For the second year running, Canada’s turn at the United Nations General Assembly’s green marble dais was taken by its foreign minister rather than its prime minister. Anita Anand delivered Canada’s annual address late Saturday afternoon — late in the rotation, because the UN reserves its weekday daytime slots for heads of state and government and schedules foreign ministers toward the end. Mark Carney had been at the UN from Monday to Wednesday, but his officials cited scheduling issues.
Anand’s message was that the big table is being cleared while the middle powers are still seated. “Great powers are walking away from global economic co-operation, dismantling economic integration,” she said. “In the face of this rupture, Canada’s goal is to achieve greater strategic autonomy.” The speech echoed Carney’s rhetoric over the past year about middle powers forging deeper ties — on emerging technologies, critical minerals, defence production and energy, alongside the rule of law and respect for sovereignty — including with states that are not close partners. “We will lead other middle powers to act collectively and decisively,” she said, arguing middle powers are helping build the framework of a new international order that is being established “as we speak.”
She wrapped the pitch in a metaphor from her rural Nova Scotia roots: “The tide does not wait; you must move with it.” State sovereignty, she said, “has been treated with disdain,” and Canada will defend the principle while working toward stability and common rules — which she connected to a just peace in Ukraine, self-determination for Palestinians and Israelis, and an end to hate-based violence. “We were tragically reminded of the scourge of antisemitism again when a gunman carried out an attack on a synagogue in Belleville, Ont.,” she told the Assembly.
On alliances, Anand pointed to the recent defence agreement among Denmark, its autonomous territory Greenland and U.S. President Donald Trump. “This agreement is yet another reminder that North America and Europe are stronger together. And as a founding member of NATO, our commitment to the transatlantic alliance is ironclad,” she said, amid rising warnings from European leaders about Russian hybrid attacks. Work to secure the Canadian Arctic, she added, is proceeding in lockstep with Indigenous Peoples. She also backed the International Criminal Court at a moment when Washington is working to dismantle it — a campaign that has included sanctioning a Canadian judge for her ICC work, though Canadian critics argue Ottawa still will not call out American coercion directly. Anand reiterated Canada’s bid for a UN Human Rights Council seat, with a vote expected in one year.
The doctrine on offer was “values-based realism”: advocating democracy in Iran, the return of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, and work to end Haiti’s gang crisis, with mentions of gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, Sudan’s civil war, Hamas’s attacks on Israel, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and safe approaches to artificial intelligence. On the next UN secretary-general, Anand said Canada is ready to work with whomever members elect, referring in French to the role by both its masculine and feminine titles. The Trudeau government called for a woman in the job in September 2024; the Carney government has not repeated that call.