Canada’s first new national security strategy in more than two decades will be public within a few weeks, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Mark Carney has told MPs. David Morrison said the strategy will strengthen Canada’s defences against a wide array of threats, ending a wait that stretches back to 2004.
A few weeks away, adviser tells committee
Morrison, the prime minister’s senior diplomatic and international affairs adviser, told MPs on the House of Commons public safety and national security committee this week that he hopes the strategy will be public within a few weeks. He said it will bolster Canada’s defences against an array of threats.
Privy Council Office spokesperson Mélany Gauvin said the coming strategy will increase Canada’s focus on economic security — a sign it will reach well beyond military and intelligence questions.
Morrison was before the committee on Wednesday as part of its study of Canada’s security screening processes, where Conservative MPs pressed him on how a Canadian facing espionage allegations in Belgium got a high-level NATO clearance despite a documented federal fraud finding. Morrison, who was deputy minister at Global Affairs Canada when the clearance was issued, said every protocol in force at the time was followed, and that the department would now run an open-source search in a similar case.
A new national security strategy two decades in the making
Canada’s most recent complete national security policy, Securing an Open Society, was released in 2004 by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. It was Canada’s first such document, built around three core interests: protecting Canadians at home and abroad, ensuring Canada was not used as a base for attacks against its allies, and contributing to international security.
The road back to a successor has been long. In April 2024, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government said it would publish a national security strategy every four years. That November, Trudeau gave Nathalie Drouin, the national security and intelligence adviser, a mandate letter asking her to deliver a renewed strategy in 2025: an integrated framework for Canada’s security, defence and diplomatic posture.
The work stalled after Carney took office. A March 2025 memo from John Hannaford, then the clerk of the Privy Council, told Carney that changes to Canada’s strategic environment meant the draft under preparation was based on assumptions that were “no longer valid.” The heavily redacted memo, obtained by The Canadian Press through access to information, landed less than a week after Carney was sworn in, amid U.S. tariffs and President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to make Canada a U.S. state.
Carney later said a new policy would come “in due course,” calling the world a more dangerous place than in the 1990s and the early part of this century. “There were challenges then, but there are bigger challenges now,” he said. “The power balances are shifting, alliances are shifting.”
Governing in pieces while the strategy waited
Without an overarching strategy, Ottawa has handled security through a string of narrower documents: the 2024 defence policy update, Our North, Strong and Free, a national cyber security strategy in 2025, and a defence industrial strategy this year. A NATO Association of Canada policy paper published last month noted that, as of 2026, neither a renewed national security strategy nor an accompanying action plan had been released.
The delay drew skepticism from the experts who follow the file. Intelligence expert Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said last year he suspected work on the strategy had stalled over “conflicting desires”: officials wanted a meaningful statement of policy rooted in the national interest, but feared inflaming tensions with the Trump administration during trade negotiations. “I suspect it will stay on the shelf for now,” Wark said at the time. “There is zero political gain to release it.”
Wark testified before the same committee this week, in its screening study, and cited figures from the CSIS public report: the service received 129,130 government screening requests in 2025, along with 438,600 immigration and security screening referrals. He called the arrangement unsustainable.
Vincent Rigby, a former national security and intelligence adviser who now teaches at McGill University, has argued the tensions with the United States are a reason to publish rather than wait: a government needs the road map before choosing which roads to take.
What happens next
No release date has been announced; Morrison’s “within a few weeks” is the firmest timeline offered so far. What to watch for when the document lands: how it describes the security relationship with the United States, how much weight the promised focus on economic security actually carries, and whether the government revives the four-year review cycle promised in 2024, meant to ensure Canada never again goes two decades between strategies.
