The Paul Wells Show - When Trump pushes, push back

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Mark Norman believes an attack from the U.S. in not hypothetical. It’s already happening. And Canada’s lacking a strategy to respond.    He first laid out his argument in an opinion piece for the National Post titled  “Canada’s relationship with the U.S. can’t be saved.”   He joins Paul to explain why he thinks we need to change our national mindset towards the U.S.    Mark Norman is the former Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy and Vice Chief of the Defense Staff of Canada.   Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. One thing about life in the military, it helps you spot an attack. It's really hard to tell where the line is, but I think we've already crossed the line. And I think his consistent commentary and his focus on Canada is not by accident. This week, Mark Norman, he was the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy. He says the big country next door has become a threat, and he says it's time for Canada to do something about it. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show.

Mark Norman was in the National Post last week saying some extraordinary things about Canada's relationship to the United States. He wrote that, "'When the leader of our closest neighbor says that he can destroy us with the stroke of a pen, it is more than just an expression of perceived superiority or hyperbole. It's a real threat. Dismissing that threat would be irresponsible and naive, he wrote.

Instead, he says we need to rapidly deploy all available instruments of national power with maximal effect. That could include cutting off energy exports, walking away from alliances, and urging other countries to take Canada's side against the Trump administration. It's not just anyone saying this. Mark Norman is a career naval officer who was commander of the Navy

and second in command of the entire Canadian military when he was suspended and then fired on breach of trust charges the Trudeau government was entirely unable to defend in court. Mark Norman got an apology from the entire House of Commons and a settlement. He's doing much better these days. He was in Brussels when I called him, where he had the same question everyone does. What do countries who thought they were America's friends do now? It's fair to say Mark Norman doesn't have a full plan, just an instinct. Retreating

and apologizing in the face of a harassment campaign isn't right, and it won't work. The first thing that's needed is a change of attitude, from, how can we make these threats go away, to, how can we make the Americans regret making these threats? Mark Norman, thanks for joining me. Well, thanks for taking an interest, Paul. I really appreciate it. Some important discussions need to happen. It sounds like you're basically ready to

write the United States off. Well, look, first of all, I have to give credit for the somewhat provocative headline to the editors at the post, but I was intentionally being a bit provocative. What I think we need to do here is we need to very carefully reset our thinking, our expectations and our behavior. This is not about tariffs specifically. Those are just simply one of a variety of tools in the toolbox. This is about a much bigger reset of the international

system. And how does Canada want to position itself? And how do we want to move forward? And yes, I was being brash and basically trying to shake us out of our slumber and our focus too much on the president himself and not enough on the bigger issues that are playing out. So that's where I'm starting from. Okay. Maybe a little bit of background would help. You were the commander of the Navy. Any Canadian military officer, especially in a command position, has worked closely with American counterparts in a bunch of different theaters. Can you sort of sketch some of your experience working with Americans and what that's been like for the smaller partner? Yeah. First of all, in no particular order, I would say that it has been

inspiring and professionally satisfying. The United States military are incredible professionals. They are patriots. They understand the geopolitics of everything that they're doing. They, for the most part, are very respectful of their allies and in particular, Canada and some of the other closer Five Eyes community. And they really appreciate everything that we have done and that we continue to do. The challenge of course, is that we're doing less and less because we have less and less. And that's part of the reason why we're being called out. I think this is an important dimension of the discussion because those relationships are quite robust. They're beyond personal, they're professional, and there is really an underlying sense of a shared interest

in not just the security of the continent, but more importantly, global peace and security. We really do behave like partners, recognizing that that yeah, we're much smaller. We have much less capability, but they never really treat us that way. What sort of places have American and Canadian forces work together, especially in, in, in naval deployments? Well, everywhere from the middle East, the Indian

ocean, one of Canada's frigates just transited through the Taiwan strarait the other day, again, as part of an ongoing commitment to peace and stability in that region. Those are all part of US-led operations. Balkans in the Adriatic from a naval perspective, both Gulf Wars, Libya, like it just goes on and on and on. And even in Afghanistan, ironically, a number of Navy folks deployed in counter IED and other activities alongside their US counterparts. So it's well established in history.

It's well established as a pattern of behavior. And Canada has always been committed to 99.9% of the global objectives of the United States. But this is where we get to where we are today and there appears to be a bit of a fracture in our collective views of the world. I'm not sure that permeates down to the rank and file of their military, but they will be loyal and they'll do what they're told. But I imagine that there's a lot of anxiety, likely in the minds and offices of many senior members of the US military as they're struggling to reimagine the kinds of relationships that are being, if not openly fractured by the behavior of this administration or certainly brought into question.

You were still serving during, I've got to be careful about my timing here. You were on the job when Trump became president the first time, if I'm not mistaken. Well, I was on the job, but kind of not on the job, so to speak. I was on the payroll, but I was suspended at the time. Yeah, I was sidelined. I was on the bench. Yeah. But yes, if I can interpret where you're going with this, I think what's changed, a number of things have changed, but the two big ones for your listeners would be, we now have a much more emboldened individual for a variety of reasons, who has clearly an agenda. And I think the second most important thing is that the group around him now and the layers of those both individuals and organizations

that are behind him are much more committed to this reset of the global system that I referred to a few minutes ago. And they have a much more coherent plan, it would appear. And so that I think is probably one of the key changes. My instinct tells me that a lot of these ideas were probably there before, but they didn't have the depth of understanding or planning to actually implement them. And now they're coming into office with a mandate, with an agenda, and damn the torpedoes full speed ahead to use a naval analogy. There was much more of a sense the first time around that it was like the dog that chases

the car and doesn't know what to do when it catches it. Whereas this time they absolutely know they're going to get in and start driving. Yeah. I think that's a great summary. Exactly. I want to quote a couple of sentences from your piece in the national post.

You write, I submit we are under attack and more significantly so too is the global system upon which our security and prosperity are based. In response, we need to rapidly deploy all and more significantly so too is the global system upon which our security and prosperity are based. In response, we need to rapidly deploy all available instruments of national power with maximal effect. What's the nature of the attack? Let's start with the first half of that quote. What's the nature of the attack? The nature of the attack at the moment is clear expressions of intent to either annex us territorially, to absorb us in whatever way, shape or form, his use of executive power to do so.

And this is all about intimidation. So some would argue, well, that's just a threat, but it's not because he's actually acting on it. What he's doing at the moment is he's using the lower threshold tools that he has to start what we would describe in military terms as softening. These are shaping actions. These are designed to influence our decision-making. That is, in essence, part of the attack. In the old world of purely kinetic warfare, which no longer exists in a pure sense, that would be the idea of softening up targets with perhaps some bombing or maybe in the modern terminology, some cyber events, those kinds of things. I'm not suggesting he's doing those things, but he is doing them in a virtual way. And so that's why I'm saying it's really hard to tell

where the line is, but I think we've already crossed the line. And I think his consistent commentary and his focus on Canada is not by accident. And there's some real intent behind it. I mean, the analogies that come to mind are at certain points in the American's military history, they sometimes play loud music outside a compound where they want to distract the people inside, or there's long history of, um, propaganda broadcasts, pamphlet drops, things like that. This is a sort of a modernized version of that. Yeah, exactly. And this is why I made the comment that it's

difficult to tell where you are on this continuum. And so you either accept that you're on the continuum or not and you act accordingly, or you pretend that, well, it's not so bad and it's just a whole bunch of noise and blah, blah, blah. They haven't really done anything. And that is an arguably irresponsible interpretation of what's going on. It forces this into a mindset where we're being reactionary and we're behaving tactically. So one move results in a counter move, which results in a counter move, and you're always in that scenario, you're always giving the advantage to the aggressor, because you're always in a reactive scenario. And that's where we find ourselves. And that's why one of the arguments I was making was we need to change our strategy.

It's hard to do right now. We've got a prime minister whose ass is going to resign. We've got an election that's going to happen sometime in the next three months. That's not ideal. No, it's not. In fact, you'll know that I make explicit reference to that. Washington are making incredible use of that vulnerability and it is a vulnerability. And so back to your comment earlier, they're now using the weakness and vulnerability that you just described to set a whole bunch of conditions in place for whatever it is that they wanna do. I'm not expecting an attack in the traditional sense,

but this is all part of an ongoing set of very strategic plays on a game board, if I can describe it that way, and I don't mean to trivialize it, in fact, to the contrary, on a game board that has fundamentally changed. And for any of your listeners that remember the game of risk, this would be the simplest characterization of what's playing out here. When we start looking at either hemispheric or geostrategic blocks starting to play out where basically Russia and Europe, you guys fight that over, then there's the Indo-Pacific and that's China's space, but America has interests. Then

and that's China's space, but America has interests. And then there's hemispheric North America and potentially Central and South America, depending on how far you want to go. That's not a particularly attractive framework for the future of global security. Okay. Now, before we talk about elements of a Canadian response, I want to push at this notion of a threat a little further. I mean, I have heard people say that this is just Trump's latest obsession and he'll get bored and he'll move on to something else soon, or that he will get his hair cut in the midterms in 18 months and you know, the incumbent party always takes losses at the midterms. And if we're going to get back to a kind of an approximate normal pretty soon.

Do you buy that? It's possible. One of the elements of the discipline of military training is that we look at things through a variety of different scenarios, including the least threatening, the most threatening, the most likely, the least likely, all these different scenarios, including the least threatening, the most threatening, the least likely, all these different scenarios.

It's entirely possible that that could play out. And that could lend itself to a strategy where you kind of wait and see. But waiting and seeing isn't a particularly dynamic strategy and it doesn't really put you in control of many of the factors that you're considering. The deeper concern I have, and I alluded to it in the piece, is this goes beyond himself. I'll call him Voldemort for this discussion. There are not just a bunch of people around him who are arguably zealots of whatever ideology he is motivated by, but there's a much deeper commitment to many of the principles here. And yes, it is entirely possible that even some of his most staunch

supporters could start to wonder what they signed up for over the coming years. And that's probably a realistic scenario. One could hope that that would be the case and that they would be more reasonable. But there's a deeper issue here and there's a number of folks who are committed to this. It goes back to these repeated references to the bad deals. The bad deals are not just about the latest rewrite of North American free trade or whatever the hell we want to call it. These are deeper issues that go right back to the end of the Second World War with respect to arguably the disproportionate burden that United States both incurred and accepted, and those are two

different things, in order to maintain the peace and stability that we've enjoyed for the better part of 80 years. And they're saying that's it, game over. There are a lot more people committed to that philosophy than are directly surrounding Voldemort at this particular moment in time. I've also heard it said, they're not even wrong that most NATO countries have not been pulling their weight, close to none,

with the exception of Poland and maybe Estonia, are spending as much of their GDP on defense as the Americans do. There are lower thresholds like the 2% target. But on a simple measure of, are you in it as hard as the Americans have been for a generation? The answer is in most cases, no. Maybe it's time for NATO to just pull its weight. This is one of the challenges because if that's the premise of their argument, then you start the conversation with a factual premise. And so it's harder to counter-argue. I mean, you look at the math, this would have to be fact-checked. But let's say for this discussion that the total combined expenditure on defense of all the other 33 NATO countries only equates to about 60% of what the United States spends on defense.

But the United States has global interests that other NATO partners don't have, so right there you can start to unpack that reference, but it doesn't change the facts. The problem with that is if they choose to just say, that's it, we're out, it creates massive power vacuum, which is what we're observing right now. The news today is all about the transition to the so-called peace negotiations related to Ukraine. I think Ukraine is going to be offered up as a sacrificial anode in this whole thing. I don't think that aligns with the underlying principles of many people, including a lot of Americans, but they get to make sovereign decisions. If that's the decision they're making,

then the global system has to adjust. How's Canada going to react? What's our strategy going to be, not just to weather this tompet that we're in the middle of, if we accept the premise that it's just going to last a short little while and then something else will happen, okay, fine, or are we going to reset ourselves? Look, we've needed to reset ourselves for decades. This is perhaps a bit of a wake up call for us because it's more than just a theoretical conversation now, there's an existential threat.

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are open now for next fall. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool. Is there any history of contingency planning in the military for an America that's transformed into well, an adversary? A less than benign neighbor. You'd have to get a historian. I'm an amateur in that regard, but this isn't a military issue. And this is part of the problem. This is some of the reaction.

I said earlier, I was being intentionally provocative to start a conversation, and I'm glad people are responding. Some people are responding quite emotionally, and that's fine. But the reality is, I'm not suggesting for a minute that this is going to be a military thing where they invade us. It's a foolish conversation. Even Voldemort himself has said that that's not how he's imagining this. He's imagining it play out in a different way where there is just so much economic pressure and influence exerted that he's looking at some sort of, whether it's an economic union, common currency, I don't know what the scenarios are, but I don't think it's useful for your listeners to imagine a military scenario. But nonetheless, that doesn't mean that we're not under attack. And this is what I'm trying to say. An attack does not have to be a traditional attack in the military sense. It can be economic,

it can be psychological, it can be through a variety of different means and that's what we're seeing right now. And we don't have the contingency plans that you're referring to even in a non-military context. So in your piece, you suggested that deploying all available instruments of national power might include shutting off our oil and gas, electrical power and critical supplies as well as the abandonment of historic diplomatic and military relationships and commitments. I don't know if you've been reading much in the Calgary Sun these days but thems fightin' words. The idea that Canada would withhold its energy exports is

not popular in some parts of the country. No, and I understand it. And I was hoping that there was sufficient nuance in the way we might have to consider things that we would have previously thought unthinkable. But the issue is, you know, we're either in this or we're not, and this goes back to one of the key messages that I was trying to communicate is that we're kind of, we're nibbling in the margins and we're not really hoisting in the significance of what's playing out.

We know from all of the analysis that's gone on over the last several weeks and the reporting that's been done, and it's been quite voluminous. And I would suggest if we strip out some of the emotion of the conversations, it's actually been really helpful to say there are no winners in this and anything that we would do to aka hurt them is going to hurt us. We know that. But then we have Prime Minister Harper suggesting that it's worth the cost. And my concern in all of this, I go back to, okay, what's our plan? My view is we might be focused on the wrong fight and a tit for tat approach to this is not the right one. And yes, I accept the fact that shutting off one of our major sources of revenue

is probably not helpful in the longterm. But the question is, are we in this to win it or are we in this to basically let somebody else decide what winning looks like? You also notice something that is starting to get remarked on, which is the neighbors are awful quiet, by which I mean the rest of the Western world. When an American president is overtly coveting the neighboring nation, you might kind of hope that some people would start to say, hey, don't do that. And yet we haven't really heard much of that.

Yes, exactly. And therein lies part of the concern. And this goes back to the dominant bullying behavior. My instinct is, and I'll get a better sense of it this week because I happen to be in Brussels for some meetings, but to be honest, I think they're all scared to death of what this means potentially for them. Nobody wants to be singled out. If we look at the non-North American NATO members or we look at the EU members,

they're large blocks of like-minded countries. And to the extent that they can speak with one voice, I think it's really powerful. This president, he does not like multilateralism. He wants to deal one-on-one with whoever the decider is on the other side of the conversation. And there's a bit of a divide and conquer mentality playing out here. And I am disappointed, but at the same time, I think there is perhaps a combination of both fear, trepidation of anybody speaking up because they have their own challenges that they're trying to manage here. I mean, this massive sucking sound that's just been created by the commentary of both the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President in the last week have sent shockwaves through the capitals of Europe. And they're now looking at

their Eastern flank and saying, holy shit, what are we going to do? So they are preoccupied, but they're also probably some privately thinking, wow, that's a North American problem. You guys sort your own crap out. We don't really need to get involved. And by the way, Canada, you reap what you sow, which is another valid argument that people are making is that, well, we had this coming. valid argument that people are making is that, well, we had this coming. Yeah, we did, but that doesn't excuse the nature of the behavior or the apparent intent, which is some form of annexation of a sovereign nation. And that's just totally, totally over the line, pun intended. lying, pun intended. We've got a G7 meeting in Cananaskis in four months. Can that be just another annual get together of a bunch of leaders? What are we heading towards? I don't know what we're heading towards, but to the essence of your question, Paul,

anybody who is under the illusion that we can carry on as business as normal is living in an absolute fantasy world. The president's actions alone are enough to cause enormous questions. There's a lot of discussion openly in the public domain now about whether he's even invited, whether we let him in the country. These are serious diplomatic and policy discussions. And my hope is that there's some adults in the room having those conversations. But no, you can't pretend that it's all normal again, which is why I made the comparison to the abused partner in a relationship who just continues to be, well, you know, if I try harder, it's all my fault. You know, we see this kind of thing all the time. And this is just another example of, of continuing

to perhaps unknowingly belittle ourselves in the relationship. I think either a non meeting or a meeting without him. Um, but then he'll just dismiss it and say, yeah, here we go. It's just another instrument of old school think, and I don't really give a crap. And this is what we're going to do. And when he starts suggesting that Russia should be back in the conversation, or,

you know, this is just, this is a fantasy that doesn't have a good ending in my opinion. I mean, I don't know much about tactics, but I know that when you try and move, when you need to change your position, your goal is to get to a newly stable position. Is there anything like that, that's conceivable in Canada's future?

But the neighbors don't like us. Yeah. So you're right. You don't want to fight on insecure ground if you can use that analogy. So yeah, you need a stable footing in whatever analogy you're going to use. And this is one of the challenges. And it's not that the neighbors don't like us, it's that the head of the homeowners association, if we're going to use a

neighborhood analogy here, has decided that he's going to unilaterally change the rules related to the longstanding, you know, bylaws of the homeowners association. I'm being a bit, you know, facetious here to make a point. And so the coexistence, it's a viable approach. You know, I use the analogy of a marriage. I mean, just because the marriage is potentially over as we knew it to be, that in and of itself doesn't mean that it's a disaster. It just means we have to reset the terms and conditions of the relationship. We can't deny the geographic connection here. Trade is going to continue. We know one of the other principles of this administration is that they want to sever their dependence on China, which is a good thing. So how does Canada leverage that growing opportunity? And that's exactly what

it was. It's the dismissive comments about, you know, they don't have anything we need and this kind of crap that is both wrong in fact, but that's never stopped him. And it also creates an environment in which it appears that we have no leverage. My view is we have lots of leverage. We just have to figure out how to use it better and realize that I think it's a bit of a long shot. And look, I'm all in on the Hail Mary from the perspective of would the best scenario be some sort of momentary ripple in the force and then we go back to the way things were. Okay. Wouldn't that be nice?

The reality is we need to reset ourselves anyway. And rather than fighting to go back to the way things were, why don't we fight ourselves to a new point, to the essence of your question, where we've redefined who we are, what we stand for, and what the principles are of our economics, our industrial strategy, all these other things that allow us to enjoy the relatively good quality of life, notwithstanding the fact that it's been under a lot of pressure recently, that we've enjoyed. We're still very fortunate and we still have enormous opportunity. But if we're squabbling over, I hate to say it this way, the nickel and dime issues issues and I know these are billions and billions of dollars but in the grand scheme of things, it's back to the old British maxim, penny wise and pound foolish. This is where I think we're focused on the wrong strategies. The bottom line is that you're calling for a change in stance or attitude from reactive and defensive to active and strategic.

Yeah, exactly. And coherent. Look, a former captain of mine that I had the pleasure to sail with a couple of times, she used to use the terminology of playing chess versus playing checkers. And not to oversimplify it, I think we're probably playing Tiddlywinks at the moment. And we need to op our game and we need to look longer down the board to where we wanna be and who we wanna be when this is all said and done. Because it's only gonna play out a couple of different ways.

And there's no point in being doomsday-ish about it. And yeah, I take responsibility for being intentionally provocative to get people out of their comfort zone and start thinking about this differently. Well, you set the table for a hell of a conversation and I'm grateful for it. Mark Norman, thanks for taking some time

to talk to us today. And thank you, Paul, and to your listeners for it. Mark Norman, thanks for taking some time to talk to us today. And thank you, Paul, and to your listeners for taking an interest in this. This is nation-defining stuff, and it's really important. Thank you. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max

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