Canada's Defence Policy Architect Was Fired After Warning That Anti-American Rhetoric Serves Beijing. Her Lawyer Wants to Know Who Gave the Order.

Ottawa bureaucrats are "horrified that someone like her can get terminated, given her record, her standing in the government," lawyer for Raquel Garbers says.

Prime Minister Mark Carney during his government’s trip to Beijing in January 2026.

OTTAWA — A chill is roiling Ottawa’s bureaucracy after the woman who crafted Canada’s policy to defend the North with American allies was fired, she alleges, after criticizing the government’s anti-American rhetoric — and shortly after Mark Carney’s government declared Beijing a strategic partner, The Bureau has been informed.

Raquel Garbers spent 28 years in Canada’s public service and helped write the country’s current defence policy. On October 15, 2025, she published an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s growing anti-American rhetoric was splitting the Western alliance and handing a gift to the country’s real adversaries, Beijing and Moscow. Two days later, according to the statement of claim in her wrongful-dismissal suit, Canada’s foreign minister stood in Beijing and signaled a shift toward a “strategic partnership” with China — a sharp reversal of Ottawa’s own recent posture toward Beijing. Weeks after that, she was fired.

Garbers, 57, filed her claim this month in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa, seeking about $2 million from the federal government. She is not a junior official, and her stature, and questions about whether Mark Carney’s government is trying to enforce a silence over the public service as Ottawa pivots closer to Beijing, are topics of conversation in Ottawa, Garbers’s legal team told The Bureau today.

“She was a very senior person and her termination has been a shock in Ottawa, in the public service,” her lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, said. “People couldn’t believe it when she got terminated. And my suspicion is that her termination was likely something that someone very senior called for, and I think it was completely related to the public opinion that she gave, that Ottawa’s anti-U.S. rhetoric was harmful to national security.”

The statement of claim describes Garbers as the principal architect of the small team that wrote Canada’s 2024 defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free, and as one of the only women ever to hold senior leadership in Canadian defence-policy work. Marshall says the case is built to answer one question: who, inside a government turning toward Beijing and away from Washington, ordered her removed.

If someone of Garbers’s rank and record can be removed for saying what most national-security professionals consider obvious, Marshall said, then “No one’s safe.”

“The fact that Ms. Garbers has been wrongfully terminated, for frankly just doing her job, and has been lied about as the reason for termination — there’s a lot of concern about the chilling effect as well of her termination, because she’s so senior,” Marshall asserted.

“A lot of comments and a lot of people are messaging myself and also Ms. Garbers, that they’re horrified that if someone like her can get terminated, given her record, her standing in the government, her length of service. If someone like her can get fired for saying something that is frankly very obvious to most Canadians, but definitely to anyone who has national security expertise, then honestly, anyone in the public service can be fired for the same thing.”

“The government destroyed her career because she wrote an op-ed,” Marshall added, arguing that expressing such opinions fell squarely within Garbers’s job. Governments often punish dissent that no rule forbids, she said. “They don’t want you saying things that are perhaps critical of them, even though that’s not written anywhere.”

The sequence from op-ed to firing was short and, in Marshall’s account, damning.

Garbers published her op-ed in the Hill Times on October 15. The department raised no objection at the time. Two days later came the foreign minister’s signal in Beijing, a turn the claim places alongside Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stated intention to reduce Canada’s reliance on the United States. Carney has said publicly that the old relationship with Washington “is over.” The op-ed, meanwhile, drew heavy criticism online and went viral, following a report in the Ottawa Citizen. Then, on November 13, the claim states, a senior assistant deputy minister, Scott Millar, told Garbers in a video call that her assignment would not be renewed and her position as director general would be eliminated, with no alternative offered. Formal notice followed on November 20. Her employment was set to end May 19, 2026.

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, held talks with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing on October 17, 2025 — exactly two days after Garbers’s op-ed appeared. Anand told the Canadian Press that Canada now viewed Beijing as a strategic partner, and in Beijing the two governments agreed to revisit the strategic partnership they first signed in January 2005. It was a sharp turn for a country that, three years earlier, had branded China a “disruptive global power.” Anand cast the shift as part of reducing Canada’s reliance on Washington amid President Trump’s tariffs — the same realignment that runs through Garbers’s warning and, her lawyer says, through her firing.

Marshall was careful about what she can and cannot yet prove.

The Bureau asked if legal discovery could lead to the office of the prime minister, or Mr. Carney himself.

“We don’t have any concrete evidence linking her termination with the prime minister’s office,” she said. But the decision to remove an official of Garbers’s seniority, she argued, could only have come from the top. “It would have had to have been someone very senior,” she said. The firing stunned the capital. Tracing the order is the point of the case. It will “explore through the discovery process who called for Ms. Garbers to be fired,” she said, and added: “I am sure there’s a lengthy paper trail.”

The government’s stated reason was that Garbers’s position had become surplus and that no comparable work existed. The claim says that is false on its face. Within weeks of declaring her role redundant, it states, the department staffed an equivalent executive position in the same branch she had been removed from, filled two more equivalent roles, and began searching for a candidate for a fourth. Marshall was blunt. The official reason, she said, “is a lie.” The department, she added, “is actually hiring right now.”

The surplus claim also clashes with what the department had promised her months before. In February 2025, the claim states, the then-deputy minister, Stefanie Beck, committed to extending Garbers’s secondment to an Ottawa think tank, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, for up to three years, and assured her she would return to her director-general role or an equivalent. The pleading calls the later surplus declaration wholly inconsistent with those assurances.

Of the roughly $2 million claimed, about $405,836 covers lost salary over a 24-month notice period. The rest — $500,000 in moral damages and $1 million in aggravated, exemplary and punitive damages — is tied to what the claim calls the bad-faith and dishonest manner of the firing. “The moral damages and the punitive damages are really related to the very bad faith manner of her termination,” Marshall said. “We’re going to be seeking accountability.”

What disturbs Marshall most is the message the case sends to everyone still inside the building. People are staying quiet, she said, because they are scared. She compared the moment to the outcry a decade ago over accusations that Stephen Harper’s government had muzzled federal scientists, and asked why a far larger question had drawn so little protest now. “Where’s the uproar?” she said. The Carney government has said nothing about the dismissal. Its only response, through the department, has been to decline comment, citing the litigation. To Marshall, the silence is itself an answer. “There’s been crickets,” she said. “They’re taking sides.” And, she added, “the silence is deafening.”

No statement of defence has been filed, and none of the allegations has been tested in court. The case is just beginning, Marshall said, indicating the discovery process could be extensive and explosive, and touch on matters of geopolitical consequence and Canada’s future.