Canada and America Are Drifting Apart. The Pentagon Just Made It Official | The Walrus

Newsletters

Subscribe

Donate

Search

Sections

Latest Stories<br>Business<br>Environment<br>Society<br>Politics<br>Arts & Culture<br>View all categories >>

Explore

Newsletters<br>Events<br>Podcasts<br>Games<br>Magazine<br>The Walrus Lab

Support

Donate<br>Subscribe<br>Merchandise<br>The Walrus Plus<br>Annual Report<br>The Walrus Gala

Follow

Twitter<br>LinkedIn<br>YouTube<br>TikTok<br>Facebook<br>Instagram<br>Bluesky

About Us

Contact Us

My Account

Manage Subscriptions

-->

Skip to content

Thomas Hawk / Flickr

In a post on X on May 18, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon, announced that the United States would pause its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD) to “reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.” The under secretary pointed to Canada failing to make credible progress on its defence commitments as well as to Canadian rhetoric, a jab at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos about middle powers co-operating in the face of hegemonic powers, as the reasons for the US decision. The move comes barely six weeks ahead of the mandatory joint review of the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which Canada is heavily reliant on, as well as amid a climate of worsening bilateral relations since President Donald Trump’s own rhetoric about making Canada the fifty-first state and the imposition of tariffs on Canadian trade.

Below is a Q&A briefing put together by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, with contributions by Christopher Hernandez-Roy, Mark F. Cancian, Jamie Tronnes, Richard Shimooka, Christopher Sands, and Philippe Lagassé. It explains how suspension of the PJBD exposes deeper tensions over defence, trade, and sovereignty, threatening a key mechanism for managing Canada–US security co-operation.

What is the PJBD and what does it do?

The PJBD is the oldest formal Canada–US defence co-operation mechanism and serves as the principal advisory body on continental security. Created in 1940 under the Ogdensburg Agreement between Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the PJBD was established to coordinate the defence of the north half of the Western Hemisphere and study problems related to sea, land, and air, including personnel and matériel. In 1947, the two countries agreed that the board would continue in the postwar period for peacetime joint security purposes.

The PJBD brings together senior civilian and military representatives from both countries to discuss strategic defence priorities, continental security, Arctic issues, critical infrastructure, military modernization, and emerging threats. During the Cold War, the PJBD played an important role in shaping many pillars of North American defence co-operation, including the development of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line and North Warning System for Arctic surveillance, defence industrial coordination, and major infrastructure projects, such as the Alaska Highway and St. Lawrence Seaway.

Some analysts argue that the PJBD lost influence after the creation of NORAD in 1958 and especially after the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) was established following the September 11 attacks. Co-operation and coordination, they argue, is located in the tri-command arrangement consisting of NORAD, USNORTHCOM, and Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC), even if no overarching true central structure exists to provide unity of effort and command for North America. Others, however, contend that the PJBD’s importance has been as a discreet, high-level forum for strategic dialogue, trust building, and policy coordination between the two countries, away from public visibility or operational command authority, to allow Canada and the United States to more candidly address sensitive defence issues. Canadian scholar P. Whitney Lackenbauer argues that renewed geopolitical competition and a recognition that the “homeland is not a sanctuary” make the PJBD increasingly relevant to today’s bilateral defence relationship.

The administration’s stated reason for the hiatus is that Canada is not spending enough on defence. Is that true?

That was true in the past but is no longer the case. Canada now meets the 2 percent North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) goal for defence spending, though some commentators have said the government has relied on some creative accounting methods in calculating its military spending. In any event, it’s a dramatic increase from where Canada was when the goal was announced in 2014. For many years after the end of the Cold War, Canada was a defence-spending laggard at about 1 percent of gross domestic product. The level has increased since 2014 and is now slightly over the 2 percent goal (2.01 percent).

Because Canada has a relatively large economy, spending 2.01 percent on defence produces one of...