Originally published in The Hill Times, under the title Why Canada can no longer trust U.S. regulatory agencies. For all of Mark Carney’s talk about how Canada needs to reduce its reliance on the United States, he’s been conspicuously silent on the governance links that create and maintain our interdependence. Regulatory cooperation, as Natasha highlights, is a big part of these links. We need to start taking it seriously. That starts with coming up with a plan to deal with the fallout of the U.S. evisceration of its domestic regulatory frameworks.

President Trump’s August 1^st firing of the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics with a bad faith allegation of manipulated statistics is another critical attack by the U.S. government on the independence of statistical and regulatory agencies and on knowledge itself. Trump’s administration has declared war on the independent agencies that produce scientific knowledge on health, weather, climate, the environment, the economy, and space by cutting funding and cancelling programs, firing workers and demanding that the science produced reflect Trump’s ideologies. The U.S. government is dismantling the very state and academic institutions that made the United States a global data and knowledge powerhouse.

Alongside this ideological war on science, the U.S. government is razing its regulatory agencies, slashing decades of work regulating the environment and food safety in mere months. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is rolling back wastewater regulations for oil and gas development, lowering air quality standards, including on hazardous air pollutants, and, in a time of climate emergency, fast tracking fossil fuel projects. Meanwhile, the food system in the United States is in danger because of deep cuts and job losses at the federal agencies that oversee food safety, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Policy expert Sarah Sorscher, at the Center for Science in the Public interest, contends the U.S. “federal food safety system is teetering on the brink of a collapse.”

The U.S. government’s wholesale destruction of knowledge and regulations is not solely a problem for the United States. It affects every country that relies upon U.S. data and regulations to inform their policymaking and regulatory efforts.

In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney, who was elected with a strategy of ensuring Canadian sovereignty and values in response to Trump’s repeated threats of making Canada a 51^st state, had said very little publicly about the collapse of the U.S. regulatory state. Carney’s priorities are signing a comprehensive trade and security deal with the United States, bolstering Canada’s military spending, and dramatically cutting the federal spending and the federal civil service. Carney’s priorities, as other critics have noted, reflect a business-as-usual response to a now-authoritarian United States, not a recognition that the Canada-U.S. relationship has fundamentally changed.

Commentators have usefully pointed out that Canada can no longer rely upon the United States to comply with existing trade agreements, let alone new ones. However, what’s largely missing from public debates on Canada’s future with the United States is a consideration of what that relationship looks like when U.S. agencies’ data cannot be trusted and U.S. regulatory agencies are becoming partisan entities of an authoritarian United States.

Canada needs a sharp pivot away from its traditional regulatory reliance on the United States. Consider Canada’s dependence on U.S. health institutions for tracking infectious diseases, including avian flu and tuberculosis, and dealing with pandemics. What are Canada’s plans in response to the U.S. government’s cuts to their public health sector? This is a critical situation given that U.S. cuts have crippled its responses to public health emergencies, posing “immediate and long-term risks to the health of neighbouring countries and to global health,” according to a recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Canada, the editorial contends, needs to strengthen public health and disease surveillance systems nationally.

More ambitiously, Canada could step in where the United States is abdicating its role in public health. The United States plans to cancel US$500 million in funding for mRNA vaccines, including those that have been safely and successfully used to counter Covid-19. Canada could pour funds into scientific research in Canada to attract key scientists, academics and health professionals to ramp up vaccine research and production in Canada. This would also require extensive and sustained investment in Canada’s research funding programs and university system, which has been hobbled by decades of underfunding.

Now is not the time for the Canadian government to be slashing the federal public service, which will weaken regulatory capacity domestically. Instead, we have an opportunity to boldly reenvision Canada by strengthening our academic and scientific research and, crucially, building a world-leading data and regulatory capacity.