MORNING GLORY: Canada is a small power biting the hand that protects it

Our very nice neighbor and ally to our north, Canada, has 42 million people and a GDP of 2.4 trillion, but doesn’t even spend 2% of that GDP on defense. Its new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, promises that it will reach that minimum standard for NATO alliance members by 2030. The last consecutive years in which Canada contributed 2% of its GDP to the defense needs of the West occurred around 1989-1990, after which defense expenditures dropped significantly. 

Canada answered the bell after 9/11, and while it’s standing military is quite small — 68,000 – it sent troops to Afghanistan from the beginning of that long war and kept them there until 2014, sacrificing 158 of their soldiers on that faraway battlefield. 

516 Canadians died during the Korean War and while Canada did not send its troops to Vietnam, many Canadians volunteered for the U.S. military and as many as 140 died there.

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We remember the events depicted in “Argo.” Many have cheered the musical “Come From Away.”  My wonderful daughter-in-law and her parents and siblings came to the U.S. from Canada and while now proud Americans, they are also proud Canadians. Few are the Americans who don’t genuinely consider our cousins to the north very close friends, if not so strong in the national security department, and also very baffling in their politics.

In the era of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, when the West stood up together and defeated the Soviet Union, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was a friend indeed who, while he could not bring great force to bear on the communist powers, stood side-by-side with Reagan even as later Canadian Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper stood shoulder to should with President George W. Bush and all America in the aftermath of the attack on our country. 

Canada has always been an ally of the strongest power in the West — first as part of the British Empire, then as part of the Commonwealth and as a part of NATO through the whole of the Cold War and since then as part of the “Five Eyes” of the intelligence consortium where trust and shared values were assumed. 

Those assumptions have now frayed.

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The long and wearisome tenure of Justin Trudeau marked a turning of Canada away from the shared values of the long Anglo-American history, but as he was always a clownish figure, one that not many Americans really worried about as a true expression of the values of our friends to the north, the idea of Canada as hostile to the U.S. was unthinkable. When Mark Carney — an international banker first and for decades — took over from Trudeau, it was anyone’s guess how he would govern, but few expected the events of this January. 

Now we know. Carney went to Davos last week and delivered a 15-minute masterclass in the national security equivalent of fantasy baseball and an exercise in very real moral equivalence, one that would inevitably insult serious-minded Americans, as Canada’s head of government choose to define the world as divided into one class of two or three “hegemons,” then another of “middle powers” and then everybody else. 

Carney then presumed to speak on behalf of the “middle powers,” and did so in a way calculated to insult America by explicitly placing us in the “hegemon” category that includes China (and maybe Russia?), and calling out to the “middle powers” to band together to oppose the hegemons, even as Canada desires robust trade with both China and the United States.

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Make time to search out and listen for yourself to Carney’s speech and the Q-and-A that followed at Davos. The speech is quietly, but quite definitely, anti-American. Thoroughly so, in fact, though cowardly in its avoidance of explicitly naming the U.S. or President Donald Trump except by reference to that word, “hegemons.”

The former banker got a standing ovation from the other bankers assembled at their annual pep rally. Of course he would get one. In their fantasy world, they ought to run everything. They don’t, but they quite certainly believe they should. 

As you listen to Carney, reject fantasy and keep in mind some hard facts, beginning with Canada’s failure for almost 40 years to spend even 2% of their GDP on their and the West’s defenses.

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Carney seems to envision these “middle powers” as a variant of the non-aligned nations of the Cold War. Which is odd since Canada depends almost entirely on America for its national defense and especially for the freedom of the seas that allows it to sell its oil to China. In truth, Canada is far from a “middle power.”

The genuine “middle powers” are the nuclear powers other than the U.S., China and Russia. That small group of actual “middle powers” like India, Israel and Pakistan do not possess genuine “second strike” capability upon which the actual substance of nuclear deterrence between the superpowers depends, but they do have nuclear weapons and should and indeed must be treated differently than small powers. And this group does not include Canada, which is a small power.

Not all small powers carry their relative weight. Some are almost “free riders.”

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By way of contrast with Canada with its 42 million people, $2.4 trillion economy and not yet 2%-of-GDP defense budget, Poland has 39 million people, a GDP of one trillion, but spends 38 billion —4.7% of its GDP — on defense. 

Finland has only 5.6 million people, a GDP of $300 billion and spends $7.35 billion on defense — 3% of its GDP. Its active duty personnel number 23,000–24,000 (including conscripts and the Border Guard) and it possesses a massive wartime mobilization capacity of roughly 280,000 troops. Supported by a reserve of nearly 900,000, the Finnish Defense Forces focus on territorial defense, with plans to potentially increase reserve strength. 

Poland and Finland are in the first rank of small powers in the West as they carry their weight, and don’t rely almost exclusively on the U.S. for their defense — as Canada does.

Neither Poland nor Finland sent its head of government to curry favor with the Chinese communists this month or to Switzerland thereafter to insult the United States by comparing America to China in terms decidedly ambiguous as to which is the free country with frequent rotation of power among its parties and individual liberties zealously guarded by an independent judiciary. 

Canada is actually a relatively small power even among all small powers when it comes to military strength. It has been a friendly small power to us since the War of 1812, but it is still a very small power. When Carney felt obliged to declare at Davos that Canada stands with Greenland and Denmark, he was striking a very small chest for consumption back home among the “elites” of Canada on whose votes he depends. Again, against whom Canada was standing, Carney didn’t say out loud because, in that uniquely cowardly approach to rhetoric, he doesn’t name President Trump.

Carney, according to the New York Times, “described the end of the era underpinned by United States hegemony, calling the current phase ‘a rupture.’ He never mentioned President Trump by name, but his reference was clear.” If he really wants a rupture, Carney picked the right president to insult, even in his shadow puppet style.

Carney talked about the need for Europe and the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” to come into existence and grow strong to oppose the hegemons. The “Trans-Pacific Partnership” Carney exhorts doesn’t actually exist and never will, as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and South Korea are not into national security fantasy baseball and don’t want to “rupture” their relations with the hegemon not named China as they count on the unnamed hegemon to keep the peace and deter China’s many ambitions on their turfs. 

Yes, Carney really did equate China and the U.S. — just two hegemons. No differences at all between them. 

In fact, as Carney had just come back from kowtowing to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, perhaps Canada is actually throwing in with the other hegemon. Carney did, after all, explicitly announce an “alliance” with Xi’s regime, which Canada has apparently forgiven for its genocide against the Uyghurs (despite Carney’s double declaration at Davos about the need for the world to respect “human rights.”) Carny also did not mention that Xi’s regime had crushed Hong Kong’s liberties, that it has jailed Jimmy Lai in solitary confinement for years and threatens Taiwan on a monthly basis. That the Chinese communists flaunt any actual international norms and World Trade Organization rules did not get even an aside, much less a sentence in Carney’s soaring rhetoric.

Carney’s tight with the ChiComs. Or afraid of them. Or both. Either way, Canada will import China’s EVs and China will buy Canada’s oil — an amoral banker’s idea of the perfect world order. 

Canada is — according to Carney — an energy “superpower!” Right. The freedom of the seas upon which tankers carrying Canadian crude depends is American made. That the oceans are safe for trade is made possible by the other hegemon’s navy — ours. 

Canada’s Navy has about 8,400 sailors and about 30 ships. (Each of America’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers has 5,000 sailors). Canada has 400 aircraft and 15,000 in its Air Force. The U.S. Air Force is the finest in the world, with more than 5,000 aircraft of all varieties flown and cared for by more than 310,000 men and women. Our Space Force will work to secure Canada from far away too. (The Canadian military, very small but stalwart and staffed by national security professionals not bankers, is integrated into our defense of the North American continent.)

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Canada does not have a land frontier across which Russian troops can march as they did into Ukraine when the “middle powers” of Europe, plus the infirmity of President Joe Biden failed to deter the dictator Putin (just as President Barack Obama failed to deter Putin in the first invasion of Ukraine). But even if Russia grew as covetous of Canada’s land as China is of Taiwan’s, it is the hegemon to Canada’s immediate south that would provide the defense against such a move. 

Carney also didn’t mention the $62 billion trade surplus Canada has with the U.S. In fact, his speech is free of the reality of hard facts. He does mention that Canada has submarines. It does. It has four. The newest was commissioned in 2015. The other 3 were commissioned in 2003 (2) and 2000 (1). The U.S. has about 70, all of them nuclear-powered: 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), 4 Ohio-class guided-missile submarines (SSGNs), and over 50 fast-attack submarines (SSNs) (including Los Angeles, Seawolf and Virginia classes). 

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Unlike Poland and Finland, which are frontline states with Russia, Canada doesn’t actually have any ability to repulse conventional incursions from Russia without the U.S. to quickly back it up. Canada exists blissfully under the umbrella of American hard power and Carney knows — as every Canadian surely does — we would defend Canada in word and deed. But Carney’s sneering tone and banker’s virtue signaling should not fool ordinary Canadians. It is possible to insult your friends to the south by lumping us in with the alliance of tyrants headquartered in Beijing.

Carney’s was a cowardly bit of theater by a banker for bankers, an anti-Trump speech by the fellow who just got back from warmly embracing Xi. Did I mention Carney got a standing ovation from all the other “middle power” wannabe bankers and blue state elites? It’s so easy to pose. 

The truth — the real, hard facts of the world — is that Canada is not a “middle power.” It’s a small power blessed to live under the security umbrella provided for the past 80 years by the U.S., and to earn its excellent standard of living because of American consumers and the freedom of the seas guaranteed by the U.S. When you hear Carney declare Canada to be an “energy superpower,” ask yourself to which countries does it sell its oil and to which countries could its oil be sold should freedom of the seas be contested?

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Justin Trudeau was a clown.  Mark Carney appears to be a vain banker from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities — a “master of the universe” in an imaginary world.

Whatever the ultimate decision of the United States Supreme Court, President Trump ought to be understood by everyone to have the power to impose tariffs on countries selling oil to the other “hegemons.” Carney may not have consulted the average Canadian on the trade-off that could follow his endorphin rush which come from insulting Trump and America versus any real costs imposed in response to the Maple Leaf’s new love for the dragon. But they will be stuck with the consequences and there won’t be any “middle powers” to sell its goods to if Carney succeeds in angering not just the president, but serious Americans.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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