How Canada Learned to Speak in Values While Trading in Violence
Picture this: a surveillance camera on a concrete wall in the occupied West Bank, AI parsing the movement of a crowd, flagging the angle of a thrown stone, the colour of a hoodie. The technology is Canadian-funded. The company is Israeli. The investor is a former Canadian prime minister.
That image is not hypothetical. It is documented. And it does not stay in the West Bank.
What Canada has built, across two decades and several governments, is a foreign policy that runs on two tracks simultaneously. On the first track: the language of values — sovereignty, human rights, international law, the rules-based order. On the second: the money, the weapons contracts, the alliance calculations, and the surveillance infrastructure that contradict every word of the first.
Mark Carney did not invent this. But he has named it more honestly than any prime minister before him.
We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength.
Read that sentence slowly. He is not describing a policy adjustment. He is describing a replacement.
The Foundation: Harper, Christian Zionism, and the Privatization of Alignment
The architecture begins with Stephen Harper, and it begins in church.
As Arthur Milner documented in Inroads: The Canadian Journal of Opinion, Harper’s unwavering support for the Israeli government’s territorial policies was not simply a foreign policy calculation. It was rooted in the cultivation of premillennial dispensationalist Christian Right networks in Canada — networks that interpret Jewish control over the biblical homeland as a theological precondition. This was Harper’s base. He needed its money, its organisation, and its votes. He knew a too-vocal Christian right would cost him among moderate Conservatives, so he kept the ideology quiet and the policy loud.
What distinguished Harper was what he did with that alignment after leaving office. His venture capital firm AWZ Ventures — in which Harper serves as a leading partner and president of the advisory committee — poured at least $350 million into Israeli military-surveillance technology companies, according to a December 2023 investigation by The Breach. Among the portfolio are ViiSights, which sells AI-powered behaviour recognition software used in a dozen Israeli municipalities to identify individuals on surveillance footage by movement patterns; Octopus Systems, which provides command-and-control software for CCTV used by Israel’s Ministry of Defence; and Elsight, which sells drone communication technology to Israeli police and border forces.
Harper said in 2019 that Awz Ventures was “a chance to continue what I did in government.” He was not wrong.
The Business and Human Rights Centre documented in January 2025 that this same technology was then “repurposed” for use on refugees and asylum seekers in Greek camps, described as “dystopian” by critics at the legal aid organization I Have Rights. Technologies were first tested on Palestinians, then deployed on Europe’s most vulnerable migrants—with Canadian capital at every stage of the supply chain.
This is the laboratory. Canada did not just observe it. Canada funded it.
The Continuity: Carney's Language and What It Conceals
Carney arrived at Davos in January 2026 with clarity. He named the problem precisely: the rules-based order had always been partially false—the strongest exempt themselves when convenient, and international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused. “Looking away,” he said days later in a statement marking the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, “is not a passive act, but an active betrayal.”
Then came the actions.
When the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, without UN authorization and without legal justification under the UN Charter, Carney said the strikes “prima-facie appear to be inconsistent with international law“—and then said Canada “supports” U.S. efforts. Whether international law was broken, he added, was “a judgment for others to make.” According to retired Major-General Denis Thompson, Canadian soldiers at the Combined Aerospace Operations Centre were likely directly involved in targeting during those strikes, with Canadian personnel also present at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and at the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
The Carney government voted down Bill C-233, the No More Loopholes Act, which would have closed the loophole allowing Canadian military exports to reach Israel through the United States without human-rights review. Canada allowed Netanyahu’s aircraft to transit Canadian airspace despite outstanding ICC arrest warrants for crimes against humanity — warrants Carney had previously said he would honour if Netanyahu landed. [CJPME, February 2026]
As Alex Neve, Canada’s longtime human rights advocate, stated directly: “International law is not broken; our commitment to and defence of it is.” [The Tyee, March 2026]
Decoding the Rhetoric: What "Principled and Pragmatic" Actually Means
Carney’s formulation—”principled in our commitment to fundamental values… pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, and that not every partner shares our values“—is not a paradox.
It is a permission structure.
“Principled” is the declaration. “Pragmatic” is the escape hatch.
Together, they constitute a doctrine that says, we believe in international law when it costs us nothing and suspend it when alliance loyalty or economic interest requires.
This is not a tension within Canadian foreign policy. It is Canadian foreign policy.
The Tyee put it cleanly: “Exhortations from political leaders like Carney to simply ‘take the world as it is’ condition citizens to believe in inevitability, to conclude that we are without choices and, comfortingly, that we are without responsibilities.” [The Tyee, March 2026]
"Canada Strong" — Strong for Whom?
Now comes the frame: “Canada strong.”
Defence spending elevated to a “centrepiece of economic policy,” in Lloyd Axworthy’s description in The Walrus (April 2026). Tens of billions committed toward NATO’s 2 percent target, with arms production repositioned as a jobs driver. The Defence, Security and Resilience Bank — a proposed multilateral bank designed to mobilize private capital for the “democratic world’s” defence and security procurement — represents the financial architecture of this pivot: a bank purpose-built to ensure wars stay funded at scale. [DSRB.org]
At the same time: budget cuts to Indigenous services, compounds into real gaps in housing, clean water, and basic services. Climate targets weakened, then dropped. Social programs streamlined. The Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States maintained as a filter, not a protection. Pre-screening that cuts off asylum claims before they reach an independent hearing. UN experts have called on Canada to abolish immigration detention. Canada relocated it into a federal prison in Quebec. [Axworthy, The Walrus, April 2026]
Bill C-22—the Carney government’s surveillance legislation—gives law enforcement the power to compel telecoms to geographically track users and disclose whether a suspected person uses their services. OpenMedia’s analysis of its predecessor described it as having “no precedent for how deeply it undermines Canadian privacy.” The ICLMG documented in March 2026 how unregulated AI tools are already being used to profile individuals in immigration, border security, and employment—and found Carney was “sacrificing privacy rights, as well as throwing migrants and refugees under the bus, to appease Trump’s false border concerns.”
The technology that was first tested on Palestinians. Refined on Greek refugees. Now turned inward.
"Canada strong" does not mean Canadians are strong. It means the state is.
How Canada Thinks as a State
John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, in How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (Yale, 2023), make an argument that cuts to the centre of this question.
States, they argue, are routinely rational — not moral, but rational. They base their policies on credible theories about power and survival, and they deliberate toward those ends.
Rationality, in their framework, is about process, not ethics. A policy can be strategically rational and murderously unjust.
Canada is thinking rationally as a state.
The theory is straightforward: maintain the U.S. alliance, integrate into NATO supply chains, grow a domestic arms economy, manage dissent through surveillance, and speak the language of values loudly enough to maintain domestic legitimacy. This is coherent. It is also what Carney described when he said Canada would rely on “the value of our strength.“
The problem is not that Canada is irrational. The problem is that state rationality and human rationality are not the same thing. A state can be perfectly rational and choose, with full deliberation, to fund the killing of civilians in Gaza by refusing to close an arms export loophole.
The coherence is not exculpatory. It is the indictment.
What Carney is "living within"—to use his own Davos frame—is not a lie about values. It is a structurally maintained fiction that values and power can indefinitely coexist without one consuming the other. They cannot. Power has already won. The language of values is now the decoration on the architecture of force.
What Remains
The courage this moment requires is not the courage to be outraged. Outrage is easy, and it is often comfortable.
The courage required is to see the continuity: from Harper’s theological alignment with Israeli government territorial policy, to his private capital flowing into surveillance technologies tested on Palestinian civilians, to Carney’s vote against the arms loophole and his silence on the aircraft and his surveillance bill and his war bank.
These are not separate stories. They are one story.
And the question it places in front of every Canadian who still believes in the Charter, in the UN Charter, in the Geneva Conventions, and in the simple proposition that suffering is not selective is this: at what point does looking away become a decision you have made?
You already know the answer. That is why you are reading this.
