From migs to Careny: Canada’s Security awakening must become Capability

On Monday, at the Montreal International Security Summit hosted by the Montreal Institute for Global Security, military leaders, diplomats, investors, policy-makers, and defence innovators sent a remarkably consistent message: Canada’s security can no longer be separated from its economy, industrial capacity, or alliances.

Again and again, the discussion returned to uncomfortable truths. Capabilities matter more than declarations. Procurement must move faster. Canada needs sovereign manufacturing capacity in critical areas but cannot build everything alone. We must learn from Ukraine, work with trusted allies, secure critical minerals and supply chains, and create a defence industrial base capable not simply of buying equipment but of adapting and producing at scale.

One speaker described Build, Partner, Buy not merely as a framework but as a “firing order.” Another made an equally important distinction between stockpiles and capability. Warehouses filled with drones that could be technologically obsolete within months are not resilient. The sovereign asset is the ability to quickly design, manufacture, modify, and replenish the next generation. The discussion extended well beyond defence.

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Artificial intelligence, cyberattacks, critical infrastructure, foreign interference, economic coercion, and the resilience of democratic societies are becoming inseparable elements of national security. Three days later, Prime Minister Mark Carney released The Plan for a Stronger Canada, Canada’s first national security strategy in more than twenty years. Its most consequential sentence is also its simplest: “The line between economic security and national security has disappeared.” That is an overdue recognition of the world Canada now inhabits.

This new strategy brings economic security, foreign policy, defence, intelligence, and public safety into one framework. Ottawa pledges to strengthen strategic industries, secure supply chains, rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces, accelerate procurement, modernize intelligence, and confront foreign interference, espionage, organized crime, money laundering, and foreign information manipulation.

But the devil is in the details, and former spy Dennis Molinaro (CSIS)  and former Superintendent of the RCMP, Garry Clement, characterize it as a plan towards a plan rather than a real effort to address the fact that Canada is a haven for terrorist proxies, malign state actors and organized crime conduits connected to CRINKS alliance countries.  But let’s give them credit for identifying in writing the geopolitical realities confronting all democracies.

So in principle it deserves support. It also deserves relentless scrutiny for the reasons stated above.  The test is whether Ottawa is prepared to name and prioritize threats, protect strategic technologies, enforce sanctions and trade rules, secure infrastructure, confront transnational repression, and build industrial capacity to sustain Canada and its allies through a prolonged crisis. And that brings us back to Montreal.