Canada can no longer rely on the United States to defend core values like democracy and human rights as Americans reject the role they have played in promoting and protecting the global order.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland laid out a vision for a future where Canada can no longer count on its southern neighbour to safeguard a rule-based international order, and where ensuring Canada is able to act – with force, if need be – to protect those values alongside allies will require substantial investment in the military.

It will also require Canada to work to support the evolution of a new global order that can both preserve the best elements of the current order while embracing the rise of Asian leadership and the withering American role on the world stage.

“I would like to profoundly thank our American friends. As I have argued, Canada believes strongly that this stable, predictable international order has been strongly in our international interest and we believe it has helped foster stability for our southern neighbours as well,” she said in a speech that read like a retirement speech to American global leadership.

“Yet it would be naive or hypocritical to claim before this House that all Americans today agree. Indeed, many of the voters in last year’s presidential election cast their ballots, animated in part by a desire to shrug off the burden of world leadership. To say this is not controversial: it is simply a fact.”

Freeland’s speech also touched on echoes of the ‘responsible conviction’ foreign policy pillar pushed by her predecessor Stephane Dion.

That assertion called for Canada to act not out of hard opinions of what is right and wrong, as critics have suggested the former Conservative government did in situations that required a more delicate touch.

“It is clearly not our role to impose our values,” she said. “But it is our role to stand firmly for these rights both in Canada and abroad.”

The speech stressed the need for Canada and the United States to continue to seek common cause on issues such as border security and trade, but also touted the need to go it alone in protecting values like human rights, particularly women’s rights and the right to safe and accessible abortion.

“These rights are the core of our foreign policy,” she said.

Freeland hinted more details will come in an announcement Thursday by International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau of the way ahead for Canada’s developmental aid policy.

She also keyed up the reveal of the hotly-anticipated defence policy review on Wednesday by committing to the role of middle powers like Canada in mitigating the influence of great powers.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been critical of NATO and called on ally states to pay their “fair share” in order to hit the two per cent of GDP target agreed upon by members.

Freeland touched on that, saying that “doing our clear share is clearly necessary” and warning that failing to do so, or trying “to rely solely on the U.S. security umbrella would make us a client state.”

She also took aim at critics who might say her plan is too lofty, the product of the so-called “Laurentian Consensus” of eastern Canadian elites.

“These are ambitious objectives,” she said. “There is no guarantee of success. We set them not in the assumption that success will come easily but in the certain knowledge that it will not. We will venture in noble causes, we will risk, we will suffer defeats. But we will keep working for a better world, because that is what Canadians do.”

Roland Paris, an international affairs professor at the University of Ottawa and former foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, characterized the speech as one with parallels to the 1947 Gray Lecture given by former prime minister Louis St-Laurent.

He said both speeches had the difficult task of summarizing momentous changes taking place in preceeding years and trying to chart how those will effect Canada going forward.

“The world had undergone remarkable change: it was just coming out of the Second World War, the Cold War was just taking shape, and it was very unclear what these changes meant entirely and what they meant for Canada. [St-Laurent] in his speech described the changes that were taking place, he described why it was important for Canada to be involved in the world,” he said.

“I think that Freeland’s speech today was the best foreign policy speech that I have ever myself heard a Canadian politician give. She did an excellent job of describing the context, making the case and spelling out priorities, and doing so in way that spoke to Canadians and spoke to our allies and spoke to the United States all at the same time.”