What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

How Trump’s Cabinet Picks Could Threaten Canada’s National Security

Sigh.

I’d hoped to take a break from writing about Trump and his impending fascist regime. After all, it’s an American problem, and much of the drama Trump will create will be entirely domestic. There are, of course, significant knock-on effects on Canada, our economy, and our national security, many of which I’ve addressed in previous articles.

Then Trump started announcing his cabinet picks.

I doubt there’s been a bigger group of unqualified misfits promoted to high office in a major democratic country. It’s a collection of conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, serial sexual predators, and wannabe oligarchs. Some are certainly criminals in the judicial sense. For our purposes—Canadian national security and defence—we’ll concentrate on just two: Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense, and Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for Director of National Intelligence.

The Secretary of Defense

Hegseth is a Fox “News” morning host who is also a veteran, reaching the rank of Major with, I believe, three deployments. One of these was as part of a training mission in Afghanistan where Hegseth's reputation among his Canadian counterparts appears to have been less than stellar. He is, of course, one of those veterans who wear their service on their sleeve—literally in Hegseth’s case, as he was the subject of a formal complaint for displaying far-right “Crusader” tattoos while serving with the Washington, D.C., National Guard. More seriously, accusations are surfacing that he paid off a woman with whom he had a sexual issue of some kind.

These and other allegations just emerging would disqualify Hegseth virtually anywhere else. Yet he’s about to take charge of the most powerful military on the planet and an enormous bureaucracy. Canada, of course, has outsourced much of its defence to the United States, and militarily, we are virtually a client state. This gives people like Hegseth an outsized influence over Canadian defence priorities, procurement, and strategy—especially with regard to continental defence. That he has literally no experience managing anything of consequence and is a Christian “end times” nationalist is just the icing on a fetid, rotten cake.

Hegseth is certain to take Canada to task immediately for our lacklustre defence spending. While he won’t be wrong, he will be viewing such issues through a purely transactional lens and we could soon find ourselves held hostage to US interests, complete with demands for compliance on defence matters.

Tulsi Gabbard

As bad as Pete Hegseth is—and he’s very, very bad—perhaps the biggest looming threat to Canadian national security is Tulsi Gabbard. Once a Democrat, Gabbard is Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, a powerful position that ultimately controls all the major U.S. intelligence agencies. Gabbard’s résumé includes military service and a political career marked by sometimes odd, contradictory positions. Most important to this discussion is her weird affinity for dictators, including Syria’s Assad and Vladimir Putin. She is a vocal opponent of Western support for Ukraine and is widely regarded as a Russian sympathizer—if not more.

Intelligence Sharing

It’s difficult to overstate how much the Canadian intelligence community relies on cooperation with U.S. agencies. While details of our intelligence arrangements remain classified, it is publicly known that Canada benefits significantly from allied support. Information is shared very freely, and Canada often relies on American technical means for both raw and processed data. Canada's intelligence capabilities have long been intertwined with those of its allies, particularly the United States, through formal and informal arrangements. This cooperation has provided Canada with critical insights but has also created vulnerabilities. Canada gets virtually unfettered access to some U.S. intelligence products, while Americans get similar access to ours.

As a result, Canada has very little in the way of truly sovereign intelligence-gathering capability, especially on the technical side. If Gabbard were to limit Canadian access for ideological reasons, the impact would be immediate and extremely profound. Worse, there is a real possibility that Canadian intelligence data could be at risk from a United States that no longer supports or cares about our national interests. Our ability to make decisions and act rationally and in an informed manner within the international community would be in jeopardy.

Contracting Out Security

I doubt Canadians realize the extent to which our national security is intertwined with that of the U.S. This is particularly true, of course, of continental defence, where our two air forces basically act as one. But it extends well beyond this to encompass even benign things like the military telephone system. For decades, Canadians have accepted this enormous infringement on our sovereignty because it worked, came with little political cost, and allowed us to maintain defence on the cheap. It was a deliberate decision undertaken by successive governments of all political stripes over the course of decades.

What these decisions have done, though, is essentially remove our ability to make sovereign decisions regarding many aspects of national security. Canada is, in many spheres, a client state. This was fine while our values and interests matched those of the United States.

So What?

Unfortunately, as I’ve stated several times, a genuinely fascist administration has been elected to the presidency—one which will certainly not have our national interests in mind. We are about to pay a price for decades of complacency and neglect and for outsourcing our security requirements to a foreign country. Let’s hope that price isn’t too high and that our government decides to take action now to restore a modicum of sovereignty to our national security interests.

In reality, this means increasing our defence budget, cooperating more with the other “Four Eyes” (ie: the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) on security issues, developing sovereign secure communications systems, reiterating the national command and control arrangements for binational forces, and diversifying defence procurement. Moreover, we should look long and hard at developing a more sovereign intelligence architecture.

We need to start this process now, not three years from now and certainly not after Trump has decided to squeeze Canada for his own benefit. This requires maturity, clear-thinking, and decisiveness. Sadly, I’m not sure our current politicians can meet this challenge.