Matt Gurney: Watch out, Canada. Trump is about to start softening us up

Scrapping a U.S.-Canada defence forum is fair — we have been negligent. But the timing is the most interesting part. Expect more moves like this.

By: Matt Gurney

Because getting through a long weekend without some breaking news development intruding is apparently now impossible, I was sitting outside on a surprisingly hot Ontario spring day when a phone alert told me that the U.S. was withdrawing from a major forum for American-Canadian defence cooperation that had existed for more than 80 years.

Oh, Lord, I thought. The U.S. has done and gone blown up the PJBD.

Dear readers, they had indeed done and gone done it.

Most of you probably haven’t heard of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense. It’s pretty much the domain of senior U.S. and Canadian defence and military officials, plus, historians. But it was a big deal once upon a time. Created in 1940, it linked Canada and America together in self defence at a time when the United States remained a non-combatant in the Second World War.

Then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been trying to nudge his country into the fight — he believed that America would have to eventually get into the war against Germany, but faced severe constraints from the powerful isolationist movement at home. One of the ways he was able to nudge America more and more into the allied camp was through a series of steps that he could plausibly sell to a skeptical American public as entirely defensive. Alongside Lend-Lease and Destroyers for Bases, the Permanent Joint Board on Defense whittled away at the concept of pure American neutrality even while keeping it out of the war as a full combatant, all under the guise of America looking after itself by securing the local neighbourhood from any external threat.

I’ll leave, with sadness, the military history at that. What matters today is that the PJBD has remained operative since 1940 as an important forum for coordinating U.S. and Canadian bilateral defence of North America. It’s not an operational command, where actual day-to-day military decisions get made. It only meets annually (in theory, anyway — it reportedly hadn’t met since 2024). It remained a valuable place to bring senior U.S. and Canadian officials together to hash things out.

But the U.S. has had enough. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense, announced in a series of Twitter posts on Monday that the U.S. was “pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.” The tweets also criticized Canadian underinvestment in defence, linked to Mark Carney’s famous/infamous Davos speech, noted Canada’s gaps between rhetoric and reality, and ended with this: “Only by investing in our own defense capabilities will Americans and Canadians be safe, secure, and prosperous.”

So. What’s up with this?

First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.

The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.

Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.

We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.

So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.

Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?

A fascinating thing I’ve noticed in my years of observing U.S. politics — from afar, I grant, but steadily — is that only a few major issues can consistently hold the attention of the White House. America’s global commitments and concerns are simply so vast, and their domestic politics so ceaselessly churning, that senior U.S. officials don’t have the time or bandwidth to think about more than a few issues at once, and very few of those are important enough to be consistently on their mind. Canada doesn’t make that short list. But with the July 1 trade talks deadline approaching in under six weeks, now, I suspect that official U.S. attention is shifting, even a little bit, to little ole us. We are sliding into their awareness window.

And that means that we should probably expect to spend the next month and a half being softened up.

You might not have noticed it ahead of the long weekend, but this wasn’t the only bad news for Canada coming out of the States. The United States has also, and I am not making this up, tariffed our mushrooms. The U.S. claims it is because of inappropriate government subsidies, the Canadian mushroom industry insists it’s not especially subsidized. I confess to absolutely no knowledge of or expertise in fungal farming, so I’ll skip any commentary beyond noting the timing. I have a hunch this won’t be the last such curveball lobbed at our faces as the CUSMA clock runs out.

So that’s what I think is going on. “Pausing” the PJBD is actually fairly clever. It won’t materially damage the day-to-day defence cooperation. NORAD will still function. The military commands will still talk. This is a largely symbolic move that hits directly at the historical core of the special U.S.-Canada defence relationship. It sends a strong signal without actually doing much damage, and it shines a light on a genuinely embarrassing, self-inflicted Canadian weakness.

In other words, from Trump’s perspective, it’s just about perfect. It embarrasses us, costs him nothing (at least nothing he cares about) and puts Canada on notice. We have been reminded of our weakness and dependence on American protection.

I don’t think it’ll work, for what it’s worth. I don’t think Carney or his government will be intimidated by this, and if anything, it may accelerate our efforts to be less dependent on the U.S. I quipped on Twitter yesterday that the U.S. announcement is a boon for Saab, the Swedish company that is making a hard push on us to buy their Gripen fighter jets alongside or instead of American-made F-35s. As more than one observer replied, it’s actually possible I have the causality reversed: maybe this is America’s way of expressing displeasure at our plans to do exactly that. In any case, I don’t think the American move will accomplish what it seems to be trying, and if anything, it’ll probably have the opposite effect.

So here we are. That’s what the PJBD is, why “pausing” it both does and does not matter, and why we should expect more moves like it. My main hope is that this kind of public pressure does what a career’s worth of my columns was never able to do — forces us to get serious about fixing what we’ve allowed to break down in our own country, very much including our armed forces. If it does, Colby will have my thanks.

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