Last Monday, US Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby announced the suspension of the 86-year-old Permanent Joint Board on Defence.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and William Lyon Mackenzie King founded the board at Ogdensburg, New York, in August 1940. It later helped create the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Arctic warning radar stations and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Colby’s post linked to Mark Carney’s address at the World Economic Forum in Davos four months earlier. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments,” he wrote. “We can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
Carney’s government rejected that framing. Canada had met NATO’s 2% of GDP defence spending target ahead of schedule, committing to 5% by 2035.
Ottawa treated the suspension as an opening.
Canada’s European Bet Was Already Placed
Canada’s European turn began before Colby’s post. On 20 May, the European Parliament formally ratified Canada’s entry into the defence borrowing and procurement agreement known as SAFE, making it the only non-European country to join.
The programme is the lead pillar of the European Commission’s Readiness 2030 plan, targeting up to €800 billion in European defence spending by decade’s end. European rearmament has drawn close attention on both sides of the Atlantic.
Defence Minister David McGuinty had signed the formal Security Action for Europe agreement at the Munich Security Conference in February, three months before the suspension. Canada and the European Union sealed the Security and Defence Partnership at the Brussels summit the previous June, covering cyber, Arctic, maritime and procurement cooperation. Carney has framed his posture around “middle powers” banding together against great-power pressure.
Under the SAFE agreement, Canadian firms can now bid for European procurement contracts on broadly equivalent terms to EU member companies. McGuinty called it a “major marketplace for us.” This matters because Canadian defence firms had anchored much of their business to US contracts, now exposed to tariff disruption and procurement preference under the Trump administration.
Greenland Draws Copenhagen and Ottawa Together
Donald Trump spent the early weeks of 2026 insisting he would acquire Greenland, Danish sovereign territory, threatening a 25% import tax on European nations unless Denmark complied.
Trump walked back the explicit military threat at Davos. By then, the largest recorded protest in Greenland’s history had gathered in Nuuk, bringing out roughly one quarter of the capital’s residents.
Canada holds its own Arctic archipelago, much of it adjacent to Greenland’s coastline. The case Trump made for Greenland, that only the United States could properly defend it, applies with little adjustment to Canada’s north.
Denmark and Canada now occupy matching positions on Washington’s territorial map. That overlap in exposure is a shared interest that needs no formal declaration.
Michigan Operatives, Albertan Voter Data
A separatist group called the Centurion Project loaded personal records of 2.9 million Albertan voters onto an app built with Michigan-based Republican operatives under the name 10xVotes. Elections Alberta obtained a court injunction on 30 April, forcing the app offline.
CSIS director Daniel Rogers confirmed on 9 May that the referendum process would be subject to foreign interference, with Russian-aligned networks and American political operatives amplifying the separatist conversation.
US State Department officials met Alberta separatist leaders three times between April 2025 and January 2026. Alberta holds roughly 167 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, with roughly 95% of its crude flowing south into the United States. Ottawa controls the regulatory environment, pipeline approvals and pricing framework. A separated Alberta would hand all three to whoever fills the void.
Stay Free Alberta submitted more than 300,000 signatures to Elections Alberta on 4 May, exceeding the threshold needed to place a separation question on the October ballot, though Elections Alberta had not verified the count by mid-May.
All in all, pressure from Washington on trade, provincial integrity and Arctic sovereignty is producing the outcome Washington presumably set out to prevent. Canada is adding Europe to its orbit.
That is what natural consequences tend to look like.
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