The room at Chatham House carried that familiar hush of polished wood and old ideas. Mélanie Joly stood there on 22 July, hybrid lights catching her face, and spoke of building Canada strong. Not in slogans. In steel, in reactors, in the quiet calculus of who controls their own power when the supply chains snap.
She had come to London to talk industrial strategy and the peculiar art of middle-power diplomacy. The event, chaired by Laurel Rapp of Chatham House's North America programme, drew the usual mix of analysts and officials. What lingered was Joly's insistence that industrial policy is back. Not as academic theory. As the new geopolitics.
She described a country that intends to triple its liquefied natural gas exports, pushing annual capacity toward 50 million tonnes. A security measure, she called it, for allies in Europe and Asia staring at winter shortages and unreliable suppliers. Canada plans the first small modular reactor in the G7 at Darlington, Ontario. It will refurbish its CANDU fleet. Its electricity grid already runs more than 70 per cent clean, mostly hydro and nuclear. That figure is not abstract when factories decide where to land.
In Quebec, industrial power comes cheap: three to five Canadian cents per kilowatt-hour. The sort of number that makes energy-intensive industries, green aluminium, steel, batteries, data centres, think twice about reshoring. Canada has already lifted steel and aluminium exports to European markets by more than 50 per cent. The United States draws roughly 75 per cent of its aluminium from Canadian sources. These are not gifts. They are leverage.
Defence as industrial policy
Joly tied it together with defence spending. A planned 500 billion Canadian dollars in the sector is expected to generate 125,000 jobs and boost exports by half. Procurement of F-35s, submarines from TKMS, expansion at Pratt & Whitney, participation in the GCAP fighter programme alongside the United Kingdom. The message was plain: sovereignty is not declared. It is engineered, kilowatt by kiloton.
Our entire plan is about building Canada strong, and we think that we can have even more control on our economy, our own destiny, to protect jobs but also to create jobs.
She said it without flourish. The room listened. Later she returned to the theme of a third way. Canada would work with the United States, work with China, but chart its own path as a middle power. The phrasing carried the old Canadian reflex for balance, yet beneath it ran something harder: the recognition that strategic autonomy is no longer optional when global trade pressures turn friends into rivals overnight.
