The Rupture

A few months ago, we were approached by Canadian journalist Stephen Marche, about the second season of his podcast, Gloves Off. 

Stephen wrote “The Next Civil War” about American politics and culture, and since the first season of Gloves Off last summer, he’s been thinking deeply about what Canada can do about our decades-long dependency on the United States. Stephen and his team are grappling with questions about how Canada can thrive in the midst of geopolitical rupture, and American aggression.

For the next eight weeks, we’ve partnered to provide research and expert analysis. It’s an eight-part series about the threat to Canada’s sovereignty and what we can do about it. 

The first episode just dropped. You can watch here or find links to various podcast feeds over at the Gloves Off website. We’ll also be posting some of our research work on the Shield website each week.

There’s one word in the Trump Administration’s AI Executive Order that epitomizes the current geopolitical stance of the United States: Domination.

Previous administrations wanted the U.S. to lead in artificial intelligence. This one wants to dominate. That shift from leadership to dominance is the key to understanding most of what the Trump administration has done over the last eighteen months, and what it means for Canada. 

What is emerging from the Trump administration is not conventional American conservatism or even standard protectionism. It is something more systematic: a deliberate shift from liberal economic integration toward a command-style national security industrial strategy. AI, chips, cloud infrastructure, payments, energy, capital, standards, maritime capacity and supply chains are being repositioned — explicitly — as instruments of American dominance. 

For Canada, our core digital, financial, defence, and infrastructure dependencies already run through U.S. systems. That interdependence was mostly manageable when both countries operated under a shared assumption of mutual benefit. But that exposure is more of a vulnerability today.

As we’ve been talking through these ideas with the Gloves Off team, we’ve put together two resources that we think you’ll find useful too:

The first is a cheat sheet and interactive timeline covering the major executive orders, legislative actions, and industrial policies that the Trump administration has put forward since 2025.

The firehose of news can be disorienting, so it’s good to collect it all in one place — from the AI executive orders and the GENIUS Act on stablecoins, to outbound investment controls, maritime strategy, and the One Big Beautiful Bill. Each entry includes what the policy does and what it implies for Canada.

Taken together, the past 18 months of American policy reveal a coherent through-line: the U.S. is treating markets, technology, energy, data infrastructure, AI models, and investment flows as instruments of national power — and it is moving fast. Executive orders have restructured AI governance, accelerated semiconductor and data centre development, expanded controls on outbound investment, reasserted maritime ambition, and begun pushing a full-stack American AI export strategy onto allied markets.

This is the context for Canada negotiating a renewed trade deal of some kind with the United States, and potentially getting strong-armed into making concessions. 

That’s why we’re also releasing our Terms of Trade glossary for readers who want a clearer handle on the language driving these debates.

The interdependence was manageable when both countries assumed mutual benefit. It becomes a different kind of exposure when Washington reframes integration as hierarchy.

For the next couple months, we’ll be dropping more policy research and analysis, alongside episodes of Gloves Off. 

I’ll also be participating in a weekly chat show with Stephen Marche and John Shell, Managing Director of Social Capital Partners, where we talk about these issues in a frank and unstructured way. Watch the first of those chat shows here.