By: Patrick Green, Foreign Policy Analyst
On October 29, the Government of Canada released its first National Security Policy (NSP) since 2004. The 2004 policy was a 60-page document that proposed a new, integrated national security system for the federal government to build. It identified $690 million CAD in new security initiatives and proposed institutions including the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, Government Operations Centre, and Public Health Agency of Canada.
The 2026 policy is considerably briefer at 13 pages, only 10 of which contain the substantive strategy, and reads more as an overarching strategic framework than an institution-building exercise. It places strategic autonomy and sovereign capabilities at the centre of national security. In doing so, national security becomes not only a framework for protecting the country, but an organizing principle for Canada’s broader economic, industrial, and foreign policy.
The policy identifies five enduring national interests, summarized below, with four further priorities under international security:
- Canadian sovereignty
- Economic prosperity and inclusivity
- A cooperative relationship with the United States based on mutual respect
- International stability and security
- Diversifying economic and security partnerships
- Defending the Arctic and strengthening North American security
- Maintaining Canada’s commitment to NATO and European security
- Supporting stability in the Indo-Pacific
- A values-based society
These national interests are familiar. Sovereignty, economic growth, trade diversification, defence, and relations with the United States were all reflected in the seven priorities outlined in Prime Minister Carney’s May 2025 mandate letter. Similarly, the Arctic, European, and Indo-Pacific security priorities closely mirror those articulated in the 2024 defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free: A Renewed Vision for Canada’s Defence.
The institutional context is also important. In September 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau established a National Security Council (NSC), chaired by the Prime Minister and comprising seven other Cabinet ministers. Its mandate was twofold: to provide a forum for strategic national security decision-making and to facilitate the sharing and analysis of intelligence at the Cabinet level. At the time, retired Canadian Army Brigadier-General James Cox criticized the Council for its vaguely defined responsibilities, questioning whether it could address longstanding weaknesses in the government’s intelligence analysis and review processes.
Under the Carney government, national security has taken on a more explicit economic and industrial dimension. As of May 2026, the NSC’s membership had expanded to 12, including the Prime Minister and ministers responsible for Finance, Energy and Natural Resources, Industry, Internal Trade, Justice, Transport, Immigration, and Emergency Management, alongside the traditional Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Public Safety portfolios. Yet despite this broader membership, the Council’s publicly stated mandate remains substantively unchanged from its creation under Trudeau:
“[The NSC] serves as a forum for the assessment and advancement of Canada’s strategic national interest in a rapidly evolving world, including through the rigorous analysis of intelligence.”
Against this backdrop, the central organizing feature of the new NSP is its Plan for a Stronger Canada, built around the development of strategic capabilities in eight critical sectors:
- Emerging technologies, including cloud and AI computing, quantum computing, space-based communications and navigation, semiconductors, and telecommunications
- Critical minerals
- Defence
- Energy
- Transportation
- Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology
- Food security
- Payments, settlement, and investment
Several of these sectors, particularly energy, critical minerals, transportation, and finance, correspond closely to portfolios represented on the expanded NSC. However, the Council’s membership also reveals some notable omissions: the ministers responsible for Agriculture and Agri-Food, Health, and Environment, Climate Change and Nature.
The NSP identifies five policy areas as the foundation for developing these strategic capabilities:
- Economic Security
- Foreign Policy
- Defence Policy
- Public Safety
- Intelligence
Of these, economic security takes centre stage. The government explicitly states that protecting and building strategic capabilities will guide decision-making at home and abroad. While this gives economic security a central position within Canada’s national security framework, the Carney government’s Defence Industrial Strategy and Buy Canadian Policy had already established economic sovereignty and resilience as key government national security priorities.
The relationship between these priorities and the NSC’s membership raises questions about how the new framework will be implemented. Under economic security, the NSP identifies the National Food Security Strategy and the need to strengthen domestic food production, processing, and distribution. Yet Heath MacDonald, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, is not a member of the NSC. The same section emphasizes securing critical health supply chains, including essential medicines and biologics, despite the absence of Marjorie Michel, Minister of Health, from the Council.
Climate change presents an even more striking contrast. It receives a single explicit mention in the NSP’s introduction, with little further discussion of its implications for national security. By comparison, the Department of National Defence’s (DND) 2024 policy, Our North, Strong and Free, repeatedly identifies climate change as a challenge to Canada’s security, particularly in the Arctic.
DND is also implementing its Defence Climate and Sustainability Strategy 2023–2027, which documents the growing operational demands climate-related disasters place on the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Between 1990 and 2010, the CAF conducted just six deployments in response to natural disasters under Operation LENTUS. Which is a contrast to the 30 that were completed between 2011 and 2020, and the further 11 that were done in 2021–2022 alone. In 2025, the CAF undertook eight Operation LENTUS deployments, involving more than 900 personnel and 162 deployment days.
These demands have implications beyond domestic disaster response. Climate change is reshaping the Arctic operating environment, increasing pressures on military infrastructure and personnel, and competing with other requirements for CAF readiness.
If the new NSP considers national resilience and the defence of Canada’s Arctic central to national security, why does climate change receive so little attention? And given its documented implications for Canadian defence and emergency preparedness, why is Julie Aviva Dabrusin, Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature, also absent from the National Security Council?
Economic security is framed as a whole-of-society undertaking, requiring closer collaboration between the federal government, other levels of government, industry, academia, and international partners. Particularly notable is the commitment to strengthen national security and intelligence information-sharing with the private sector and research institutions. This addresses a longstanding challenge in Canada’s national security system: translating intelligence held within government into information that can help businesses and researchers identify and respond to threats. Canada has begun developing mechanisms, including the Research Security Centre and Canadian Cyber Defence Collective (CCDC), alongside legislative changes expanding CSIS’s information-sharing authorities in 2024. Public Safety Canada’s own evaluation of its Research Security Centre in 2025 identified opportunities to improve the sharing of unclassified threat intelligence with universities. Former CSIS Deputy Director of Operations Michelle Tessier has discussed the broader challenge of developing an intelligence culture that extends beyond federal institutions, echoing much of the sentiment expressed by James Cox. The United Kingdom provides useful institutional comparisons. Its Research Collaboration Advice Team maintains ongoing advisory relationships with universities, while the National Cyber Security Centre’s Industry 100 program embeds private-sector professionals directly within government cybersecurity teams.
Under foreign policy, the NSP proposes aligning Canada’s existing regional strategies within a single interest-based foreign policy, integrating intelligence more effectively into sanctions and import/export controls, and reorienting international assistance toward Canadian national interests and values. These are potentially consequential directions, but the document does not explain what changes to diplomatic institutions, assistance allocations or sanctions processes would follow. It also refers to the diversifying Canadian international trading partners, and to the Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance (CMRPA). Made up of the G7, European Commission, and Australia, the CMRPA aims to diversify global critical mineral supply chains, reduce market concentration and dependence on dominant suppliers, and mobilize investment to accelerate critical mineral production and processing among trusted partners. Established in June 2025 and expanded in June 2026, the Alliance has already facilitated several rounds of international partnerships, including 13 new initiatives announced at the 2026 G7 Leaders’ Summit, expected to unlock more than $5 billion in investment across Canada’s critical minerals value chain.
Under defence, the NSP introduces the ambition of making the Canadian Armed Forces a leader in “defence in depth,” drawing on lessons from modern conflicts such as Ukraine and developing capabilities to respond to multidomain threats. However, the strategy offers little explanation of how the concept would translate into Canadian military doctrine, force development, or procurement priorities. The section’s commitment to strengthening domestic defence production is more familiar, directly reinforcing the government’s Defence Industrial Strategy and its broader objective of increasing economic and strategic autonomy.
Under public safety, the NSP proposes a centralized process for reporting foreign-interference incidents and improving victim support. In August 2026, the government established a foreign influence registry as part of implementing Bill C-70 Countering Foreign Interference Act. The NSP also calls for a national exercise and preparedness program. These are identifiable implementation commitments that the government believes will enhance societal resilience. This section also references implementing the 2025 National Cyber Security Strategy and Bill C-29 An Act to establish the Financial Crimes Agency which at the time of writing, is still under consideration in committee in the House of Commons.
The intelligence section of the NSP is particularly notable for its stated intention to expand Canada’s sovereign intelligence capabilities, including intelligence collection and analysis. The government proposes strengthening the capacities of Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and defence intelligence. It also commits to increasing Canada’s contributions to the Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership and diversifying intelligence relationships with other countries. To achieve intelligence capacity building the government will invest in artificial intelligence and secure cloud infrastructure to improve the speed and sophistication of intelligence processing, strengthen all-source intelligence assessments, and expand capabilities to detect foreign information manipulation. Finally, the NSP calls for modernizing intelligence authorities, security clearances, and information-sharing arrangements.
However, these objectives are largely generalizations from previously established practices. The 2024 Canada’s Intelligence Priorities national intelligence policy already detailed a government-wide process for coordinating the various intelligence organs through Cabinet-approved intelligence priorities every two years, followed by ministerial directives from Foreign Affairs, National Defence, and Public Safety to their respective intelligence organizations. Within the Privy Council Office, the Security and Intelligence Secretariat manages this process, while the National Security Council Secretariat supports Cabinet decision-making, produces intelligence assessments, and leads the intelligence assessment community, including through the Canadian Academy for Intelligence Analysis. The 2024 policy also explicitly prescribed the sharing of declassified or sanitized intelligence with provincial and municipal governments, critical infrastructure operators, the private-sector, and the public citing instances where CSIS and CSE had previously shared intelligence to warn industry partners of cyber threats. So, while the NSP commits to expanding intelligence capacity, the details and methods of execution and implementation for this goal remain to be communicated.
The final section of the NSP is titled Implementation, and provides several notable commitments by which the government intends to turn the NSP and its Plan for A Stronger Canada into action. A First Ministers’ meeting on National Security chaired by the Prime Minister will be held to coordinate federal, provincial, and territorial security policies and activities. Again, this section, like the ones prior, commits to expanding engagement with external stakeholders, in industry, labour unions, and academia. Finally, the NSP tells us to “expect more frequent updates to Canada’s national security legislative framework,” and to modernizing legislation within the first year of implementation of the NSP’s plan through a review of the “entire national security enterprise.” Going forward, the government intends to update the NSP within four years, and every four years indefinitely. This is a significant change and signals that the government intends to continue taking this more strategic, whole-of-government, and whole-of-society approach to national security.
These commitments are particularly relevant given the recent challenges unearthed in Canada’s national security decision-making. In its 2024 Special Report on Foreign Interference [PDF], the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians found that, despite increased intelligence reporting on foreign interference, the Privy Council Office, Global Affairs Canada, and Public Safety Canada had failed to adequately consider intelligence assessments or develop policy advice in response to specific cases. Ministers responsible for national security had also failed to request such advice, while the government was slow to establish governance structures capable of translating intelligence into decisions. The Committee further identified unclear roles, mandates, and accountabilities within the NSC and its supporting committees. The NSP aspires to establish a more coherent, strategic approach to national security across government and society. However, the government has already developed many of the policy interests, commitments, and achievements referenced within it. Ahead, the government will have to further develop an implementation plan for its Plan for A Stronger Canada, with measurable objectives and capabilities that ensure intelligence informs strategic national security decision-making going forward.
References
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