A Sovereignty Collab with the Gloves Off Podcast
Happy Canada Day!
July 1 is also the deadline for all three parties involved in CUSMA to decide whether to renew the deal for another 16 years, withdraw or start an annual rolling review process.
It’s going to be a Hot CUSMA Summer.
As these negotiations continue, we’re thinking through Canada’s new place in an unpredictable world order and how we can meaningfully rebuild our economic sovereignty. That’s why we were excited to partner with journalist Stephen Marche and the team at Intellengentsia Productions as they developed the second season of their hit show, Gloves Off. They invited us along for the ride as a research partner.
Season 1 of the series was all about surviving. In the past year, Canada has become a prominent global force.
Season 2 focuses on how Canada can win. The show will explore key strategies from around the world in order to thrive economically; surveying alliances, trade, the economy, technology, defence, political influence before concluding with a cold hard look at what we’re fighting for.
Episode 1, The Rupture, dropped today. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
What you’ll hear is a clear-eyed look at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push for “middle powers” to form a third pole of global influence as the U.S. becomes a less reliable anchor for the world order. Since his Davos speech, Carney has been traveling to rally like-minded leaders, but the idea is getting a mixed response at home. Stephen explores Canadian skepticism from former foreign ministers Peter MacKay and John Manley, alongside support from former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and other international voices.
Over the next eight weeks, we’ll be releasing companion material that supports the show. Managing Director Vass Bednar will also participate in a new video podcast aftershow called Cross Check, where she will get into the nitty gritty of each episode with host Stephen Marche and Jon Shell of Social Capital Partners. This new conversation was spurred by all the public policy questions that Stephen was bombarded with last year.
We’re thrilled to contribute to the national conversation on the future of Canada that Stephen and his team are leading, and hope you will tune in.
Throughout the Gloves Off season, we’ll be publishing some of the research that we pulled together to support the show. This week, we’re publishing our Terms of Trade glossary, which surveys trade-related jargon that is quickly becoming a part of everyday conversation.
We also visualized major industrial policy moves under the Trump administration, to provide a cheat sheet on the United States’ explicit pursuit of domination. Check out the timeline at the end of this post. You can also surf through the information in this interactive.
We will elaborate on that statecraft in our newsletter, The National Interest, on Friday.
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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