies where immigration is framed as identity affirmation rather than capacity-limited policy. That risk favours symbolism over structural reform. Canada developed a government that governed through symbolic pronouncements rather than solutions.

Narrative lock-in reinforces the problem, fuelled by a press captured by the federal state through direct subsidies. Immigration and multiculturalism have acquired moral status. Evidence of failure is treated as miscommunication rather than misdesign. Housing shortages become funding debates filled by recurrent promises that never materialize. Crime becomes an optics problem. Service strain becomes a funding argument. The possibility that intake exceeds integration capacity is excluded early from acceptable discourse.

Canada’s advocacy and consultative ecosystem further narrows the space for reform. Many organizations operate within frameworks that assume continued high immigration and expansive accommodation. They do not set policy, but they shape the environment in which policy is evaluated. They, too, are clients of the state.

Urban concentration also matters. The benefits of high immigration accrue disproportionately to metropolitan labour markets and asset-owning sectors. Many of the costs fall on municipalities, renters, younger cohorts, and strained service systems with limited fiscal autonomy. This asymmetry reduces urgency. The wealth and generational gap between beneficiaries of the status quo and those bearing its costs is remarkable.

Jurisdictional fragmentation, often exploited as a political tool, compounds paralysis. Immigration is mostly federal in practice, though it is constitutionally shared. Housing, healthcare delivery, policing resources, and social services are largely provincial or municipal. Lower levels of government see their planning and programmes sabotaged by federal policy that operates without regard for downstream consequences. Responsibility diffuses easily. Problems in Ottawa are treated as separate files rather than as interacting consequences.

Finally, time horizons work against reform. The benefits of high intake are immediate: labour supply, headline GDP growth, and short-term fiscal flows. The costs accumulate slowly: degraded services, entrenched criminal economies, weakened trust. Electoral systems reward short-term stability over long-term repair.

5. Anticipating the Objections

Several objections predictably arise whenever Canada’s immigration and integration failures are raised. They deserve direct answers for the conversation to move forward.

Canada is not Sweden. That is true in the narrow sense and beside the point in the larger one. The comparison is not about copying policies but about recognizing patterns. Organized crime exploits weak enforcement wherever it finds it. Housing shortages follow population growth that outpaces supply in any market. Social trust erodes when citizens experience disorder and declining services while being told that concern itself is the problem. Geography does not repeal capacity limits.

Crime and social strain are unrelated to immigration. This objection mistakes interaction for causation. Immigration does not create every problem. It amplifies existing weaknesses when intake exceeds the capacity of integration and enforcement. Sweden learned this when welfare systems and policing were stretched beyond what trust-based governance could sustain. Canada’s experience since 2015 shows the same interaction at work, compounded by misguided movements to defund police.

Economic benefits justify current levels. Immigration does contribute to labour supply and headline GDP. What is disputed is the assumption that aggregate growth equals public benefit. When gains concentrate in asset inflation and low-wage labour supply, while costs are borne through housing unaffordability, service overload, vanishing productivity growth, and weakened enforcement, social consent erodes.

Reform risks intolerance. This contention confuses enforcement with animus. Sweden’s reforms are based on conduct, compliance, and capacity, not ethnicity or belief. Citizenship thresholds, benefit conditions, and removal enforcement apply by rule, not identity. Treating immigration and citizenship as policy instruments rather than moral symbols is governance, not exclusion.

Canada lacks the legal room to act. This overstates constitutional paralysis. The Charter constrains means, not ends. It requires proportionality and fairness, not the passivity we see daily. The COVID period showed what governments can do and how they can circumvent obstacles when they want something done. Canada retains broad authority over intake levels, enforcement priorities, benefit conditions, and citizenship criteria. The authority needs to be exercised.

These problems are temporary shocks. Canada’s crime trends since 2015, its housing supply gap, its opioid death toll, and its enforcement backlogs are cumulative indicators. But ten years of waiting for them to correct themselves is not prudent (That strategy already failed in the fiscal sphere). It is abdication.

These objections do not defeat the necessity for reform. But they explain the paralyzing delay.

Conclusion

Sweden changed course when a critical and courageous mass of citizens concluded that the state could no longer guarantee cohesion under existing policies. Does Canada have the necessary courage and critical mass to push for similar solutions?

Sweden’s reforms were not driven by hostility to newcomers. They were driven by a sober recognition that inclusion without enforcement and generosity without reciprocity corrode the foundations of a liberal state. Sweden concluded that immigration must align with integration capacity, that citizenship must mean something, and that social trust cannot be sustained by slogans alone.

Canada faces the same choice. Since 2015, crime severity has risen, organized criminal economies have embedded themselves more deeply, housing affordability has collapsed, healthcare systems have strained, and institutional trust has weakened. Since 2020, these pressures have intensified. None of this requires panic. It requires honesty and the courage to face reality.

Meaningful reform is not anti-immigrant, as Sweden has demonstrated. It is pro-citizen and pro-integration. A system that enforces its rules, sets clear thresholds, and aligns intake with capacity is fairer to newcomers and to those of us already here. It offers membership rather than ambiguity, and belonging rather than permanent precarity.

Sweden chose boundaries before its institutions failed. Canada theoretically still has that option. But it lacks the courage to act, the willingness to accept limits and the sobriety to tell the truth about trade-offs. There is room for Canada’s long-established immigrants to take the lead in advocating for these reforms, which the timid Laurentian elites aren’t fit to correct. A serious country does not confuse moral posture with policy, or delay correction until ideological dysfunction hardens into a norm.

The question is not whether Canada needs reform. It is whether it will choose reform deliberately, or be forced to adopt worse policies later under even worse conditions.

By Brian Lee Crowley

Not for the first time, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Policymaker of the Year is not a Canadian.

In 2019, our laureate was Xi Jinping, leader of the People’s Republic of China, whose long arm reached far into many aspects of policymaking in our nation’s capital.

That helps to underline our intention in conferring this recognition. Policy influence can be used to Canada’s benefit or detriment. In naming our annual Policymaker of the Year, MLI does not endorse their policies; instead, we seek to draw to the attention of Canadians those people who have had the most influence on public policy in this country – for good or ill – in the past year.

And in 2025, who can deny that US President Donald Trump, the Disruptor-in-Chief, has exercised an outsized influence on Canadians – on their hopes and fears, on their political preferences, and, most importantly for our purposes, on the policies pursued by the Canadian government?

How has Donald Trump spurred policy change in Canada? Let us count the ways:

First, set aside for the moment any focus on specific policy areas and just think about the President’s style and strategy. Anyone who has read The Art of the Deal knows that Trump is quite straightforward in avowing that his dealmaking strategy sets out to frighten and intimidate the other party with a degree of unpredictability, bravado, and unwillingness to be bound by past assumptions that is sometimes just breathtaking to contemplate.

On the other hand, what on the surface appears to his opponents as simply irrational is in fact nothing of the sort. He sets out to frighten and intimidate, but he also sets out to get deals done, which cannot happen with negotiating partners paralyzed by fear. And in fact, the list of deals he has done in less than a year in office is impressive: NATO members have made big commitments to increase defence spending, the war in Gaza is paused by a (shaky) ceasefire of his design, trade deals have been struck with many partners, including the EU, the UK, Mexico, and even China … though notably, not with Canada.

Here at home, Trump has riled Canadians with his comments about annexation and disputed borders, laid a heavy finger on the 2025 electoral scales, and met repeatedly with Prime Minister Mark Carney – but equally repeatedly sent him on his way with little to show for the Prime Minister’s efforts as supplicant. Policies that seemed settled, like our purchase of the F-35 fighter jet, our deep integration with the US economy, and our feeble attempts at even-handedness in the conflict in the Middle East, all seem to have fallen victim to Ottawa’s ill-advised urge to stick a finger in Donald Trump’s eye, whatever the cost.

Like it or not, Trump has reminded Canadians in no uncertain terms that America is the elephant and we are, if not exactly a mouse, certainly a beast whose wellbeing depends on American forbearance and good will. The question of whether we can calm the rampaging elephant and charm him into a better humour or fall back on much less profitable relations with other countries far away is THE question that will preoccupy policymakers in Ottawa this year and for several years to come.

It is against this backdrop that several major dimensions of Canada-US relations have been thrust into the spotlight – none more dramatically than trade.

Weaponized Tariffs and Fractured Trade
Tim Sargent

For many Canadians, Donald Trump’s re-election on November 5, 2024, while not a cause for celebration, was also not an existential threat to our economy. After all, when Trump was first elected in 2016, his threats to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ultimately came to nothing, and the new version of NAFTA that was negotiated by the US, Canada, and Mexico (we call it CUSMA, the Americans call it USMCA), was broadly similar to its predecessor, with almost all Canadian goods able to enter the US market tariff-free.

That complacency was almost immediately shattered when the President, even before his inauguration, announced his intent to slap a tariff of 25 per cent on Canadian (and Mexican exports), supposedly in response to Canada’s failure to stop fentanyl from crossing over the US border. The shock was rapid, and the implications unmistakable.

Once in office, Trump made good on his threat and imposed the 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian exports except energy, which was subject to “only” a 10 per cent tariff. The sheer interconnectedness of the North American economy forced Trump to partially back down and exempt CUSMA-compliant goods from the tariffs. However, because they raised input costs for US manufacturers, Trump opened another front by slapping tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos, copper, lumber, and furniture in the name of national security, overriding the CUSMA treaty that he had signed. While these tariffs apply to all countries, these are all commodities for which Canadian exporters are very dependent on the US market, and which are very important for the Canadian economy.

While trade disputes with the US have not been unknown since the signing of the original Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988 – softwood lumber is the most obvious example – no one expected Trump to take aim at the whole Canada–US trading relationship, which accounts for almost a quarter of our GDP. This escalation marks a break not just with economic norms but with decades of strategic restraint.

None of this augers well for the negotiations for the renewal of CUSMA, which are supposed to conclude in the summer of 2026, or the broader Canada-US trading relationship. Indeed, it is not clear that the renewal document will be worth the paper it is written on, given that Trump has shown no compunction in violating the terms of the original agreement. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the President, reflecting a broader strand of America-first nationalism, simply does not see trade as a mutually beneficial activity; rather, it is a zero-sum game in which the only way for the US to win is for others to lose. The fact that basic economics says the opposite seems to be neither here nor there.

All this leaves Canadian policymakers with some unpleasant alternatives. While the Carney government originally attempted to retaliate by imposing tariffs of its own, the reality is that these are pinpricks to the US, for which Canadian exports are only a few percentage points of GDP. Furthermore, tariffs hurt Canadian consumers. The other alternative, which the government is now pursuing, is to diversify Canada’s trade away from the US. However, Canadian governments have been trying to reduce their reliance on the United States since at least the 1970s, with little success. Geography and economic gravity continue to dominate: the US will always be the most obvious market for our exports, even with tariffs.

Perhaps the most that Canadians can hope for is that Americans will, as has happened in the past, come to realize that a close and stable trading relationship with Canada is in their national interest just as much as it is in ours.

Trade Tensions Fuel Canadian Oil Revival
Heather Exner-Pirot

Donald Trump’s tariffs and threat to the Canadian economy have meaningfully shifted both the public understanding and attitude towards oil and gas. Perhaps in the past it could be seen simply as something Alberta produced, an embarrassing source of global emissions. After 2025, it became clear how essential oil production is both to our economic health and our global standing.

Oil is Canada’s largest export, and most of it goes to the United States. When Trump declared in January 2025 that “we don’t need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody,” it was a tell. Canadian oil and gas is precisely the thing we produce that the United States needs more than anything else. In fact, that same month the US imported a record amount of Canadian crude oil: 4.27 million barrels; the most any country has ever imported from another in the history of the world.

This newfound appreciation of oil and its geopolitical importance brought a long-dead idea back to life: an oil pipeline to the northwest coast of British Columbia, the value of which has always been in diversifying our market for heavy oil from the US to Asia. The source of hard fought culture wars in the 2010s before being approved in 2014, rejected by Trudeau in 2018, and handed the final indignity of a tanker ban in 2019, a Northern Gateway-type pipeline is now not only possible, but even likely. In every public opinion poll in 2025, such a pipeline has enjoyed majority support. It is the centrepiece of the landmark MOU between the federal and Alberta government that has as an explicit goal increasing oil and gas production.

Canada has always had the resources of an energy superpower. Trump’s threats have done more to give us the ambition of one than anyone or anything before him.

“Elbows up” and the New Anti-American Nationalism
Mark Reid

Donald Trump’s return to the White House drastically altered the course of Canadian politics. The ensuing fallout – fuelled by threats of tariffs and incendiary “51st state” rhetoric – became the key catalyst that propelled Mark Carney’s Liberals to victory on an “elbows up” platform.

This resurgent Canadian nationalism was defined by a sharp strain of anti-Americanism in general, and a profound dislike of Trump in particular.

As Trump slapped tariffs on Canada (and mused about annexing Greenland), the Prime Minister and provincial leaders promised a “Team Canada” approach to counter the President’s aggression. Canadian politicians from coast to coast earnestly vowed to remove interprovincial trade barriers, back major national projects, and present a common front.

That unity quickly faded.

Faced with new rounds of tariff threats, Carney’s government shifted to diplomatic conciliation, rolling back the Digital Sales Tax and offering border security concessions to avert economic disaster. Supporters called it pragmatism; critics called it a surrender.

Meanwhile, the Team Canada vision turned out to be a mirage. Interprovincial squabbles over a bitumen pipeline to tidewater in BC persists, while a multi-million-dollar Ontario anti-tariff ad, which aired on US television, infuriated Trump.

These internal divisions underscore a dangerous reality: Canada’s very sovereignty may be at risk. The US President’s recent “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine clearly articulates his vision of American hegemony over the Americas, with Canada, presumably, as a sort of vassal state. The federal government now faces an impossible task – buying time in the hope that the US political climate shifts, while protecting Canadian autonomy from an American president who sees it as negotiable.

Smashing the Overton Window on social policy
Peter Copeland

Donald Trump is polarizing for good reason. He is rude, crude, lewd, and norm-breaking to an extraordinary degree: a former Manhattan Democrat and social liberal whose transgressiveness and contempt for precedent embody many of the very cultural tendencies the left has long celebrated. His impulsiveness seems to threaten alliances and raise geopolitical risks by the day – yet he now leads the most effective conservative movement in decades.

He also possesses unusual strengths. His entrepreneurial instinct has allowed him to see the gap created by an oblivious, or unwilling, left- and right- establishment political class on trade, immigration, cultural and social decline – and to seize the opportunity. His unfiltered political style contrasts sharply with the scripted, risk-averse habits of career politicians and the professional-managerial class. He seeks no validation from the Davos set or the media-academic establishment, making him unafraid to challenge orthodoxy. Trump’s rise is a sharp indictment of liberal elites on both sides of the political spectrum, who proved incapable of addressing the deep social and economic issues that he foregrounded from the outset of his presidency.

On issues like gender identity, DEI, and mass migration, rooted in an extreme open-society ideology of hyper-individualism and autonomy, establishment leaders had long been unwilling even to acknowledge the problems. Then Trump came along and threw open the Overton window on just about every issue.

For Canada, Trump’s impact is mixed. He expanded the envelope of the politically possible on topics thought untouchable just years ago, but his abrasive style has made Canadian elites – whose defining characteristic is anti-Americanism – more reluctant to pursue parallel reforms. On immigration, borders and defence, Ottawa is now moving; on gender, DEI, and education, it is retreating behind “Trump did it, so we won’t.”

Shredding Canada’s US security blanket
Richard Shimooka

President Trump’s successful upending of American foreign policy in 2025 has had profound and potentially long-term consequences, but few are as acutely felt as the changes he has forced upon the Canada-US security relationship. Trump’s actions have effectively ended the decades-long expectation that the United States would forever underwrite Canada’s defence and security, forcing a sea-change in Ottawa’s strategic calculus.

Since the Second World War, the foundation of the Canada-US security and economic relationship has been an interlocking system of security guarantees through alliances and free trade blocs. This synergistic mix, which bound states like Canada to a rules and values based international order conceived in Washington, allowed Canada to maintain a relatively small defence footprint, relying instead on overwhelming American firepower to deter its enemies.

However, Trump’s skepticism towards this foundation, evident since his first term, consolidated into decisive policy changes in his second term. By launching a devastatingly counterproductive trade war against Canada and other major trading partners and directly questioning the value of major alliances like NATO, he effectively declared America’s security commitments are no longer unconditional.

For Canada, this has meant a new urgency to foot a larger portion of the bill for continental security, a renewed focus on securing both the Canada-US border and the Arctic, and for finally meeting long-standing pledges to spend two per cent of GDP on NATO.

Ironically, while Trump’s pressure tactics have succeeding in pushing Canada (and other allies like Japan and Germany) to increase defence spending and become more self-sufficient, it comes at the cost of America’s ability to lead like-minded states. As US leverage wanes, Trump’s strategy may end up pushing America’s allies into the arms of strategic rivals like China.

Without American global leadership, states may prioritize a narrower brand of self-interest – one that is counterproductive to America’s overall strategic ends. Observe how Canada is now looking to rebuild its economic relationship with the People’s Republic of China, not merely for trade, but as a deliberate economic counterweight to its highly integrated trade relationship with the United States.

This impulse will likely be shared by many US allies. Indeed, allied nations in Southeast Asia may begin to doubt Washington’s commitment to the current geopolitical alignment and seek to balance their relationship with China. Some may even fall further into Beijing’s grasp, becoming the 21st-century equivalent of tributary states.

“Trump the Peacemaker” and the Politics of Force

Casey Babb

Donald Trump’s bold and fearless foreign policy decisions – especially regarding Israel’s war in Gaza and the broader Middle East – make him one of the most consequential and transformative political leaders in a generation. His combination of disruption, recalibration, and strategic risk-taking sought to redirect the trajectory of the Middle East in ways few leaders have attempted.

Some of these changes began during Trump’s first administration. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, reflected a shift toward open regional co-operation against shared security concerns. His decisions, like recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and cutting aid to Palestinian institutions, were commonsense corrections to what he viewed as unnecessary diplomatic ambiguities.

However, his most transformative actions in the Middle East happened in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel. From his 20-point plan for peace in Gaza and his efforts to bring home hostages, to the “12 Day War” between Israel and Iran, Trump made it clear that America’s support for Israel remains unwavering – signalling that Washington is willing to take decisive action in the Middle East to protect US and allied security.

Beyond the Middle East, Trump’s approach to China marked a sharp departure from previous presidents. Replacing engagement tactics with tariffs, export controls, and the framing of China as a key rival, Trump pushed for a shift in US policy that continues in his second term in office.

In Europe, Trump’s record on the Russia-Ukraine war is mixed. The President has pressured NATO allies to carry a greater load in terms of supporting Ukraine, and the US has continued to provide Kyiv with lethal military aid. However, critics worry about Trump’s personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin: as the peace negotiations continue, will Ukraine eventually be sacrificed for American expediency?

Conclusion

Trump’s legacy remains unwritten. It may destabilize Western institutions, or it may be the jolt needed to shake a complacent boomer establishment out of its decadent, dogmatic slumbers.

Trump has clearly shifted the geopolitical landscape in both Canada and around the world – in ways no conventional figure could have. It is worth asking: would Europe have increased defence spending without American pressure? Would Canada have taken border security, immigration, defence, or energy policy seriously?

Even conservative governments – often differing little from liberal ones in practice – have lacked the capital or resolve to confront entrenched bureaucracies, and it remains doubtful whether any old-school Canadian libertarian-oriented fusionist, or a typical Wall Street Republican in the US, would have had what it took to win, yet alone enact the needed the reforms.

Trump was, and is, very much the man for the moment. Whether this shift leads to renewal or decline, only time will tell. Those same disruptive instincts have defined his approach to the world stage as well, reshaping geopolitics in ways Canadians cannot ignore.

Brian Lee Crowley is managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Tim Sargent is a senior fellow and the director of Domestic Policy at MLI.

Heather Exner-Pirot is a senior fellow and MLI’s director of Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment.

Mark Reid is the senior editor at MLI.

Peter Copeland is the deputy director of Domestic Policy at MLI.

Richard Shimooka is a senior fellow at MLI.

Casey Babb is the director of MLI’s The Promised Land program.