Prime Minister Mark Carney launched The Plan for a Stronger Canada on Thursday, October 29, which his office calls "Canada's first national security strategy in over 20 years." The 13-page framework puts economic security first, lists eight sectors in which Canada must build its own "Strategic Capabilities," and commits the government to "prepare for all contingencies up to and including war and other worst-case scenarios." Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told the House of Commons "this is a historic day for Canada." Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner answered that the strategy "could have been an email" and was silent on screening non-citizens entering the country; her party's statement called it "extremely weak."
Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, called the strategy both a "slim document" and "a radical rethink," and told CBC News: "It will take money, in some cases bucket loads." Philippe Lagassé, a professor at Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, wrote in his defence newsletter that "there is no money announced in the Plan. Nor should there be," and that "It's fine for this Plan to be high level. The follow-on policies should be more granular." Both sides agree the detail is still to come: under each of its five pillars the strategy says "the Government will produce a plan," and the detailed foreign, defence, economic security, public safety and intelligence policies are promised over the coming months, starting with a foreign policy in about a month, The Canadian Press reported.
What the document says
The strategy opens with a message from Carney: "Canada stands at a hinge moment in history." Its list of national interests begins with "Canadian sovereignty, first, and above all" and includes "a cooperative, clear-eyed relationship with the United States" and a "robust, permanent presence in our Arctic." The eight sectors are emerging technologies, critical minerals, defence, energy, transportation, pharmaceuticals and biotech, food security, and "payments, settlement, and investment." "Our Plan for a Stronger Canada begins, deliberately, with economic security," it says. It records that Canada spent 2 percent of GDP on defence in 2025-2026 and is "on a path" to NATO's 5 percent target by 2035. It promises a First Ministers' Meeting on national security, legislative proposals "within the first year," a review of "our entire national security enterprise," and an updated plan every four years.
"Over 20 years": what came before
Neither the strategy nor the Prime Minister's release names the earlier document; both say "over 20 years." The predecessor, identified by The Canadian Press, is Securing an Open Society: Canada's National Security Policy, a Privy Council Office publication dated April 2004 and issued under Paul Martin's Liberal government, so the gap is closer to 22 years than 20. The papers in between were not national security strategies: Strong, Secure, Engaged (2017) and Our North, Strong and Free (April 8, 2024) are defence policies, per the Department of National Defence, and the Defence Industrial Strategy released in February is a plan the new strategy says it will deliver through the Defence Investment Agency. Justin Trudeau directed officials two years ago to produce a renewed strategy in 2025; a March 2025 memo from the Privy Council clerk told Carney the draft's assumptions were "no longer valid," The Canadian Press reported on October 23.
Wark wrote in his newsletter that the 2004 policy "laid out a basket of eight diverse threats" while the new one does not "try to pin down the threat landscape"; senior officials say the threat environment is changing too rapidly for that, Wark reported. At the launch briefing, an unnamed senior official described threats running "from climate change to terrorism, crime, opioids, and pandemics, cyber attacks to frontier AI to the increasing possibility of a major war," the National Post reported.
Stephen Staley, a senior adviser at the Oyster Group, wrote in The Hub that the strategy "does not use the word terrorism once," that "Iran, China, and Russia do not appear," and that "Antisemitism is not mentioned, even though the federal government said in a report last month that it treats antisemitism as a national security issue." Profoundd's search of the canada.ca text confirms those counts; the document names Ukraine once, as an example of modern conflict. What the text does say is that the government will "counter foreign interference, espionage, violent extremism, and transnational organized crime," defend Canadians' values against "new and evolving forms of radicalization," and protect "communities vulnerable to transnational repression." Noah Shack, chief executive of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, welcomed the strategy on October 29 but said that addressing antisemitism "must be prioritized in the implementation of this new strategy." Staley raised the government's likely defence, that "a strategy like this sets direction, while the detailed work on specific threats happens in classified assessments the public never sees," and rejected it, writing that the document "has no trouble getting specific when it wants to."
The United States, named as a partner
The strategy names no country as a threat, CBC News and The Globe and Mail both reported, and the United States is the only country it treats as a bilateral priority, The Hub noted. The strategy's list of national interests says Canada "will work to maintain a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, national sovereignty, and shared responsibility for the security of North America," and its foreign-policy section promises to "build a new partnership with the United States." The Prime Minister's Office release lists "the weaponisation of trade deals" among the new threats to sovereignty, which the Globe read as an indirect reference to U.S. tariffs. Wark told The Canadian Press that although the document never says so, "it's clear that the message is around reducing Canada's dependence on unreliable allies like the United States," and that the war language confirms "that Canada aligns with its NATO partners in taking seriously the prospect that there could be a war involving NATO as an outcome of Russian aggression."
As Profoundd reported earlier this week, a Global Affairs Canada memo told Canadian diplomats in the U.S. not to meet or be photographed with midterm candidates, as the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa accused Canadian politicians of trying to influence that election; Carney said there was "no merit to these claims," and the U.S. ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, later said the embassy had not concluded that interference had occurred (Profoundd NewsRoom, October 27). Profoundd found no reaction to the strategy from the U.S. government: none on the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa's news page or among the recent posts on Hoekstra's X account, checked Friday afternoon, and none from any U.S. official in English-language web searches through Friday afternoon.
Spies, screening and the opposition
The strategy does not decide whether Canada will create a foreign spy agency like the CIA or MI6. "I don't think we're on the verge of announcing a separate agency that would be akin to the CIA or MI6," a senior official said on background, according to CBC News. Stephanie Carvin of Carleton University told The Canadian Press that intelligence Canada receives through the Five Eyes "is primarily serving American interests first, or British interest first," but that a new agency may not be necessary in an era of biometrics and AI.
In Question Period, Conservative MP Fred Davies called the strategy "a nothingburger" and said the Canada Border Services Agency "had 675 reports seeking deportation on national security grounds, but only 44 people were actually removed"; he cited no document for the figures, and the minister did not address them. Rempel Garner, the party's immigration critic, said "CSIS screening requests hit a record 538,000 in 2024," a figure her party's statement links to CSIS's 2024 public report, and asked why the strategy says nothing about screening. Anandasangaree replied that the strategy "is all-encompassing and has many elements of what my friend opposite is seeking" and that his department is "working toward finalizing a more comprehensive response that includes security screening." Tested against the text: the word "screening" appears once, in the economic-security section, which promises to "build intelligence, counterintelligence, and security screening capacity" for partnerships with companies and researchers, and the public-safety section's border bullet promises "new CBSA officers, modernized border technology, and better use of intelligence"; nothing in the document addresses screening non-citizens who seek to enter Canada.
No Bloc Québécois or NDP MP raised the strategy in Question Period on October 29, according to Hansard. Friday's Hansard was not yet posted Friday afternoon, and The Hub's selection of quotes from Friday's Question Period includes none on the strategy. Profoundd found no statement on it from the Bloc (its latest communiqué, dated October 29, concerns another subject), the NDP (whose website says some features are temporarily unavailable, and whose news page, ndp.ca/news, returned a 404 error) or any premier, checking those sites and English- and French-language web searches through Friday afternoon; the first ministers' meeting the plan promises is expected next year, The Canadian Press reported.
This article reflects reporting through the afternoon of Friday, October 30, 2026. Sources: the Privy Council Office, The Plan for a Stronger Canada; the Prime Minister's Office, October 29; House of Commons Debates, No. 158, October 29; the Conservative Party of Canada; Securing an Open Society, April 2004; National Defence on Our North, Strong and Free and Strong, Secure, Engaged; The Canadian Press via CP24, thecanadianpressnews.ca, October 23 and L'actualité; CBC News; The Globe and Mail; Wesley Wark's newsletter; Philippe Lagassé's newsletter; the National Post; the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs; The Hub's analysis and Stephen Staley.
