Thank you, Bob and Nader. And thank you to the Economic Club of New York for the invitation.
Canada is a proudly bilingual country, so I will begin with a few words in French and then proceed in English.
The world has changed. As a result, Canada is focusing on what we can control: consolidating our forces at home and diversifying our partnerships abroad.
To that end, we are catalysing one trillion dollars in investments in Canada over the next five years – in energy, transportation, data and defence.
Investments that will help build a stronger, more competitive, and resilient Canadian economy.
As we consolidate our strengths, there are several opportunities that Canada and the United States should seize to work together and compete with the rest of the world.
The time has come for a new partnership that will redefine the economic relationship between our two countries.
When I last spoke here, I reflected on the global financial crisis that had just passed and the Brexit that was about to commence.
Looking back now, those were comparatively carefree days.
Today, the world is undergoing a rupture.
Led by the United States, technological change is accelerating.
The U.S. is transforming all its commercial relationships.
The world is becoming more divided and dangerous.
Canada recognised these developments earlier than most, and our response reflects the core lesson we have taken from these tectonic shifts:
We have to take care of ourselves and be true to ourselves.
Taking care of ourselves means building our strength at home and diversifying our partnerships abroad.
So, in our first year as government, we have cut taxes on incomes, capital gains, and new business investment. We have introduced a Productivity Super-Deduction giving Canada the most competitive tax rate for new investment in the G7 – half the G7 average, and four percentage points below the United States.
We are catalysing one trillion dollars of investment in Canada over the next five years – in energy, transportation, data, and defence.
We have launched our most significant regulatory reforms in generations to fast-track hundreds of billions of dollars of nation-building infrastructure projects.
We are realising our full potential as an energy superpower.
By 2030, Canada will export nearly 50 million tonnes of LNG annually. By 2040, that capacity will double.
We are advancing a potential pipeline that would carry at least one million barrels of low-emission Alberta oil per day to Asian markets, while creating a new industry of large-scale carbon capture and storage.
We are building the first operational small modular reactor in the G7 while expanding our world-leading uranium production.
In the past year, we have signed 56 critical minerals agreements with more than ten countries — unlocking over 18 billion dollars in capital while reducing dependence on foreign chokeholds in critical supply chains.
We are doubling our electricity grid, building on the lowest-cost power in the G7 and second-lowest emission power in the OECD.
That is what an energy superpower looks like when it decides to act like one.
In parallel, we are diversifying our partnerships abroad.
We have signed over 20 economic and security deals on five continents in twelve months.
Our existing free trade accords already provide access to 1.5 billion consumers from the EU through to the CPTPP. We are now on track to double that addressable market this year with new deals with India, ASEAN, Mercosur, Thailand, and the Philippines.
We are the only non-European member of SAFE, the EU’s defence procurement initiative.
Our core objective across these partnerships is to increase our strategic autonomy.
Because we live in a world where integration has been weaponised.
Because a country that cannot feed, fuel, or defend itself is not truly sovereign.
Because strategic autonomy, today, extends to building partnerships in capabilities across AI, payments, space, critical minerals, and clean energy.
We are making progress because Canada has much of what the world wants from energy to critical minerals, key aspects of aerospace, cyber, AI, and quantum. Our pension funds are among the most sophisticated infrastructure investors in the world.
Our banks are among the most resilient.
And we are making progress because our reputation – as a reliable, predictable partner – has rarely been more valuable in a world where transactions are replacing relationships.
We are blessed with many commodities in Canada, but we have earned the most valuable one – trust.
Which brings me to being true to ourselves. True to our values of taking care of each other and meeting our responsibilities to our allies.
Canadians take care of each other with a relentless focus on affordability. By providing universal childcare, health care, and education. By building affordable housing at scale.
Canada is now doing our share abroad. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are meeting our NATO targets. We have already embedded within our fiscal framework a path to 4% of GDP in total defence spending by 2030 and are en route to 5% – consistent with the NATO schedule.
We have launched our first Defence Industrial Strategy that will catalyse half a trillion dollars in investment over the next decade – building on Canadian strengths in aerospace, shipbuilding, AI, cyber, and quantum.
We are leading NATO’s multinational brigade on the front lines in Latvia.
We are one of the largest per capita contributors as part of the Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine – standing up for freedom, for democracy, for territorial integrity, and for human rights, against criminal Russian aggression.
The outcome of this war is not in doubt. The only question is the scale of senseless human suffering that will be inflicted before Russia and its enablers accept the inevitable.
We are stepping up to protect Arctic sovereignty through intensified cooperation with the Nordic countries, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and by working within NATO to make Arctic security the priority it needs to be.
To back that up, we have moved quickly in the past year to build new military operating hubs, over-the-horizon radar, and submarines, while adding to one of the world’s largest fleets of icebreakers.
We are leading the creation of a new multilateral institution: the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank – to provide long-term, low-cost financing for defence and resilience projects across NATO.
Being true to our values also means continuing to invest in global public goods, including global climate and development finance, even as others are pulling sharply back. And it means helping to broker an enormous trade pact between the EU and the CPTPP, a bridge that will expand the footprint of rules-based trade.
We may be just getting started but the early results are encouraging.
Canada is projected to have the second-fastest growth in the G7 this year and next.
We already have the strongest fiscal position in the G7 – an advantage we are reinforcing by cutting 10% of the federal civil service, 20% of spending on consultants, and by reducing the annual growth of operational spending from over 8% to less than 2%.
Non-U.S. exports are up sharply and are on track to double over the next decade.
Foreign investment is running at twice the rate of our nearest G7 peer.
And Canada now ranks as the most attractive country in the world for infrastructure investment.
The Finnish President, Alex Stubb, has observed that people consistently do three things: over-rationalise the past, over-dramatise the present, and underestimate the future.
The right path out of the global financial crisis and the right response to Brexit both look clear in hindsight. But I can tell you, as someone at the table during each, there were few who identified those paths at the time – and fewer still who had the courage of their convictions to walk them.
The fog and fear in a crisis are real. They always are.
The right response to the global rupture today is clearer than it may feel.
In a crisis, fortune always favours the bold.
Canada got this early. We understood the world had changed. We know that nostalgia is not a strategy.
That’s why we are focused on what we can control. Building at home and weaving a dense web of international partnerships abroad.
This is making us a much stronger, more resilient, and more independent country.
Above all, this is good for all Canadians, but it is also good for the United States, because it makes us a better ally.
We know that, while Canada and the United States have had our differences over the years, we have always, eventually, worked through them, because our shared values and common interests run deep.
They run through our economies. Canada is America’s largest customer, buying more goods than China, Japan, and Germany combined.
They run through our supply chains, where 70% of Canadian exports are inputs to American cars, homes, aircraft, machinery, and finished goods, creating hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. value-add.
And they run through our energy partnership, where, at a time of a global energy crisis, Canada provides the United States with the reliable power and critical minerals that help fuel American growth: 99% of U.S. natural gas imports, 85% of electricity imports and 60% of crude oil imports.
That is mutual strength.
Canada Strong will help make America great again.
The examples are legion where we should work together and compete with the world together. To those ends, we have made specific, practical proposals to the U.S. Administration.
Consider aluminum: it’s electricity in an ingot. Canadian exports to the U.S. are the energy equivalent of 10 Hoover dams. With America’s growing energy needs, does it make sense to build the Gigawatts needed to replace Canada?
On automobiles, Canada is America’s biggest customer, and an integrated North American market for production is the best and most durable way to confront intense global competition.
On critical minerals, with rich endowments of potash, nickel, copper and uranium, Canada can be the most reliable supplier that America needs to put affordable food on the table, strengthen its national defence, and meet exploding demand to power AI.
We shouldn’t underestimate the future.
The United States approaches its 250th birthday as the most dynamic, resilient, and inventive country the world has ever known, as a country whose founding values of liberty, democracy, justice, and openness should continue to serve as guides to its future and that of the world.
That future should include a new partnership with Canada.
A true partnership that re-imagines cooperation in specific sectors deeply challenged by global competition.
A partnership with a different Canada, a stronger Canada. A more confident Canada.
A country applying the lessons from past crises.
A country boldly unleashing its enormous potential.
A country aggressively translating its belief in openness into dozens of new global partnerships.
A country that is predictable, reliable and principled in a world that is anything but.
I look forward to the conversation.