The Politics of Canada in the Shadow of Empire: a Q&A with Yves Engler
Photograph Soruce: The White House – Public Domain
Canadian foreign policy is at times presented as rights-based and as an example of textbook multilateralism. The left often argues, however, that beneath the surface lies a politics of power that aligns Ottawa’s interests with the Pentagon’s. This raises questions about the country’s role in peace and conflict. In this exclusive interview from Montreal for CounterPunch, writer and activist Yves Engler, co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy(Baraka Books, 2024), looks at the contradictions shaping Canada’s global politics under Prime Minister Mark Carney. He covers Canada’s relationship with the US and the overall limitations of Canadian sovereignty. Further, Engler comments on the nation’s response to Gaza and the unprecedented protest movements it has inspired across the country. He looks at the future of Canadian Liberal foreign policy as the hemisphere tilts closer towards fascism.
Daniel Falcone: You covered a lot regarding Canada’s foreign policy in The House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy (Black Rose Books, 2020). In author Peter McFarlane’s recent work, Last Call for Canada: Sovereign Nation or Vassal State (Baraka Books, 2026), he cites George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1965). Grant raised initial concerns about Canadian sovereignty at the hands of US influence. How does Canada’s relationship with the US impact its ability to pursue a “progressive” foreign policy in the Mark Carney era, especially concerning the Middle East?
Yves Engler: The elite in Canada see the world and profit from it in ways that are very similar to the elite in the US. There is opposition to Trump that can elicit a nationalist backlash, so there is hostility in that sense. But if you look at the long-term picture, at least since World War II or arguably going back more than a century, there has been this basic view of the world organized around profit that is remarkably similar on both sides of the border. You can see that historically. For instance, when the US occupied Cuba, the Royal Bank of Canada was the preferred bank because at that time there were restrictions on the international operations of US banks. Thus the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), still Canada’s largest bank today, became the main financial institution for the US occupation of Cuba. That is just one very concrete example of Canadian capital benefiting from US imperial domination around the world.
That must be a central part of the discussion. Obviously, you can point out innumerable examples of it. Carney, I think, is somebody who just sees the world the way an international banker does. That is what he has been for the better part of 30-plus years at Goldman Sachs, Brookfield Asset Management, as governor of the Bank of Canada, and then governor of the Bank of England. He sees the world through a certain Eurocentric capitalist lens. But he is also a leader boxed in by Canada’s relationship with the US. (See: recent US placement of heavy tariffs, going up to 50%, on Canadian metals like aluminum; crude oil and energy products are exempt from these threats). So then, the US relationship obviously has an impact on whether the Carney government is going to oppose the genocide in Gaza or support Trump’s attack on Iran.
In the case of Iran, Carney came out almost immediately to endorse it. He later backed away rhetorically but his initial statement was supportive. More important than the rhetoric, however, is that Canada has a base in Kuwait located on a US base with about 200 Canadian troops stationed there. Canada also has bases (“operational support hubs”) in Jamaica, Senegal, and Germany that are explicitly part of supporting the Pentagon’s global military infrastructure. There are also recent reports that Canadian officers oversaw the US base in Qatar from the middle of last year through the end of the year. When Israel and the US attacked Iran during the 12-day conflict, it was a Canadian overseeing air operations. These are all parts of the uniquely close ties between the Canadian and US militaries. There is no other military that is more integrated with the US military than Canada’s, with hundreds of formal agreements between them.
Therefore, the Canadian military is very much structured to assist the US military around the world. It is not structured to defend Canada against the only country that could realistically invade it, which is of course the US. The point is that there is a curtailment of Canadian sovereignty in a fundamental sense [via Fortress North America]. But Canada’s capitalist elite do not actually want sovereignty in some ways. They want to be part of the US empire, just as they were once part of the British Empire. Concretely, the Canadian military (and nationalism) itself was created as an institution of the British Empire that conquered these lands. Then, over the past seven decades, it has increasingly become a historical extension of US empire.
Daniel Falcone: Can you talk about the role of Canadian civil society in global politics? What is their collective reaction to Canada’s foreign policy in terms of upholding human rights and international law in relation to Gaza? I know that Doctors Without Borders, for example, has done great work on this. (See: Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience: A behind-the-scenes account of MSF decision-making, 2012).
Yves Engler: Palestine is something unique because there has been a substantive, organized protest movement. The movements against the Canadian role in the genocide in Gaza are the most significant and sustained popular uprisings against Canada’s complicity in international crimes. There really hasn’t been anything else on this scale. There were major protests of apartheid in South Africa that went on for a long time, but they were nowhere near as significant as the protests we’ve seen over the past three years. There were also big movements against Canada formally joining the Iraq War in 2003, and those were very sizable here in Montreal.
Although the protests to the Iraq War were larger than anything we’ve seen in Gaza (the high point for Gaza was around 50,000 people, while for the Iraq War we reached close to 100,000 people twice, for two different demonstrations), the difference with Gaza is the sustained nature of the social movement.
Here in Montreal there were protests every weekend for two years. There were many protests with 50,000 people, and then 10,000, 20,000, multiple times. Even a year and a half into it, demonstrations were still regularly drawing more than 1,000 people. Then it shifted with protests happening on both Saturdays and Sundays, partly because of some internal divisions within the movement. But there has never been a more active street movement. I’ve been to around 250 Palestine-related demonstrations and actions over the past three years myself.
It is contradictory in the sense that we still have not won the big, obvious policy change that should have been the lowest-hanging fruit, a formal arms embargo. Looking back, the Trudeau government claimed that Canada was not selling weapons to Israel, and that was mostly a lie. But even the limited measures they announced only addressed a small part of Canadian arms exports, because the major channel is through the US. Canada has a 60-year-old Defense Production Sharing Agreement with the US, where arms sales are not even fully tabulated in the same way.
For example, General Dynamics here in Montreal were still sending things like components and small arms ammunition to Israel throughout that period. The arms embargo that the government claimed to have introduced, which was supposed to end permits for arms sales, wasn’t even addressing most of the arms transfers that were happening through the US to Israel. (Note: The current Canadian government claims that since January 8, 2024, it has not approved new permits for weapons that could be used in Gaza).
Overall, though, regarding Gaza, the large movement has had massive amounts of protest activity, including the encampment at McGill, which was very prominent. I was there for four months during the student encampment. It featured many direct actions and all kinds of other organizing. Similar versions of this happened across the country. We didn’t win in terms of major policy changes but there have been some smaller wins and rhetorical shifts from the government. For example, they began criticizing Israel more openly and said that they would arrest Netanyahu if he came to Canada, even though he has flown through Canadian airspace several times.
We also saw a major shift in public opinion, and it has changed very significantly. All these protests have clearly chipped away, slowly, over time at public perceptions of Israel and Zionism. There have been other major movements re: Afghanistan and historic movements around nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. Those were important struggles. Unfortunately, the reality is that many of Canada’s international crimes and interventions, like the bombing of Libya in 2011, for example, generated little protest by comparison.
Mark Carney is now pursuing what I would call a radical militarist agenda and huge increases in military spending. There’s very little organized opposition. Generally, foreign policy issues are kind of ignored by the broader public, and there aren’t as many institutional mechanisms for challenging them. One important distinction between the US and Canada is that labour unions in Canada still represent roughly 31 percent of the workforce, two or three times higher than the percentage in the US. There are institutional ways for defending workers against capital. They’re not as combative as I would like to see, and there are certainly limitations, but those instruments do exist. When it comes to foreign policy issues, though, it’s a very different situation. There are a few small chapters of organizations like World BEYOND War, and now Palestine has developed some institutional infrastructure around the issue. But for the most part, anti-war and international issues are driven by small grassroots groups that have little money and institutional backing.
Daniel Falcone: Carney might expect everyday Canadians to take peace and reconciliation of First Nations seriously domestically. Does the government’s support for Israeli and US priorities create a human rights credibility gap and undermine this project in your view? Further, which Canadian development programs are rights-based, and which are corporately driven? The Liberal approach might be to conflate them?
Yves Engler: I think it would be an interesting contrast between Carney and Trudeau on that question [of power sharing]. Trudeau had a rhetorical reconciliation agenda. I wouldn’t necessarily call it decolonization, but there was a progressive rhetorical element around Canada’s history of dispossession of First Nations. In practice, though, it was very limited. They didn’t even overcome the issue of water advisories on reserves.
At one point, there were 200 or so reserves where people had to boil their water because it wasn’t safe to drink. They did reduce that number; I think they got it down to around 50, though I don’t remember the exact number. There was an improvement over the seven or eight years of the Trudeau government, but they still didn’t fully resolve the issue. Carney, by contrast, has largely ignored that question. In fact, he has moved quite aggressively in the opposite direction. The so-called Bill C-5, which included the Building Canada Act, was pushed through very early in his mandate, and it essentially reverses that trajectory. I argue that it tramples on steps toward the principle of free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous First Nations when it comes to projects affecting their territories. That has effectively been overridden by this new legislation. Carney has taken an aggressive, openly pro-capital approach, all under the guise of defending Canada from Trump. The whole framing is about “building Canada.”
Trump is destabilizing us economically, so we have this idea that we must build more pipelines to the coast. Contradictorily, that means Indigenous rights gets discussed but little is done. In Canada, Indigenous issues should be at the core of what is distinct about the country. But that is not a capitalist conception. When it comes to foreign policy, I think there is a bit of a contradiction. Rhetorically, there might be some sense that we should have land acknowledgement statements, and we should oppose Europeans dispossessing Indigenous peoples, but then, when it comes to Israel, that framework is completely thrown out the window. (This is the case even among some of the Indigenous leadership).
In terms of development, there is an important dynamic in Canadian foreign policy, which is that aid is not really aid in the way that most people think of the term. Aid is principally about advancing Canadian geopolitical interests, and often corporate interests quite directly. In many cases, aid is designed to advance Canadian mining interests. And there’s a famous example in Colombia where Canadian aid played a central role in rewriting the country’s mining code. It rewrote it in a way that served companies and explicitly undercut Indigenous rights.
That was a case of Canadian aid being put at the service of extractive companies, specifically international extractive companies. And in the case of mining, Canada plays a dominant role. When you are talking about international mining, you are largely talking about Canadian mining companies. There is a serious duplicitous element to how Canadian aid projects are framed: the idea that “we’re just trying to help the world’s poor.” But more often, these projects end up advancing Canada’s geopolitical interests and Canadian corporate interests.
Daniel Falcone: So, then Canada holds important global political influence regarding critical minerals and security issues with the US. Can its citizens develop a social movement that pushes the Carney government to use that leverage in pursuit of peace?
Yves Engler: When it comes to critical minerals, the Pentagon is funding several Canadian mining projects. There was a big controversy recently around one of these projects, which the community defeated, and the Pentagon was funding a significant portion of it. There is this whole mechanism where the US military is literally funding mineral projects in Canada because they are part of this competition with China over certain critical minerals.
Here, Canada exercises substantial leverage. It’s a wealthy country; it’s a member of the G7. Could the power of Canada as a viable State be put toward more peaceful and justice-oriented ends? Of course it could. There’s no reason, at any theoretical level, why it couldn’t. But the country isn’t structured in that way. Public opinion is open to a different conception of Canada, one as a force for peace in the world. But right now, public opinion is distracted and preoccupied with anti-Trump sentiment. Politically speaking, no one is saying, “Let’s pause these soldier and officer training programs, as long as Trump is threatening to annex Canada.”
Obviously, I come at it from an internationalist and anti-imperialist angle, but you could even frame this in a nationalist way within the political system. The opinion polls are just overwhelming. Just like on Palestine, polls strongly favour Palestinian rights and Canadians reject genocide, but it doesn’t translate politically. Public opinion is essentially ignored. It is not necessarily a problem of public opinion but perhaps public awareness and political representation. If people don’t fully know what Canada has been doing in places like Haiti over the years, they won’t speak on it.
As a rule, the tendencies are not bad. Canadian tendencies are peace-minded and internationalist. The problem is that they don’t have much political legitimacy behind them, and there isn’t really a political avenue for expressing those views. You can even see this with something like Cuba. Cuba is an interesting example because Canadian public opinion has historically been quite different from that of the US. At the high point, around a million Canadians were going there every year. Particularly here in Quebec, there is a real sense of personal connection and solidarity with Cuba. Even as many Canadians go there through resort tourism, they still have some reference point and some level of solidarity. Carney has just completely capitulated on any sense of challenging Trump’s total campaign of suffocating that country. The government went along and travel advisories were adopted by Ottawa. These measures harmed both Cuban and Canadian companies.
Power structures are not oriented toward internationalism, justice, or equality in international affairs. This is generally true across the board, but it is particularly bad when it comes to foreign policy because the public has very little ability to influence that. There are some examples where public pressure has mattered like when the Iraq War in 2003 impacted the Chrétien government. In the case of Iraq, Canada still supported war in a whole range of different ways, but it didn’t provide the main thing that Bush wanted, a formal endorsement of the coalition. And that was because of mass protests.
Other movements against apartheid in South Africa, the Vietnam War, and the high points of peace activism and nuclear activism in the mid-to-late 1980s were also movements that had some significant impact on Canadian policy. Unfortunately, the victories that were won were only partial.
Daniel Falcone: Some have expressed that Canada could end up as an American territory like Puerto Rico; it is seen as a worst-case scenario. It makes it sound like the Canadian government’s concern is less about liberation or self-determination, and more about preserving Canada’s international power and status. Is the real fear losing influence rather than losing sovereignty?
Yves Engler: If you look at some of Carney’s first reactions to Trump’s threats, he goes to France and the UK; he did this when we trade with Mexico. He did not prioritize or legitimize Mexico. There’s a racial element to this just like there is a history. The conception is, “since we are a part of NATO, we are part of the G7, we are the big boys who help run the world.” In a narrow sense, what Canada should be saying is “we don’t like what this current US president is doing, and we need to be principally opposed to bad policies and commit to those in the world struggling against domination,” to uphold long-term Canadian legitimacy and sovereignty.
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