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Canada needs to become more secure by becoming more self-sufficient. In a new series, the Post examines how a country made wealthy by globalization and trade can also protect itself against pandemics and other unknown future shocks to ensure some of our immense resources and economic power are reserved for our own security.

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It has always been true that a country is most secure when its functioning is least contingent on external sources. To the degree that it is possible, to provide for itself all which is necessary for that functioning, is an undebatable proposition.

It’s as old as the fine axiom of “stand on your own two feet.” Others’ limbs will not support you when it most matters. But here in Canada we have displaced that idea, shackled those industries central to the country’s capacity to own itself. And we have neglected and even disparaged the most central enterprises, diminished the respect for enterprise itself, leaving us open and vulnerable to factors over which we have no influence.

Others’ limbs will not support you when it most matters

Canada has almost all it needs. But the country, or more properly its government, has disconnected from priority concerns to become preoccupied with issues over which it has no real influence. Drop the nonsense preoccupations that distract or supersede from our real interests, for example, that seat on the UN’s useless security council, and drop specifically this idle idea that we can change the planet’s climate in 2100.