The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, has privately proposed expelling Canada from the Five Eyes. A sign for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building is shown in Ottawa, May 14, 2013.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A report that Canada could be ousted from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance was publicly denied by a senior adviser to Donald Trump Tuesday, but experts say the risk remains that Canadian assumptions about security co-operation with the United States will be tested in the months ahead.
The U.S. President’s installations of loyalists – including director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is accused of repeating Russian propaganda, and FBI director Kash Patel, who has spoken positively of the QAnon conspiracy-theory movement and supported the Jan. 6 Capitol attack – have thrown his country’s intelligence community into upheaval, and spread uncertainty among its allies.
The Financial Times reported Tuesday that Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, has privately proposed expelling Canada from the Five Eyes – which also includes the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand – as a means of increasing pressure on a country that Mr. Trump wants to annex as the “51st state.”
Mr. Navarro, speaking to reporters Tuesday after the report’s publication, rejected the idea of removing Canada from the Five Eyes. “We would never, ever jeopardize our national security, ever, with allies like Canada, ever,” he said.
Stephanie Carvin, a former national-security analyst and a professor at Carleton University, said speculation that Washington could remove Canada from the Five Eyes has circulated recently as the U.S. vowed a succession of tariffs against Canadian imports and as Mr. Trump persists in his talk of annexing Canada.
“This has been a persistent rumour for at least the last two weeks, and knowing the Trump administration and the threats they’ve made against Canada, it’s concerning, even with the denial,” Prof. Carvin said of the Navarro story.
A newsletter published by The Economist magazine on Feb. 24 also mentioned similar speculation. “In Munich I was told that American officials had earlier threatened Canada with expulsion from Five Eyes,” Economist defence editor Shashank Joshi wrote. “That was probably an idle threat, but it points to the tensions that lie ahead.”
The U.S. is by far the biggest supplier of intelligence that is shared in the Five Eyes network. Were Canada to be cut off from American intelligence, it could render Ottawa immediately vulnerable to espionage and foreign interference, Prof. Carvin said.
“That would make Canada an instant target for key adversaries such as particularly China and Russia, but also potentially India, which has closer relations with the Trump administration than we do, and there’d be a potential there for them to escalate their activities here,” she said.
Richard Kerbaj, a British journalist who published The Secret History of the Five Eyes in 2022, said that through the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Ottawa has great reach into the North American Chinese diaspora. That asset, he said, “will be of huge importance to the United States, especially because Washington deems China as the greatest economic, military and intelligence rival.”
The U.S. has previously retaliated against Canada by restricting intelligence sharing. In 2003, after Ottawa refused to join the American-led invasion of Iraq, Washington temporarily cut back on some intelligence material, according to both Prof. Carvin and Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
The U.S. would lose out if Washington cut Canada out of the Five Eyes, the pair say. It contributes valuable signals intelligence: the interception, decrypting and analysis of foreign electronic transmissions and computer data from listening posts, including Canadian Forces Station Alert in the High Arctic.
“On the signals intelligence side, we are especially valuable. It is a world-class agency that the Americans very much value,” Prof. Juneau said. He said there is a division of labour within Five Eyes, and Canada’s responsibilities for collecting signals intelligence include the Arctic, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Canada absolutely should be criticized for not doing enough on the security and defence front. But in the Five Eyes, we’re a serious player,” he said.
Prof. Juneau expects the U.S. under Mr. Trump to apply extreme pressure on Canada to extract concessions.
“That pressure will be ruthless, and will employ tactics that we would have found unimaginable until now,” he said. “It could include threats to kick us out of the Five Eyes at the extreme and even if it doesn’t go to that extreme, could it include threats to partially turn off the tap? That’s a more plausible scenario that should be of more concern.”
Prof. Carvin said she expects far-right Trump loyalists to sow chaos in the U.S. intelligence community, a development that could ultimately affect Canada. “The other aspect here is the chaos in national-security agencies, as Trump administration loyalists treat them like playthings. And at the end of the day, I worry that Canada will suffer because the agencies themselves won’t function how they used to.”
In the U.S. intelligence community, Canada and New Zealand are often viewed as lesser contributors to the Five Eyes. Australia and Britain “feel more threatened by the world,” said Stewart Baker, who was general counsel to the National Security Agency in the early 1990s, and held senior roles with the Department of Homeland Security.
“Canada’s capabilities in intelligence have suffered pretty badly from the de-emphasis on military capability generally,” he said, so losing Canada from the Five Eyes “might be less of a blow than you would think.”
He said Canada’s primary intelligence value for the U.S. lies in its northern regions, and a desire for polar intelligence gathering.
Losing that “geography would be quite significant” for the U.S., said Mr. Baker, who chairs the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. “Because the Canadian Arctic is a very sensitive place. And one where you would want to have as many eyes and ears available as possible.”