Adversarial nations that “despise our way of life” should not take precedence over Canada’s long-standing relationship with the U.S. – Brian Lee Crowley.

By Probe International

Canada must recognize and confront pervasive foreign interference from authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, as well as the rising influence of radical Islam within our borders. That was the urgent message of Brian Lee Crowley, founder of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, in his address to the Toronto Democracy Forum in late December 2025.

Discussing the stakes of a new Cold War against the West, Mr. Crowley emphasized Canada’s historical significance during the first Cold War, particularly through the case of Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who defected to Canada in 1945 and revealed a substantial Soviet spy ring operating in Canada, Britain, and the U.S. Crowley recounted how Gouzenko spent a day wandering Ottawa, desperately seeking someone to take his claims seriously. No one could understand, he recalled, why the seemingly friendly Russians, allies during World War II under Stalin, would pose a threat to “nice, inoffensive Canadians.”

The answer then as it is now, declared Mr. Crowley, “is that power-hungry despots despise our way of life.”

What authoritarian foes have learned since 1945, he noted, is that direct military threats to Western freedoms and democracy can be resisted. The Achilles’ heel of the West, they have learned, is the erosion of trust, division, disinformation, and covert influence. Campaigns orchestrated by China, Russia, and radical Islam have succeeded in creating a crisis of cohesion, said Mr. Crowley, who went on to unpack the ways in which democracy had been weaponized by enemies of the West to turn on itself.

The loss of “faith in ourselves and in the society that we have built,” he continued, causes us to “think that there is no moral difference between free democracies and authoritarian despotisms.” The result leads to ruin if there is “no reason to defend the former from the latter.”

As Canada actively seeks to establish China as a trade partner, Mr. Crowley warned “Ottawa’s complacency” regarding the country’s institutional “rot” posed a danger to both Canadians and Canada’s longstanding economic relationship with the United States.

The way forward, he advised: go West.

“The idea that we would, for example, entrust our security, freedom, and prosperity to a country like China, which has consistently shown itself willing to use any degree of trade or other dependence as a weapon against its partners, which has consistently plundered Canadian intellectual property whenever it had the chance, and which has kidnapped, threatened, and intimidated our citizens whenever it was convenient to them, is madness.”

The full address by Mr. Crowley appears below.