Pencil, Meet Eraser
How Washington Folded the Forty-One Day Table, and What Canada Does Before the Next One Opens
By Barry Appleton | Appleton’s Clause & Effect | 21 May 2026
I. Forty One Days
Forty one days from today, on 1 July 2026, the USMCA-CUSMA Joint Review opens in Ottawa.
On Monday morning, the Pentagon paused the institution that has, since August 1940, anchored every other piece of the Canada and United States defence relationship. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby announced on X that the Department of War was pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the senior advisory body created by Roosevelt and Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, New York. The agreement that created it was drafted in pencil, without consultation with either cabinet. Colby cited Canada’s failure to make “credible progress” on defence commitments, linked the move to the Hague Summit’s 3.5 per cent and 5 per cent of GDP spending targets, and pinned his thread to a transcript of the Prime Minister’s January address at Davos.
These two facts are the same fact.
The pause is not, in the first instance, about defence. It is the third leg of a coordinated pressure campaign across trade, technology, and continental security, all of it timed to the final weeks before the USMCA-CUSMA Joint Review opens. The first leg was the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report and Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s bad industrial policy framing of CUSMA. The second was USTR Greer’s testimony on Section 301 and digital services taxes. The third arrived Monday morning, posted from the Pentagon. I have written about the first two earlier this month, in Canada After the Shuffle and The Taunt as Data, and they are the same instrument applied to different surfaces.
Pausing the forum does not pause the bargain. It folds the only standing political table where the bargain was managed, forty one days before that bargain reopens in another room.
II. What Has Already Been Said
Canadian commentary moved fast. By Tuesday afternoon there were three lines.
The Prime Minister, in Quebec, declined to overplay the move. He pointed out, correctly, that the Board last met in November 2024 and that operational cooperation will continue alongside European diversification. Defence Minister David McGuinty pointed to the largest Canadian defence investments in decades: twelve under-ice submarines through the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project, eighty-eight new fighter aircraft, the new Canada and Australia Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar partnership, and billions over twenty years toward NORAD modernization. The subtext: the substantive defence relationship continues. The pause is symbol, not rupture.
Andrew Coyne, in the Globe and Mail on Tuesday, May 19 took the sharper line. The pause, he wrote, “is not about the level of Canadian defence spending” but about “how much of this new Canadian defence spending will be directed America’s way,” and should be read as “part of a larger effort to contain this country within U.S.-defined limits” on trade, defence, and resources alike. John Ivison, in the National Post the same morning, opened with the Ogdensburg agreement “drafted in pencil, without consultation with either cabinet,” and called the move “dangerous politics.” On Thursday morning, the CBC’s Murray Brewster added a third reading he called “Dr. Strangelove diplomacy”. Most Canadians had not heard of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence before Colby’s post, but they have now, and have been handed “another grievance or reason to be resentful of the imperially inclined United States, even if they had no idea the board existed, or what it did.”
A second school points the opposite way. Christian Leuprecht at the Royal Military College told the Hill Times the White House is “calling the PM’s bluff at Davos” and that the pause is “a shot across the bow.” The administration, he added, “has clearly been watching the PM’s moves on defence and has concluded that there’s too much talk and too little action.” Vice-Admiral (retired) Mark Norman, formerly Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, told reporters the move was “politically motivated” and added that he was “still really nervous about NORAD.” Kevin Page, the former Parliamentary Budget Officer, made the adjacent fiscal point in the Toronto Star on the same morning Colby posted. Ottawa has not produced a credible plan to reach NATO’s new 3.5 per cent target by 2035, and the omission, he said, is indefensible.
From Washington, Christopher Sands at the Hudson Institute, the most consistently informed American voice on Canada-U.S. relations, reads the pause the same way. The move, he writes, departs from the logic Roosevelt and Eisenhower understood: Canadian geography materially strengthens American security, and cooperation has always been a shared strategic enterprise, not a privilege Washington can withhold. He reads Carney's Davos speech as the others have not, as an acknowledgment of over-dependence on the United States rather than defiance of it, with the Canadian response being 'not defiance, but rearmament.' His verdict on the pause itself is sharper than most Canadian commentary: it 'reflects the sometimes-undisciplined nature of policymaking within the Trump administration' and 'appears less like a settled presidential decision and more like an escalation by officials seeking to signal toughness toward Canada.' He notes the pause 'could eventually be softened or quietly reversed
Each of these voices reads a different part of the same animal. The interesting question is what none of them has yet named.
Three things are missing. The first is the institutional architecture being constrained, the ladder that runs from Ogdensburg through Hyde Park and the 1950 Statement of Principles to the Defence Production Sharing Agreement, NORAD, the National Technology and Industrial Base, the 2022 modernization plan, and now the Defence Industrial Strategy. The second is the specific Canadian institutional move Washington is actually responding to, which none of the existing commentary engages by name. The third is the framework Canada has already filed in the relevant U.S. trade docket, which sits on the public record but outside the press cycle.
This piece sits in the space those readings leave open.
III. The Bargain the Forum Anchored
Two scholars at the University of Toronto, Robert Bothwell and the late Ian Drummond, built the framework that explains why this matters. They were among my teachers there, and the architecture that follows is theirs.[1]
The Board was the political summit of a five-rung ladder.
Ogdensburg (17 August 1940). Roosevelt and Mackenzie King met informally at Roosevelt’s summer encampment two months after the fall of France. The Board was announced the following day. No treaty language. No congressional authorization. No termination clause. Drafted in pencil. King privately believed Ogdensburg was as historically consequential as Confederation. The Canadian official historian C.P. Stacey later described what Ogdensburg created as 'close association amounting to actual alliance.
Hyde Park (20 April 1941). Eight months later, King returned with the second pillar. The United States would purchase between two hundred and three hundred million dollars of Canadian defence articles each year, so Canada could earn the U.S. dollars it needed to honour British orders. American war material produced in Canada would be eligible under Lend-Lease. Each country, in King’s formulation, was to provide the other with what it was best able to produce. In the Granatstein and Cuff account that remains the authoritative reading, Hyde Park was a common plan for the economic defence of the western hemisphere. King called it of permanent significance.[2]
The 1950 Statement of Principles. The Statement of Principles for Economic Cooperation, approved by President Truman in 1950, extended the Hyde Park logic into the Cold War: coordinated requirements, the best combined use of production, removal of barriers to the flow of defence materials.
DPSA (1956), DDSP (1963), NORAD (1958). The Defence Production Sharing Agreement and its successor instruments gave Canadian firms equal footing with U.S. firms bidding to the Pentagon, waived the Buy American Act for Canadian-produced defence articles, and made the Canadian Commercial Corporation the Crown channel through which Pentagon orders flow north. The political price of the bargain had already been paid in February 1959, with the cancellation of the Avro Arrow. NORAD followed in 1958. The mechanics remain in force today.
Quebec Summit (1985), NTIB (1994), NORAD Modernization (2021 and 2022). Mulroney and Reagan deepened the integration. NADIBO followed in 1987. The 1994 U.S. National Defense Authorization Act formally added Canada to the National Technology and Industrial Base, an arrangement in which Canada was the only foreign country until the United Kingdom and Australia were added in 2017. The Sajjan and Austin Joint Statement on NORAD Modernization of August 2021, paired with Defence Minister Anita Anand’s announcement of $38.6 billion in Canadian funding in June 2022, set the current multi-year program of upgrades. By 2025, more than 2,500 cumulative Canada and U.S. defence agreements rested on this structure.[3]
The bargain has been tested before. It has not, until Monday, May 18, been formally paused. The operational scaffolding remains: NORAD continues, the Canadian Commercial Corporation continues to process Pentagon orders, and Canada’s NTIB membership stands. What has been folded is the convening venue. The Board was the room where the architecture was politically managed. The building does not collapse when the meeting room is taken offline. It simply loses the place where its tenants used to talk to one another.
IV. What Bothwell, Drummond, English, and Holmes Would Have Said
Robert Bothwell’s career-long argument is that, since 1945, Canadian policymakers have told themselves a story about U.S. partnership that overstated mutual obligation and understated structural asymmetry. The alliance, he argued, was always partly an illusion. It allowed Ottawa to sustain the fiction that Canada’s defence contribution was reciprocally valued in Washington, when in fact Washington’s interest was narrowly continental and episodically transactional.
Read against that frame, Monday is not a deviation. It is a candid, public version of the pressure Bothwell documented across Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. The willingness to make the rebuke institutional, in plain view, and over a hyperlink to a Davos transcript, is new. The asymmetry underneath is old.
Ian Drummond, the economist of the group, made the industrial dimension visible. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement architecture was not, primarily, a defence policy choice. It was an industrial policy choice. Canada accepted a subordinate role as a subsystem and component supplier inside a continental defence economy because the alternative, sustaining an independent defence industrial base on a domestic market of eighteen million, was untenable. The Avro Arrow cancellation made the trade explicit. Canadian aerospace, electronics, and shipbuilding capacity that survived past the 1960s did so by plugging into U.S. supply chains under the DPSA waivers and CCC prime contracts.
If the political forum is paused now, and the industrial machinery is allowed to drift, what Canada stands to lose is not a symbol. It is preferential access to the U.S. defence market, the market that has underwritten Canada’s higher-end industrial capacity since 1959. Europe under the EU’s SAFE instrument can absorb a portion of Canadian capacity. It cannot replicate the scale of Pentagon demand. Drummond would want Canadians honest about that arithmetic before they cheered at Davos.
John English, the third of the quad, brought the biographical discipline to bear. His two-volume Pearson, and his work on the post-war Liberal foreign policy establishment, showed how the Canadian institutional capacity that produced the postwar bargain was built by specific people in specific rooms, and how easily that capacity could be lost when the rooms were closed. The Board is one of those rooms.[4]
John Holmes was a diplomat before he was a scholar. He spent most of his External Affairs career thinking about exactly the institutional question Monday raised. His two doctrines were functionalism, the idea that Canada’s claim to any international table rests on what it actually contributes, and what he called the discipline of paradox: a middle power must hold two truths at once, that it is real and consequential, and that its reach must not exceed its grasp. The Better Part of Valour took its title and its argument from Falstaff. Between unequal powers, discretion is the better part of valour.[5]
Davos, in Holmes’ frame, was a departure. Whatever its eloquence, and there was considerable eloquence (Carney earned the standing ovation), it rebuked American leadership before an audience that bore none of the consequences. Colby’s post on Monday is the predictable answer, and itself, ironically, another breach of the same discipline. The asymmetry is that Washington can afford to breach it. Canada cannot. The institutional cost is ours to absorb.
V. What Washington Is Actually Responding To
Colby did not pause the Board because Canada has done nothing. He paused it because, over the past fifteen months, Canada has done something specific, visible enough that Washington has read it as a pattern.
The pattern has six pieces. The F-35 review, opened in March 2025, has confirmed only sixteen of the planned eighty-eight aircraft and now weighs Saab’s Gripen-plus-GlobalEye proposal for seventy-two aircraft and roughly 12,600 Canadian jobs. The Canadian Patrol Submarine Project finalists are Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean. No U.S. bidder is shortlisted. Canada became the first non-European country to formally join the EU’s €150 billion SAFE instrument, accession finalized at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. On 16 January 2026, Carney became the first Canadian prime minister to visit Beijing since 2017, meeting Xi Jinping and reaching a deal to allow up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into Canada annually at 6.1 per cent in exchange for China lowering its 84 per cent canola seed tariff to roughly 15 per cent. Four days later in Davos, Carney told the World Economic Forum that middle powers must act together “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Two days after that, the President, also at Davos, called Carney “governor” and told the audience that Canada “lives because of the United States.” By Saturday Trump had threatened a 100 per cent tariff on all Canadian goods if Canada became a Beijing “drop-off port.” Carney’s reply, on the Sunday: Canada “doesn’t live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian.”
The sixth piece, and the most important one, was domestic. On 17 February 2026, Carney launched Security, Sovereignty and Prosperity: Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy. The Strategy introduced what officials call the Build, Partner, Buy framework. Build in Canada where domestic capacity exists or can be developed. Partner with the United States and other trusted allies where domestic capacity is limited. Buy from abroad only when necessary, with reinvestment requirements attached. It is paired with the Defence Investment Agency, created within Public Services and Procurement Canada in October 2025 and slated to become a stand-alone entity through Spring 2026 legislation.
On the Strategy, Dr. Ann Fitz-Gerald, Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and one of Canada’s most experienced national-security institutionalists, with a career running from RMC to NATO Headquarters to Cranfield’s Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, wrote in The Walrus the following day:
Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy is a meaningful step forward and resembles more of an actual strategy than many policy documents that Canada has produced in this space. Its emphasis on strengthening Canadian firms is long overdue and reflects how allies have operated for years. Credit is due to the government for recognizing that defence capability, economic resilience, and industrial policy are now inseparable. The strategy creates the conditions for the country to bring unique value to NATO, and particularly to U.S. partners. Turning this investment into lasting value will require more coordinated thinking.
— Ann Fitz-Gerald, The Walrus, 18 February 2026
Fitz-Gerald’s endorsement and her caution belong together. The Strategy is a genuine institutional advance, the first Canadian defence industrial document in a generation that reads as a strategy rather than a checklist. Without the coordinated thinking she names, it becomes another announcement that the Parliamentary Budget Officer will eventually score against actual expenditure. The PBO has already done some of that scoring. A $18.5 billion cumulative shortfall between planned and actual DND capital spending over 2017-18 to 2023-24, and a 25 per cent discount applied to forecast equipment spending based on a decade of delivery experience. The PBO has also priced the new commitment. Meeting the NATO 5 per cent target by 2035 means core defence spending of roughly $159 billion in 2035-36. Page is right that the fiscal plan is missing. The Strategy is also real. Both things are true.
Washington’s reading of the Strategy is sharper than Ottawa likes. Build, Partner, Buy demotes the United States from preferred supplier under the DPSA to one partner among several. On the U.S. side, the Strategy is what Colby was reading when he wrote that Canada has failed to make “credible progress.” The reading is not unfair. Build, Partner, Buy is, by design, a shift in the procurement default.
Two more facts complete the picture. First, the Board has not actually met since the 242nd session, held in Ottawa on 13 November 2024 and co-chaired by then-MP John McKay and U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Rebecca Zimmerman. The agenda included NORAD modernization, Arctic security, climate change, defence cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and critical minerals. The eighteen-month gap predates the formal pause. Monday formalized what was already operationally true. McKay, the Canadian co-chair for seven years, told the Hill Times he reads the move as a cancellation rather than a pause, and warned of ripple effects on procurement, including the roughly $38 billion NORAD modernization program.
Second, the pause directly contradicts the recommendation of the Pentagon’s own research community. In July 2025, the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies, a Department of Defense-adjacent body, published a DOPSR-cleared paper by Kathryn Friedman and Greg Pollock arguing the Board should be elevated, not paused. Co-chaired by the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and a Canadian counterpart, meeting semi-annually, focused on a handful of priorities including Arctic security and critical minerals. The paper said the Board “could focus on a few key defence priorities such as the Arctic, an approach the Ted Stevens Center would be well-suited to support.” It noted that since Canada is a leader in the global mining industry, the Board could work with the United States and possibly other allies on developing uranium and other key minerals used in defence platforms.
Colby paused on 18 May the institution his own department’s research community had recommended, ten months earlier, be elevated. The pause is a political choice. It is not a continuation of U.S. defence policy thinking.
The cross-partisan Canadian reaction reads the same way. Erin O’Toole, former Conservative leader and a member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on Canada and U.S. Economic Relations, called the move “profoundly misguided” and noted its strange timing, coming the morning after the President’s visit to China. Artur Wilczynski, the former Public Safety Canada director general who sat on the Board, was blunter on X: “Bizarre decision by the Trump regime.” To the National Post, he added that the announcement “just doesn’t make sense. It reminds me of the fentanyl excuse for the tariffs. I think there’s something else going on here.”
VI. The Architecture Reading
Coyne is right about constraint. The pause is part of a broader effort to contain Canadian alignment within U.S.-defined limits across trade, defence, and resources. What the constraint reading needs added to it is the architecture being constrained. Not “the relationship” in the abstract, but the eighty-six-year institutional bargain that runs from Ogdensburg through Hyde Park, the 1950 Statement, the DPSA and DDSP, NORAD, NTIB, the 2022 modernization plan, and now the Defence Industrial Strategy.
The pause was placed at the venue of that bargain because the venue is the single piece of architecture that can be moved without statutory or treaty change. The Pentagon pulled the lowest-cost lever it had, at the highest-cost moment for Canada: just more than forty one days before USMCA-CUSMA review opens.
Read with Bothwell, that is the alliance-as-illusion problem made institutional. Read with Drummond, it is the industrial bargain being re-priced without the consent of the supplier. Read with English, it is the institutional capacity being lost when the rooms are closed. Read with Holmes, it is the discipline of paradox failing on both sides of the border at once. None of those readings counsels retreat into denial. None counsels rupture. What they jointly counsel is a Canadian response that acknowledges the asymmetry, names what Canada still brings to the bargain, and sets a table on which the next round of negotiation occurs on Canadian-selected terms. That table supposedly opens on 1 July.
VII. Allied by Design, Vulnerable by Default
The architecture for a Canadian counter-position is not theoretical. It is already on the U.S. trade record.
On 19 March 2026, three members of the the Balsillie Legal Advisory Centre advisory centre, this author, along with Dr. Ann Fitz-Gerald and James W. Hinton, filed Allied by Design, Vulnerable by Default: Why a Durable Plurilateral Critical Minerals Agreement Must Address Security, Digital Sovereignty, and Institutional Reliability in USTR Docket No. USTR-2026-0034. Three days earlier, Appleton & Associates had filed a related submission, Changing the Flag Over the Single Point of Failure: A Framework for a Plurilateral Critical Minerals Agreement That Achieves Genuine North American Supply Chain Resilience. Together, the two submissions argue that Canada’s strategic value to the United States is not the sum of three separate policy domains. It is a single asset that geography, energy, intellectual property, and governance combine to produce.
Canada is allied by design. The G7’s most diversified critical-mineral endowment. A grid that is roughly 82 per cent emissions free. Cold-climate cooling economics that reduce data-centre energy costs by thirty to forty per cent. Mining and processing sectors under Five Eyes-aligned environmental, Indigenous-rights, and labour standards that are verifiable and legally accountable in ways that Xinjiang production is not. Magnitsky legislation among the strongest in the G7. A USMCA-CUSMA labour-chapter posture that insists on enforceable rather than aspirational standards. None of this is rhetoric. It is the design.
Canada is also vulnerable by default. The Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade have been dismantled and not replaced, a defect I have written about both in my CIGI paper on a sovereign advisory system, published in October 2025, and in an earlier Substack on the same theme. The architecture for a sovereign cloud has been directed to the Major Projects Office but has produced no visible legislative framework. The CLOUD Act creates jurisdictional exposures the Canadian regulatory system has not addressed. The rebuttable-presumption mechanism the United States uses for forced-labour enforcement has no Canadian analogue. The Defence Industrial Strategy itself remains, in Fitz-Gerald’s precise phrase, in need of “more coordinated thinking.”
The Changing the Flag submission compressed the institutional risk into a single image. A plurilateral critical-minerals agreement designed without security, digital, and institutional dimensions would simply change the flag flying over the single point of failure.
Monday’s defence board pause is the same risk in a different domain. A defence architecture without its convening forum still operates, until it does not. By then the flag has changed and nobody noticed.
VIII. What Forty One Days Require
Reading the pause as architecture rather than procedure produces five concrete moves Canada can make before 1 July.
One. Publish, before the USMCA-CUSMA Review opens, a Canadian counter-statement of principles for North American defence cooperation. Call it what it is: the 2026 analogue to the 1950 Statement. Restate the Hyde Park bargain in today’s terms. What Canada offers: Arctic geography, the critical-minerals endowment, the icebreaker and Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessel fleet identified in the Ted Stevens Center analysis, hydroelectric and nuclear power, sovereign-cloud-eligible compute capacity, trusted forced-labour-free supply chains, and the Australia Over-the-Horizon Radar partnership Canada is already delivering. What Canada expects in return: CCC prime contracting preserved, NTIB membership reaffirmed, DPSA equal footing honoured, and the Permanent Joint Board on Defence restored at Under Secretary level on the semi-annual cadence the Pentagon’s own research community recommended in July.
Two. Pair the Saab and TKMS-Hanwha decisions with an explicit, on-the-record statement of what share of Canadian defence procurement will remain integrated with the U.S. NTIB under Build, Partner, Buy. The U.S. perception of silent exit is doing the political work right now. Reciprocal honesty closes that gap. O’Toole, a Conservative serving on the Prime Minister’s own advisory committee, is positioned to lead this statement. Carney should let him.
Three. Use the USMCA-CUSMA Joint Review opening to formally propose that the digital and critical-minerals chapters be expanded to include North American defence supply-chain certification, using the Allied by Design framework. Turn the trade negotiation into the venue where the defence relationship is reconstructed on Canadian-selected terms. This is the move neither Coyne nor Ivison nor Brewster has yet named, and it is the move that converts the pause from a Canadian liability into a Canadian instrument. I have set out the broader sequencing argument in earlier articles in this Clause & Effect Substack: Canada After the Shuffle and You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone.
Four. Convene a Canadian equivalent of the Board’s function: a standing body integrating Global Affairs, National Defence, ISED, Privy Council Office, and the new Defence Investment Agency in continuous defence-industrial strategy. This is the operational twin of the sovereign advisory system I proposed in a CIGI paper in October 2025. The Pentagon has walked away from the joint forum. Canada must not also walk away from the function the forum performed.
Five. Produce the fiscal plan. Page is right. The federal government should publish, before 1 July, the credible pathway from 2.1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035. Revenue and expenditure trade-offs, with PBO assumptions reconciled, and with the Defence Investment Agency identified as the operational accountability. The single most powerful move Carney can make is to take the strongest argument of the Reality Check Reading off the table.
Christopher Sands notes that this pause could be softened or quietly reversed. Trump centralizes consequential decisions around the President personally, and Colby is not the President. But reversal will not happen on its own, and it will not happen on terms Canada selects unless Canada uses the 40 days to make the reversal Washington’s easier path.
IX. The Better Part of Valour
Holmes ended his career arguing that Canadian diplomacy at its best held two truths at once. The first was that Canada was real and consequential. The second was that its reach must not exceed its grasp. The first truth without the second produced Davos. The second without the first produces capitulation. Both are failures of the discipline of paradox.
Coyne is right that the pause is about constraint. Ivison is right that the politics are dangerous. Brewster is right that the symbolism has already done its work in the Canadian public mind. Leuprecht and Mark Norman are right that the move is political, not military. Page is right that the fiscal plan is missing. McGuinty is right that the substantive Canadian record is more serious than the U.S. framing acknowledges. Carney is right that NORAD continues. Fitz-Gerald is right that the Defence Industrial Strategy is real and that it needs more coordinated thinking. Sands is right that Roosevelt and Eisenhower would have understood Canada's contribution to American security as a strategic asset, not a privilege Washington dispenses. They are all describing parts of the same animal.
The animal is an eighty-six-year institutional bargain whose convening venue has been folded by one of the two governments that built it, forty one days before the other governments-to-be in that bargain meet in another room to negotiate the trade architecture that pays for everything. The honest Canadian response is neither to overplay nor to underplay. It is to spend the forty one days setting the table on terms Canada selects. Bothwell would recognize the asymmetry. Drummond would recognize the arithmetic. English would recognize the room. Holmes would recognize the moment a middle power must speak, and choose where, when, and to whom.
Ogdensburg was drafted in pencil. So is this.
If the forum closes, the function does not. The architecture that built the bargain in 1940 is the architecture Canada must rebuild now: in the forty one days before 1 July, in USMCA-CUSMA, and on terms Ottawa selects.
Barry Appleton is Managing Partner of Appleton & Associates International Lawyers LP, Interim Director of the Balsillie Legal Advisory Centre at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and Co-Director and Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Center for International Law at New York Law School. He is the author of Navigating NAFTA (Carswell-Thomson 1994) and of numerous articles on Canadian trade, investment, and digital sovereignty. He studied with Robert Bothwell, the late Ian Drummond, and John English at the University of Toronto. John Holmes was an early mentor at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.
Disclosure. The author and some members of the Advisory Board of the Balsillie Legal Advisory Center have filed submissions in USTR Docket No. USTR-2026-0034 (critical minerals), discussed above. The views in this piece are the author’s own.
Notes
[1] Robert Bothwell, Alliance and Illusion: Canada and the World, 1945–1984 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada Since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
[2] J. L. Granatstein and R. D. Cuff, “The Hyde Park Declaration 1941: Origins and Significance,” Canadian Historical Review 55, no. 1 (1974): 59–80; J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, For Better or for Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1991).
[3] Andrea Charron and James Fergusson, NORAD: In Perpetuity and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022); Government of Canada, “Minister Anand Announces Continental Defence Modernization,” 20 June 2022.
[4] John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1949–1972 (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1992); John English, Shadow of Heaven: The Life of Lester Pearson, 1897–1948 (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989).
[5] John W. Holmes, The Better Part of Valour: Essays on Canadian Diplomacy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Carleton Library Series, 1970); John W. Holmes, Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); John W. Holmes, The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943–1957, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979 and 1982).