Canada’s national security is increasingly under threat.
Territorial claims of the Arctic, targeted attacks on public cyberspaces and the growing hostility of our largest trading partner leave policymakers scrambling for an effective response to an unprecedented national security environment.
We address this via three interconnected policy domains, concentrating on centering resilience by design. The domains are economic, cyber and Arctic security.
For the first time, national security must be understood not as an isolated risk, but as a complex, evolving threat deeply interwoven into both international and individual security. Economic security remains at the centre of this framework which promotes broader stability and national resilience.
The question of identifying the best strategy for promoting national security should no longer be framed in abstract terms. Instead, policymakers must focus on the most effective solutions to safeguard Canadian sovereignty in a rapidly shifting global landscape.
Economic security
Our national security plan must focus on resisting coercion and strengthening our key export industries in the face of today’s unpredictable economic landscape. Our economic strategy houses two complementary policies, one international and one domestic, to advance Canada’s goals for trade diversification.
Our international policy tackles the country’s main barriers to trade with the Indo-Pacific region, which is expected to make up half the world’s GDP by 2040. These barriers include market intelligence, consistent presence and engagement with trade partners. Building on Canada’s current Indo-Pacific strategy, we can reallocate existing funding to expand the trade office and facilitate more frequent international business-to-business meetings. A more consistent approach would secure smaller, focused deals that match our exports directly to the needs of our partners across the Pacific and build trust in the long term.
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Our domestic policy should also address the significant infrastructure investment gap preventing us from expanding exports beyond the United States. It’s essential to leverage Canadian industry investment to complement federal funding to complete trade infrastructure projects, such as those that connect Canadian ports to the Indo-Pacific region.
We suggest that the newly minted Strategic Exports Office include Transport Canada officials who have supply-chain expertise and foster co-ordination of exports and infrastructure needs through business-government councils. The goal here is to build upon existing relationships between key export industries and the government. It is high time that Canada completes the infrastructure projects industries need to conduct trade with non-U.S. partners. This includes co-ordination of all projects within the Prairie-to-Pacific trade corridor.
Cybersecurity
A modern national security plan must also bolster Canada’s digital sovereignty through cybersecurity. It is alarming how vulnerable Canada’s critical infrastructure is to cyberattacks, which can cause costly and harmful disruptions to energy, health, water and other sectors. Canada needs more robust cybersecurity policies and systems to achieve compliance.
One way to reduce Canada’s vulnerability is to create a federally funded cybersecurity accreditation program designed for critical-infrastructure companies. Accreditation programs are attractive to companies because they allow them to showcase to the public their level of cybersecurity and reliability. Meanwhile, the federal government in collaboration with the Standards Council of Canada would have a better sense of the security levels in these critical sectors. It’s a win-win.
Canada is reliant on foreign data centres. This makes data encryption a necessary requirement for all critical infrastructure under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Few people realize that data stored abroad is subject to foreign data-protection laws, allowing other countries to access Canadian data regardless of our domestic regulations. One of the best ways to mitigate the risk of data breaches is encryption.
To complement this, the PIPEDA Act should make privacy impact assessments obligatory for all businesses that store Canadian data abroad. This would ensure that companies take proper precautions before signing data-storage contracts with foreign entities. Quebec’s Law 25 already requires this of businesses. The Quebec privacy regulator even provides templates to facilitate the process. The rest of Canada should follow suit.
Arctic security
Canada’s Arctic is our natural frontier. It is the clearest and most immediate test of whether Canadian sovereignty is real or rhetorical. As climate change accelerates access to northern waters and geopolitical competition intensifies, the Arctic has become a domain where presence, co-ordination and credibility matter more than ever.
These developments have been anticipated for some time, yet Canada’s response has been sluggish. Domain awareness, understanding what is happening within our borders, is fundamental to asserting sovereignty, yet it is only one piece of the puzzle. The main vulnerability lies in our fragmented awareness and scattered responsibilities, making it difficult to turn information into prompt action. In such a vast and harsh environment, these co-ordination failures directly undermine our national sovereignty.
A strategy of resilience by design requires correcting this structural weakness. That begins with treating the Arctic as a core national-security priority. Investments in infrastructure and sustained presence are essential, as recent federal commitments have rightly recognized. This includes investing in drones, aviation infrastructure and ensuring our military and coast guard have the equipment they need to operate a sustained presence. But infrastructure alone is insufficient without a system that integrates surveillance, intelligence and response across departments and agencies.
One practical proposal is the establishment of an Arctic marine security operations centre to fuse information and co-ordinate action in real time. More broadly, Canada must move toward an integrated model of domain awareness, one that links what we see in the Arctic to what we do about it. Centering this approach across government and in collaboration with First Nations partners and the people who call the Arctic home is critical in bringing Canada up to speed in defending our sovereignty.
If Canada is to remain a credible, autonomous state in an era of renewed great-power competition, the Arctic is where that credibility will be measured first. Securing sovereignty in the North is therefore both deeply symbolic and foundational.
A resilient national security strategy
As it stands, Canada is vulnerable to coercion by foreign actors. The economic, cyber and Arctic domains pose the most immediate and acute threats to our sovereignty, which is why they are at the heart of our security strategy. These domains reinforce and strengthen one another, meaning an investment in one benefits them all. A strong economy enables funding for Arctic surveillance, which is necessary for territorial sovereignty. Meanwhile, stronger cyber policies guard against data breaches that harm our infrastructure.
Understanding this interdependence is essential to building a forward-looking national security strategy.
The recommendations in this article come from the gold-medal team in this year’s National Annual Public Administration Case Competition, organized by the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration and the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. The authors competed against 13 other graduate schools’ teams to generate policy solutions for a timely public policy issue. This is the second year in a row a Concordia University team has won the gold medal. The Institute for Research on Public Policy, the publisher of Policy Options, is a sponsor of the competition, which has been held since 2012.
