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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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On Tuesday the National Post published an editorial asserting that Canada should become less dependent on foreign trade and the importation into this country of much that is vital, and which becomes more scarce in times of crisis such as the present public-health emergency. The editors have invited me to comment on this, and I agree entirely with the piece they published. As readers would know, I have called in stentorian terms for a more self-reliant and constructively nationalistic foreign policy all my politically conscient life.

I said in 1959 (when I was 14) that it was a catastrophic error for John Diefenbaker to cancel the Avro Arrow and shut down almost all of our sophisticated aviation industry. I accept that we could not have found enough buyers to make the Arrow itself a profitable export-earner. But we had a platform, including a first-class jet engine manufacturer, to use to become a co-manufacturer with British, French, or even Swedish aircraft manufacturers. Canada could have become a significant participant in the immense arms industry, and have had a good deal more control over our national security and been a serious participant in commercial airplane manufacturing and the great range of sophisticated and technologically advanced related businesses. Instead, we folded like a three-dollar suitcase, bought an American nuclear anti-aircraft missile, and Mr. Diefenbaker succumbed to the persuasion of pacifists and proposed not to fit the nuclear warheads we had promised to deploy under our NATO and NORAD agreements. We were left with an anti-aircraft system based on warheads filled with sand, until Lester Pearson was elected prime minister in 1963, and fitted the nuclear warheads with the requirement of joint U.S.-Canadian agreement before detonation.