February 17, 2026
Embedded in the marquee numbers of the Defence Industrial Strategy Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled on Tuesday was a long-unfathomable message: the United States is no longer a reliable ally, but a potential kinetic enemy.
“The assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been turned upside down,” Mr. Carney said at the DIS unveiling in Montreal on Tuesday.
This conclusion, having emerged over the course of the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, is now backed-up by numbers: $6.6 billion for the provisions of the DIS within the Carney government’s $81.8-billion defence reinvestment plan announced in Budget 2025.
By Pentagon standards, these are not staggering. The U.S. defence budget for 2026 is $900 billion, with total budgetary resources for the DOD at $1.42 trillion.
Which underscores the conundrum at the heart of this unprecedented peacetime tilt of Canadian policy preoccupation from butter to guns: is there enough money in the world to defend Canada against a neighbour whose status as an ally, democratic world power and military superpower has defined not only our worldview but our fiscally curated national priorities for the past 80 years, and who is suddenly behaving like a predator?
That the Defence Industrial Strategy is about America lies in the certainty that it would not exist — at least not in its strategically defensive, industrially decoupling form — if Kamala Harris were president of the United States.
Which brings us to the real message behind the money. While both America and Donald Trump were understandably notable for their name-checked absence from Mr. Carney’s speech on Tuesday, the purpose of this DIS in reducing both Canada’s defence-and-security dependency on the United States and its industrial exposure to a neighbour now volatile at best and belligerent at worst was obvious.
When the behemoth next door is threatening to annex you, invade your neighbours and poach one of your provinces, you don’t respond with a rhetorical bazooka. You walk a fine line between tactical placation and strategic fortification.
“This strategic autonomy doesn’t mean isolation,” Mr. Carney said. “It means being strong enough to be a partner of choice rather than a dependent. It means building a domestic defence industrial base so we are never hostage to the decisions of others when it comes to our security.”
While Mr. Carney has said, in Davos among other venues, that the assault on the rules-based international order fronted by Trump over the past year to speed the endgame of a quarter-century of global democracy degradation represents a transition, not a rupture, Canada remains too enmeshed with the United States in both trade and defence for its prime minister to use language any less transitional than that contained in the quote above.
When the behemoth next door is threatening to annex you, invade your neighbours and poach one of your provinces, you don’t respond with a rhetorical bazooka. You walk a fine line between tactical placation and strategic fortification.
“Over the last few decades, Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries,” Mr. Carney added, presenting as imprudence what was really a failure of imagination in neglecting to factor into Canada’s strategic forethought the possibility that Donald Trump, of all people, would one day serve as the wrecking ball — in Munich Security Conference parlance — that would demolish our defence and foreign policy assumptions about America.
“We’ve relied too heavily on our geography and others to protect us,” Mr. Carney lamented. “This has created vulnerabilities that we can no longer afford and dependencies that we can no longer sustain.”
By framing this fracture in bilateral relations as the product of Canadian co-dependency rather than America’s radical slide into autocracy — performative and not — Mr. Carney is diplomatically avoiding the direct identification of its perpetrator.
This approach also avoids the identification of Trump’s enablers in Congress and the Republican Party, among other assorted New World Order institutional, geopolitical, and political actors who stand to benefit most from this chaos.
No, this strategic autonomy doesn’t mean isolation — for Canada. It does add, by necessity, to the alienation of America rationalized by Donald Trump. Where that will lead in the grand geopolitical scheme of things remains to be seen. And while it may require an unprecedented Canadian response, it will not be Canada’s regret to bear.
Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.