Canada Can Be The Next Superpower

SEPTEMBER 1ST, 2026 | NATHAN DANIEL

The economic realities of sovereign statehood are straightforward. Canada is not a small, bankrupt territory living on American food stamps. We are a nation of forty-one million people sitting on top of a nearly three trillion dollar economy. We hold vast natural wealth, world-class industry, and a tax base that yields over a trillion dollars in combined government revenue every year.

​Our public healthcare system is expensive. Total healthcare spending across federal and provincial jurisdictions approaches four hundred billion dollars annually. That is a massive chunk of our national output, around twelve percent of our gross domestic product. By contrast, our defense budget historically languished around thirty-five billion dollars, barely touching one point three percent of GDP.

​If the United States vanished from the earth, or if the alliance collapsed tomorrow, Canada would certainly have to militarize. To enforce sovereign control over our Arctic waters, safeguard three oceans, and secure a massive landmass against foreign encroachment, defense spending would need to rise sharply. To maintain a serious territorial defense force, we would likely need to spend around three to four percent of our GDP on the military. That means growing the defense budget by roughly eighty to one hundred billion dollars a year.

​Finding one hundred billion dollars in a three trillion dollar economy is a heavy lift, but it does not require shutting down every hospital from Halifax to Victoria. Closing that gap without touching health transfers would require straightforward choices. It would mean slashing the bloated civil service, defunding green energy corporate subsidies, eliminating regional development grants, cutting back federal programs, and perhaps raising the federal consumption tax by a point or two.

We do not need American military subsidies to keep our emergency rooms open. We could afford both a single-payer healthcare system and a formidable defense force if we truly possessed the political discipline to manage our money properly.

​However, dismissing a few fundamental points entirely ignores the much larger cultural reality. While American protection has not funded Canadian healthcare, it has subsidized something far more fundamental: our entire political culture, our sense of moral superiority, and our ability to ignore the harsh realities of the physical world.

​For over half a century, Canadians have operated under the comfortable belief that we are a civilized, post-military society. We built a national identity around being polite global peacekeepers and compassionate social engineers. We spent decades celebrating our expansive safety nets while routinely underfunding the basic, hard-power requirements of national sovereignty.

​We allowed our military equipment to rot, left our northern coastline under-monitored, and relied entirely on NORAD and American strategic deterrence to keep rival powers at bay. The American security umbrella gave Canada a sixty-year holiday from geography and history. It allowed our politicians to treat national defense as a low-priority political option rather than the primary, non-negotiable obligation of a sovereign government.

​If we were forced to stand alone, the financial adjustments would be the easy part. The real shock would be a total collapse of the modern Canadian psyche.

Dismantling The Bureaucracy

​To spend four percent of our national income on hard military power would require an ideological revolution. We would have to dismantle the massive administrative state that Ottawa built during the easy decades. The federal government would have to stop trying to regulate every aspect of domestic life, stop handing out billions in corporate welfare, and stop pretending that soft power and earnest diplomacy can protect a vast, resource-rich continent.

​We would have to transform ourselves from a comfortable, risk-averse welfare state into a hardened, high-readiness nation. We would need to train tens of thousands of young soldiers, build specialized Arctic icebreakers, deploy advanced missile defense networks, and permanently patrol our northern borders. Our priorities would shift overnight from social engineering to basic survival.

​The average family would feel that shift immediately. The federal government would no longer have the luxury of funding endless boutique social programs, green energy grants, and administrative bureaucracies. The constant debate in Parliament would no longer be about how to distribute federal handouts, but how to protect our natural resources, secure our trade corridors, and defend our territory from predatory foreign powers who do not care about our progressive values.

​In that sense, the underlying argument contains a vital truth. Without the American security shield, Canada would not lose its healthcare system, but it would lose its current identity. The comfortable, complacent, self-righteous nation we inhabit today would cease to exist.

​We would finally have to act like a real country. We would have to pay our own bills, protect our own borders, and make hard sacrifices. The money is there, and always has been. What has been missing is the political courage and national character required to stand on our own two feet.