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Canada needs to become more secure by becoming more self-sufficient. In a new series — Strong & Free: Shockproofing Canada — 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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In 1981, when the United States was building out its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Canadian government was considering creating joint oil storage space with the Americans on Bell Island, in Newfoundland and Labrador, and along the Canso Strait in Nova Scotia. But the plan was abandoned after the U.S. energy secretary at the time decided there was no way they were going to build part of the vital reserve in another country.

“Not even Canada,” the American official concluded, according to Robert Skinner, who served as an assistant deputy minister in the federal energy department in the early 1980s when the plan was first proposed, and is now an executive fellow at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.