Updates
Mapping Carney's Pivot
Canada has spent the last six months doing something we haven’t had to do in a generation: shopping for new relationships.
The deals are real and not the usual diplomatic pleasantries. The deals that Prime Minister Mark Carney is signing are creating new institutions and concrete commitments.
Canada has a trilateral technology and innovation partnership with India and Australia. We have a framework for arctic and space cooperation with Norway. We’ve entered into a sovereign technology alliance with Germany, and Norway might join that one too. And we’ve signed memorandums of understanding with Spain, UAE and Qatar, on AI infrastructure and emerging technologies.
A reorientation is coming together incrementally. But will it be enough?
This week, our friends at Gloves Off are looking at Canada’s international pivot. Host Stephen Marche asks: what cards do we actually hold against the global superpowers, and who should Canada be building strategic alliances with?
On the podcast, former Canadian diplomat Colin Roberson assesses the viability of a genuine third pole of power, while Antony Dworkin of the European Council on Foreign Relations explains how the EU has already started previewing what coordinated middle power leverage could look like.
To complement this episode, we’ve compiled our research into an interactive map of every significant agreement that Canada has signed since the crisis began.
You can sort it by type, by partner, and by whether the deal is forthcoming or already in place. Strategic partnerships, defence and security agreements, technology agreements, resource and energy cooperation: it’s all there.
The map only includes what’s real.
It paints a picture of Canada as a country that’s out hustling. The public debate hasn’t totally caught up with the speed of the pivot. pivoting faster than the public debate has totally caught up with.
A quick note on how we built it: we tracked every meeting between the Prime Minister and foreign ministers and scanned the associated PMO media releases. We did the same across key ministries (Defence, AI, ISED) and cross-referenced against news coverage from the Globe and Mail, CBC, Global News, and CTV. Our threshold for inclusion was strict: something had to be signed or a tangible new initiative had to be established. General commitments of cooperation, statements of intent, or expressions of shared values didn’t make the cut.
We’d love your feedback. Is an agreement something missing? Is something incorrect? Should something be removed? Provide insights through this google form.
We’ll also be adding new deals as they happen.
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