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Canada’s sovereignty call-to-arms has largely been expressed through what we buy. Shoppers fiercely scrutinize labels and corporate ownership to determine whether a product is truly “Canadian.” But while we’re paying closer attention to the origin and composition of the products we’re purchasing, we’re not really thinking about how we pay for them. That needs to change.

In the early hours of March 4, 2026, in international waters off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered attack submarine, closed in on the IRIS Dena, a new Iranian Moudge-class frigate.

My excellent friend and former colleague Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School calls them the predatory hegemons. America, China, and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Mark Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule—Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defence and economic partnerships.

According to the most recent federal figures, of the 326,230 deaths registered in Canada in 2024, 16,499 were medically assisted. That year, Ontario reported 4,944, and British Columbia 2,997. Quebec registered the highest rate of medical assistance in dying, or MAID, by any jurisdiction in the world, contributing 36.3 percent of medically assisted deaths that occurred in the country.

This week saw the news that Rideau Cottage, “temporary” home of the prime minister, is “inadequate.” The house is small and insufficiently secure for a head of government.

Alberta’s separatist rumblings are often framed as the latest chapter in a decades-old constitutional quarrel with Ottawa. But let’s be honest: the current rhetoric has little to do with fiscal policy or a West-versus-feds division of power. The noise is largely coming from a small cohort (only 8 percent of Albertans “would definitely vote to leave”) steeped in conspiracy-theory-fuelled grievance.

Weeks after it was delivered, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech is still generating ripples—quoted in think tanks, parsed in Ottawa, and invoked as shorthand for a world tilting away from frictionless globalization.

The scene of Canada’s iconic polar bears scrounging among chip bags and milk jugs stands in stark contrast to the majestic images of bears traversing the sub-Arctic shores that feature in global tourism campaigns for the Hudson Bay region. It’s a sore point for the town of Churchill, Manitoba. For nearly two years now, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” that welcomes international photographers and tourists as “one of the best places” to see wild polar bears has been the site of a markedly ugly scene: bears scrounging for human garbage.

To be a “good neighbor and a responsible steward of shared resources” is a noble aspiration for anyone, though a claim that sits awkwardly near the border between North Dakota and Manitoba. Riverview, the Minnesota-based agricultural company that made the statement, is set to test the goal as it adds to its network of mega dairies by building two facilities along the North Dakotan stretch of the Red River before it flows north into Canada. One barn, near Hillsboro, will contain 25,000 head of cattle; the other, outside Abercrombie, will house 12,500. Together, the two will contain nearly the same number of producing dairy cows as the entire province of Manitoba (and will more than quadruple North Dakota’s quantity).

When Trump readied the 11th Airborne Division out of Alaska for potential deployment to Minneapolis to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in their immigration crackdown, I posted the big scoop: the operations leader for that unit was none other than Canadian Brigadier-General Robert McBride. I subsequently wrote about the intertwined nature of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the US military for The Economist.

The prime minister’s seat was empty in the House of Commons during the marathon four-hour debate on the Iran war on the evening of March 9. Mark Carney blamed scheduling issues, but it was a notable absence, jumped on by the Conservatives, who claimed he was in hiding.

In January, Alberta premier Danielle Smith issued an extraordinary threat. Unless Prime Minister Mark Carney gave Alberta more influence over judicial appointments, her government would withhold funding from the courts. In an open letter, Smith argued she wanted judges who reflected Alberta’s “distinct legal traditions”—though what those traditions are is unclear. Canada’s system is straightforward: provinces run the courts, Ottawa appoints the judges. This left many observers wondering, “Can she even do that?”

THE UPHEAVAL IN the international order prompts Canadians to think thoughts that would have seemed preposterous a short time ago. We hear our Department of National Defence is “modelling” what a US invasion might look like. A former Canadian chief of defence staff says we should keep our “options open” with respect to building our own nuclear deterrent one day.

“Gulf states, already uneasy, have been forced into a strategic dilemma.” Pierre Pahlavi Full Professor, Chair of the Department of Security and International Affairs, and Deputy Director in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto

First few paragraphs:

First few paragraphs:

IN DECEMBER 2025, United States president Donald Trump struck a deal that—uncharacteristically for such a spectacle-driven politician—barely registered among the general public.

THE DIAVIK DIAMOND MINE sits on an island in the middle of a lake, which itself is surrounded by hundreds of other lakes and the barren lands of the Northwest Territories. From above, three human-made craters look like God Herself started drilling giant, threaded holes into the landscape.

Archived link

Archived link

(BRETT) DROZD WAS BORN IN Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.

It is their juvenile form that has turned an odd-looking, slippery fish into an expensive commodity. Elvers are now Canada’s most valuable fish. Driven by demand in Asia, glass eels can fetch thousands of dollars per kilogram (approximately a one-litre bottle full)—even sometimes more than $5,000 per kilogram. In 2022, fishers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick earned $39 million from 7,557 kilograms of elvers harvested, according to DFO.

IN JULY OF 1979, Ronald Reagan, then eighteen months from the presidency, was taken to see the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD. The underground facility, jointly run by the United States and Canada, is carved inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. In one widely cited account of the visit, many on the tour were visibly awed by the scale and seriousness of the operation. But when Reagan asked what the US could do to stop a nuclear missile, the answer shocked him: nothing.

WHILE CANADIANS WORRY about climate risk and the political direction of the United States, their retirement savings are quietly riding a very different bet. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is financing—and profiting from—Donald Trump’s renewed push to expand fossil fuels and accelerate artificial intelligence development in the US. It has partnered with private equity firms to acquire American oil and gas producers and financed AI companies like Elon Musk’s xAI.

I recommend you read/skim through the article, but these paragraphs felt especially important:

THIS AUGUST WILL mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. If they hold onto their totalitarian rule for that long, they could go on to surpass their initial reign, which lasted from 1996 until the United States–led invasion in 2001. This time around, in the absence of armed intervention, it’s become increasingly clear that the international community’s measures to push them out are failing.

PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY was scheduled to deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Munich Security Conference this past weekend. The mass-casualty shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, changed that. Carney dispatched a senior delegation to Germany in his place—a crew that included Foreign Minister Anita Anand, Defence Minister David McGuinty, and Minister for AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon.