Canada and Russia

The Conservatives under Brian Mulroney and the Liberals under Jean Chrétien were caught off guard by this monumental shift in geopolitics, forced to recalibrate the government´s security posture and rethink how Canada would engage the world and Russia in particular. [...] UN peacekeepers would be deployed in a variety of failed states, many former clients of the Soviet Union, from West Africa to the Horn of Africa, from the Middle East to Central Asia. [...] Perhaps because of the media’s portrayals of Russia as a threat to Canada’s Arctic, the Harper government ignored the fact that Russia was the only Arctic state sympathetic to Canada’s characterization of the Northwest Passage. [...] This included a decision to deploy Canadian trainers to Ukraine and NATO forces to the Baltics, coupled with sanctions against the Russian government for its role in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine conflict. [...] Though the Trudeau government terminated its air operations in Syria against the Islamic State under Operation Impact, it inherited and adopted much of the policies and world views from the preceding Conservative government.