Canada’s National Security: Time for a new National Strategy and new Security Partners

When the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Dan Rogers, delivered his first annual public address on 13 November, he described the most complex national security landscape in decades. His rare public intervention, accessible through the CSIS annual speech, set out a picture in which violent extremism, foreign interference, espionage, transnational repression, Arctic intelligence activity, and hybrid operations are no longer separate files but overlapping layers of the same strategic challenge.

Yet the most striking element of Canada’s current posture is what remains absent. Two decades after its only comprehensive framework, Securing an Open Society in 2004, Canada still lacks an updated national security strategy that integrates these threats into a coherent vision of how the country intends to protect its sovereignty and project credibility abroad.

Today’s adversaries are global by design. However, Canada’s responses are still largely incremental, reactive, and domestically framed. That misalignment is no longer a technical flaw; it is becoming a foreign policy liability.

A global threat picture without a global strategy

Rogers underlined an alarming reality: nearly one in ten terrorism investigations in Canada now involves at least one minor, a trend reflected in the official threat address. This pattern mirrors the broader evolution of youth-centred online radicalisation documented in European assessments such as the Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2023, where algorithmic reinforcement, encrypted channels, and leaderless ecosystems pull increasingly younger profiles into extremist spaces.

At the same time, Canada has had to respond to a series of state-linked threats. Publicly available records confirm that intelligence operations in the past year disrupted potentially lethal plots directed by Iranian services against individuals in Canada. Other open-source reporting has highlighted how foreign services connected to Russia, China, Iran, and India are active in espionage, transnational repression, and illicit procurement targeting Canadian technology and critical infrastructure.

The Arctic has also emerged as a strategically contested space, with increased foreign intelligence interest in northern governments, private energy projects, and research partnerships, a trend reflected in recent analyses of intelligence activity in Canada’s North.

Despite this, Canada still navigates this environment without a modern national security strategy that clarifies priorities, aligns civilian and military tools, and connects domestic resilience to foreign policy. A national framework would not merely list threats; it would define which risks are existential, which are manageable, and which require new forms of international cooperation.

When strategy is missing, foreign policy suffers

The absence of an updated strategy is not just an internal coordination problem. It shapes how allies, competitors, and hostile actors read Canada’s resolve.

Without a clear doctrine, Canada’s legislative steps – new foreign interference laws, reforms to border enforcement, Arctic investments, and cyberspace measures – appear as isolated reactions rather than components of a deliberate posture. Partners see activity, but not necessarily direction. Adversaries scan for seams and inconsistencies.

For a middle power that relies heavily on alliances, this ambiguity matters. Canada’s credibility in demanding accountability for transnational repression, cyber operations, or foreign interference depends in part on whether it can show that its own house is strategically in order. That is precisely the gap that Rogers’s speech exposed: a sophisticated description of the threat picture, with no public map of how the state intends to organise itself in response.

Looking beyond the usual suspects: What non-traditional partners can teach Canada

Canada’s intelligence and security relationships are understandably anchored in the Five Eyes and Euro-Atlantic community. But many of the most acute threats Rogers described – especially youth radicalisation, jihadist remnants, and hybrid terror-crime networks – are being fought on the front lines by services outside of our traditional orbit.

If Canada is serious about building a strategy that matches the world it actually inhabits, it needs to look more deliberately at non-traditional but highly competent partners in regions where these threats are born, recycled, and exported.

North Africa: Morocco’s DGST and the counterterrorism question

In North Africa, Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST) has built a track record that increasingly attracts international attention. In particular, Open-source security assessments recognise Morocco as an active member of multilateral counterterrorism platforms and a co-chair within the Global Counterterrorism Forum, reflecting sustained investment in intelligence and prevention across the Sahel and West Africa.

Moroccan intelligence has repeatedly provided decisive leads in high-stakes European cases. During the Paris attacks in 2015, it was Moroccan information that enabled security forces to locate Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Islamic State coordinator behind the massacres, as detailed in public accounts of the Saint-Denis operation. In November 2025, the director-general of the DGST and national police, Abdellatif Hammouchi, received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Civil Guard in Spain, a decoration explicitly linked to his service’s contribution to dismantling networks with European footprints.

Earlier that year, France also awarded Hammouchi the Légion d’honneur in the rank of officer, a distinction formally granted in recognition of his service’s effectiveness in counterterrorism and organised crime, as reflected in the official announcement of the decoration. French officials highlighted the DGST’s role in the search and capture of individuals wanted by French courts – including high-profile organised crime fugitives – and in providing security support during the Paris Olympic Games. They also underscored the strategic depth of the cooperation agreements signed that same month, which established a joint roadmap for future security coordination.

More recently, Dutch authorities confirmed that the arrest of a minor in Sittard, suspected of preparing an extremist attack, followed intelligence shared by Morocco. In Germany, a 2023 conviction of a German-Egyptian extremist planning a vehicle-ramming attack also drew on prior information from Morocco. And in the United States, a radicalised soldier with Islamic State sympathies was arrested after a tip originating from Moroccan intelligence.

These examples show a particular strength: the DGST has developed habits of cooperation that cut across continents, with a proven capacity to track minors and transnational operatives in the same investigative continuum. The United Nations has acknowledged this role by locating a major counterterrorism training hub in Rabat, where dozens of African and European services receive instruction through specialised programmes.

Canada already recognises Morocco as a counterterrorism partner in its broader engagement with Africa, as reflected in recent policy statements on security cooperation and countering terrorism. A serious national strategy would move that recognition from footnote to structured policy, particularly on youth radicalisation and diaspora-linked networks.

The Middle East: Jordan’s GID as a long-standing front-line service

In the Middle East, Jordan offers another instructive case. Its General Intelligence Department (GID) has, for decades, been a key partner for Western agencies in tracking jihadist networks and foiling plots across the region. Open-source analyses describe the GID as one of the most professional intelligence services in its region, with a record of disrupting attacks both inside Jordan and abroad.

In recent years, this has included pre-empting schemes by Islamic State supporters to target American and Israeli diplomatic and military interests and maintaining relative internal stability despite severe regional turbulence. From Canada’s perspective, the value of such a partner lies not only in shared tactical intelligence but in the GID’s experience managing a spectrum of threats – from cross-border insurgents to refugee-camp radicalisation 

A Canadian strategy that takes foreign policy seriously would clarify how Ottawa intends to work with front-line services like the GID on issues that now clearly touch Canadian interests: transnational repression, foreign fighter remnants, and cross-border ideological pipelines that reach into diasporas.

Iraq, Estonia, Taiwan: Front-line lessons for a middle power

Other non-traditional intelligence partners offer lessons that Canada cannot afford to ignore. In Iraq, the National Intelligence Service (INIS) has been an essential instrument in the post-caliphate struggle against the remnants of the Islamic State. Recent operations have focused on foiling ISIS funding networks and cross-border facilitation, and on targeting senior leadership figures in coordination with international partners, as illustrated by publicly reported strikes on high-ranking operatives.

In Estonia, the Internal Security Service (Kaitsepolitseiamet) produces unusually detailed public annual reviews that map out Russian espionage, hybrid operations, economic penetration, and terrorism-related activity. For Canada, which is wrestling with foreign interference and sabotage risks, Estonia’s model shows how a small state can treat transparency as a strategic tool – using public reporting not only to warn citizens but to deter adversaries and harden critical sectors.

Taiwan, meanwhile, stands at the sharp edge of intensifying pressure from a much larger neighbour. Public reporting has documented a rising number of espionage cases involving serving and retired military officers, a steep increase in cyberattacks and coordinated disinformation campaigns, and systematic efforts to penetrate the island’s semiconductor sector through targeted cyber-espionage. Recent analyses of growing Canada–Taiwan relations underline that Ottawa already recognises Taipei as a like-minded partner. A strategy that links domestic resilience to foreign partnerships would spell out how lessons from Taiwan’s experience with persistent pressure can inform Canada’s own approach to cyber defence, interference, and economic security.

Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Estonia, and Taiwan are not substitutes for Canada’s core alliances, and they are not immune to criticism. What they offer is something different: operational laboratories in which some of the hardest problems Rogers described – minors involved with extremist networks, hybrid jihadist-criminal structures, front-line management of regional instability, and hostile state pressure – have already forced agencies to adapt.

Today, Canada engages with several of these services in a largely transactional way, often through case-by-case intelligence sharing or multilateral initiatives. However, what  this engagement  lacks is a strategic framework explaining which non-traditional partners are indispensable for its long-term security, how those relationships should be governed, resourced, and overseen, and how to reconcile the operational benefits of such partnerships with Canada’s own human rights commitments and diplomatic messaging.

Without that framework, Canada risks drifting into a dual vulnerability: under-leveraging front-line expertise on the one hand, and facing accusations of inconsistency or opportunism on the other.

From annual speeches to a real strategy

Rogers’s commitment to an annual public threat address is a welcome innovation. It signals that Canada’s security community recognises the need for transparency and public trust. But annual speeches, however frank, do not replace strategy.

A credible national security strategy for the mid-2020s would integrate domestic and foreign policy by recognising that youth radicalisation in Alberta, transnational repression in Toronto, and illicit procurement in Europe are different faces of the same global contest. It would define clear tiers of risk and associated lead roles across CSIS, the RCMP, the Canadian Armed Forces, Global Affairs Canada, and provincial and municipal partners. It would identify priority partnerships, including non-traditional ones, and detail how Canada intends to manage them responsibly. And it would commit to measurable indicators – such as inter-agency referral times, disruption metrics, and resilience benchmarks – that can be reported to Parliament and the public.

Canada has the institutional tools to do this: independent review bodies, experienced practitioners, and alliances that span both the North Atlantic and the Global South. What it lacks is the decision to bring these elements together into a public, coherent doctrine.

Credibility abroad begins with clarity at home

Rogers has made it clear that Canada is living through a period in which threats are more numerous, more complex, and more interconnected than at any time in recent memory. Violent extremists recruit minors online, hostile states intimidate communities on Canadian soil, and foreign intelligence services probe the country’s critical technologies and northern approaches.

In that context, continuing to operate without a modern national security strategy is not a neutral choice. It weakens Canada’s voice abroad, complicates its partnerships, and leaves frontline agencies to improvise where they should be guided.

If Canada wants to be credible when it speaks about sovereignty, foreign interference, and shared security – from Ottawa to Brussels to Rabat and beyond – it must finally give itself the map that today’s world requires.

Canada needs that map now.