Canada’s Illusion of Stability May Crumble in 2026 Amid Increasingly Dangerous Geopolitics: Clement
By Garry Clement
OTTAWA — As 2026 starts with high-consequence geopolitical events in Venezuela and Iran, Canada continues to present itself to the world as stable, prosperous, and benign. Yet the defining lesson of this past year is that our perceived strength is increasingly an illusion — a façade sustained by political denial, regulatory weakness, and the monetization of risk.
Across multiple fronts — land ownership, real estate, immigration, organized crime, and national security — the same pattern has repeated itself. Warnings were issued. Evidence accumulated. And Ottawa largely chose inaction.
The result is a country drifting further into vulnerability while congratulating itself on tolerance and openness.
Canada’s economy remains dangerously reliant on sectors that are poorly regulated and easily exploited: real estate, land, natural resources, and mass immigration. Throughout the year, investigative reporting and law enforcement intelligence continued to show how foreign capital — often opaque, sometimes criminal — flows freely into these systems with little resistance.
From farmland acquisitions on Prince Edward Island and the Prairies, to urban real estate markets untethered from domestic incomes, Canada has treated ownership and sovereignty as inconveniences rather than safeguards. Weak beneficial ownership registries and limited enforcement ensure that we often do not know who truly controls critical assets — and, worse, seem uninterested in finding out.
This is not economic growth. It is asset stripping disguised as prosperity.
The most brutal manifestation of these blind spots remains fentanyl. In 2025, Canada further cemented its reputation as a preferred destination for laundering synthetic drug profits. Chinese triads, Mexican cartels, and domestic gangs continue to exploit casinos, shell companies, and real estate — not because they are clever, but because Canada is permissive.
Each overdose death is more than a public health failure. It is a financial crime, a national security issue, and a policy indictment. While peer nations have hardened their anti–money laundering regimes, Canada remains slow, fragmented, and politically cautious — a combination that organized crime understands perfectly.
This year also reaffirmed Canada’s habit of strategic hesitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and allied action, the federal government continued to delay meaningful steps against hostile foreign actors operating within our borders.
Some critics charge that Mark Carney’s Liberals are already seeking to water down the long-delayed foreign agent registry, with fines of as little as $50 for non-compliance, while the government has estimated almost 1,800 entities would be expected to register, with 50 additions every year, if this future law were adhered to.
The failure to decisively confront Iranian regime proxies, foreign influence operations, and transnational criminal networks reflects a broader unwillingness to accept that Canada is no longer insulated by geography or reputation.
Our allies increasingly see Canada not as a leader, but as a weak link.
Perhaps nowhere was short-term thinking more evident than in immigration and education policy. Foreign students have become a financial lifeline for institutions, yet oversight remains inadequate. Education visas increasingly function as labour permits in all but name, feeding industries already plagued by regulatory gaps.
Public safety consequences — including in commercial trucking — are no longer theoretical. Nor are concerns about transnational criminal exploitation of these pathways. Yet the federal response continues to prioritize revenue and labour supply over integrity and enforcement.
These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a governing philosophy that treats risk as politically inconvenient and accountability as optional. Critics are dismissed as alarmist. Warnings are reframed as xenophobic. And systemic problems are deferred until they become crises.
Canada has been entrusted with extraordinary abundance — land, resources, institutions, and social cohesion. Over the past year, it has become clearer than ever that we are squandering that inheritance.
A nation can only live on reputation for so long. The erosion visible in 2025 will accelerate unless decisive reforms follow: real transparency in ownership, enforceable anti–money laundering laws, a serious national security posture, and immigration systems rooted in integrity rather than expedience.
Canada does not need to abandon openness. It needs to pair openness with vigilance.
The year behind us should be remembered as a warning. Whether the year ahead becomes a correction — or a collapse — will depend on whether leaders finally choose stewardship over denial.
As former Conservative immigration minister Jason Kenney and Conservative Senate leader Leo Housakos have noted, as reported in The Bureau’s analysis of the information war emerging from the Trump administration’s indictment alleging a Maduro narco-state conspiracy, the events in Venezuela are global in nature, and connect directly to Canadian vulnerabilities to transnational money laundering and lax immigration controls that are strategically leveraged by hostile regimes from Beijing to Tehran and Moscow.
And according to Housakos, due to actions emanating from Central and South American authoritarian regimes, including Venezuela, and ultimately instigated by enemies from Beijing, Tehran and Moscow, the upshot is that Western democracies are now facing hybrid warfare threats unprecedented since the Second World War.
In other words, through the tools of transnational drug mafias, political corruption, disinformation, terror and protest, human trafficking, and weaponized migration, Xi, Putin, and the Iranian clerics are attempting to destabilize our societies, softening our defenses before kinetic warfare, or defeating us from within without firing a shot.
Without urgent and decisive leadership in Canada, and the moral clarity and just force that has been in such lack, the continuity of our nation’s great promise is increasingly in doubt.
A thorough and accurate analysis of where Canada is, and where it stands on the world stage.
The Liberal government's blind and slavish insistence on adhering to the suicidal policies and initiatives put in place during Trudeau's decade in power have come home to roost.
Carny and his party refuse to leave those self-destructive lunacies behind - even in the face of the onrushing disaster.
A partial list: (not in any particular order)
LGBQT+ 10 squared requirements have been genetically woven into our legal and education systems and pushed forward as critical issues. All to satisfy the emotional requirements of a super-minority of the population. All to aid the government's goals of misdirection and divisiveness.
Dogmatic bowing to one welfare province who continues to stifle Canada's growth by refusing an eastern pipeline, even though they do not have the legal right to do so. This province, a separate country in all but name, states publicly that the only reason they remain in Confederation is the billions of dollars they receive in annual welfare payments from working Canadians.
Ditto, for the Rainbows and Unicorn provincial party in BC.
An immigration system that is so far out of control as to be laughable. With Liberal-appointed judges who refuse to convict criminals because it may affect their immigration status. On conviction, their immigration status should read: Cancelled, see the Bailiff for your ticket home.
An absentee PM, who sticks his head into Parliament every month or so to utter a few platitudes, then heads back overseas, to hob nob with 'His' people, the Europeans.
A justice system that is so dysfunctional as to defy description.
The lemming-like advancement of Land Acknowledgements.
The ongoing expansion of MAID whose sole purpose has become cost reduction by eliminating non-productive members of society.
MPs and Cabinet Ministers who are foreign agents, working against Canada. These are the people who make the laws that cover their crimes. And those crimes are treasonous.
The Balkanization of Canada. Provincial rifts that are in the process of becoming irreparable.
And lest we forget, the countless crimes, including but not limited to the theft of billions of taxpayer dollars by too many contractors to list here. All with the collusion of various MPs and Ministers - see the 'Other' Randy Boissonault, et al.
The Government's illegal imposition of the emergency act and their freezing of bank accounts, seizure of private property and charitable donations.
What truly saddens me is that I could continue this list for, quite literally, another hundred lines.
Somewhere in the past decade, Canada lost its way. I believe it was when the country did nothing about the crimes committed by Trudeau and SNC Laveliin during the Jody Wilson Raybault affair.
That was the beginning.
That was outright, in your face, and you can't do a damn thing about it, criminality. When they got away with that, the floodgates opened.
Woe Canada
I’ve been reading The Bureau now for well over a year. Canada is screwed. I’ve read about a govt that is corrupt to its core. A system of law that is backwards. It seriously benefits the criminal more than any legal system I’ve ever seen. The denial over the drug problem is asinine. Carney is the most corrupted leader Canada could have elected and considering he came after Trudeau that’s saying something. Canada needed someone who wasn’t going to keep the country from shifting to communism but failed to do so which to me was ludicrous. How the population watched the Covid protests in Ottawa and kept liberal is just insane. I highly doubt a damn thing changes in Canada. The best you can hope for is to keep strengthening the ties with China and the republicans keep the house this midterm election down here in the US. Should this election keep the congress for the right Canada will be taken over by the US. It’s the only way you survive. I’m sorry to say that. The US isn’t going to keep allowing you to do what you’re doing and it’s a matter of US national security. You’re our neighbor country on our border. We have for the most part gotten along swimmingly now for 250 years. There’s no possible way that stays this way with how you’re allowing China to move in. No way.