Prime Minister Mark Carney with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London, on Monday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Tom Tugendhat is a Member of British Parliament and former security minister.
On Monday, Mark Carney arrived at Downing Street and Keir Starmer wished him a happy birthday. Ottawa and Westminster are always close, but with oil surging past US$100 a barrel and the war continuing in Ukraine, the need to plan together for what is to come has never been more important.
The next morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky flew in. The two conflicts on two continents are both fuelling challenges that we will have to face at home as the world scrambles to adjust because of our dependency on chokepoints we struggle to secure.
Iran has made the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s crude still nominally flows, the centrepiece of its retaliation against the American and Israeli strikes. It has already disrupted prices, and very soon it could have an impact on supplies – affecting shipping and repricing, in real time, every good travelling anywhere, from Seoul to Saskatchewan.
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for cooperation, countries have been reticent to involve themselves in the operation. Japan said it would be legally “very difficult.” France and Britain ruled out a naval contribution. Australia’s transport minister declared the country “well prepared to weather the economic crisis” and confirmed no ship would be sent, though her statement that Australia holds 37 days of petrol and 30 days of diesel sounds more like a warning than a reassurance should the blockade endure.
All this points to a reality the world has not calculated: resilience is more than volume, it’s options. With little flowing from the Persian Gulf, that means thinking hard about those we can trust. And when it comes to CANZUK – Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – there’s no one we can trust more than each other.
Mr. Carney, right, shakes hands with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a visit to Parliament House in Canberra, on March 5.LUKAS COCH/The Associated Press
I’ve seen what we can do when we choose to act together. In Iraq, my commander was Australian, there was a Canadian in the unit and we had a New Zealand doctor. The Aussie was in his own armed forces, the others in the British, and none had changed their passports. But that didn’t matter. We all held Crown commissions and operated under structures of command, law and trust that have been built over generations.
We didn’t need a new treaty to fight together, just the political will to show up. That interoperability, tested time and again, is an asset no other group of nations possesses, and it goes beyond the battlefield.
Between us, we can offer each other resilience based on trust that none can match. Canada produced 5.3 million barrels of crude oil per day last year, a national record, and is now increasing output by a further 140,000 barrels daily as part of the International Energy Agency’s emergency response. Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves, roughly a third of all known deposits, centred on the Olympic Dam mine, the single biggest uranium deposit ever found. Canada, too, holds enormous reserves in the Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan. New Zealand already generates more than 80 per cent of its electricity from renewables, principally hydro and geothermal. Britain retains a substantial North Sea production base, which needs drilling, and is building the largest offshore wind capacity in Europe while committing to a nuclear program whose fuel needs could and should be met from within the alliance, through Edmonton and Adelaide, not Astana and Moscow.
Opinion: When Canada and Australia team up, nobody can stop us
Together, we represent a combined GDP of US$8.85-trillion, defence spending at over US$140-billion and rising. We’re already in Five Eyes, and the CPTPP, but most importantly united by the constitutional reality that each recognizes the same head of state. These are more than sentimental ties. They are institutional facts with practical consequences for how fast agreements can be reached and how far trust extends when supply chains come under pressure.
Hormuz and Kyiv remind us what matters. Energy dependence finances the very aggression that threatens us and leaves our friends exposed.
Together, we can build the resilience in arms and energy based on preferential supply arrangements, shared strategic reserves, aligned nuclear fuel cycles and joint investment in critical infrastructure, which would cut costs and create opportunity for us all.
Sharing the burden of protection, the security of supply, and the cost of innovation would build on the interoperability I witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the intelligence sharing that runs daily through Five Eyes, and in the submarine program AUKUS is delivering.
The objection will be distance, but that’s a strength, not a weakness. It gives us each a footprint in a part of the world we could never control but from which we can draw strength.
With liquefied natural gas (LNG) crossing oceans by tanker, and uranium shipped in containers, distance is no longer as great a problem as political imagination. Closer cooperation has been treated as nostalgia, but the reality is that the wars in Iran and Ukraine show it matters today. From Alberta to South Australia, the trust already exists. What is missing is the decision to act.
Mark Carney was in London this week. He met Britain’s Prime Minister and our collective King. The conversation should not end there.