When Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s former ambassador to the United States, stood up at the Global Business Forum in Banff last week, she wasn’t there to reassure the room. She was there to puncture what she called a persistent and, in her view, dangerous assumption among Canadian business leaders: that the cross-border relationship with the United States will eventually settle back into something familiar. It won’t, she told the crowd — and companies still planning around that hope are making a bet the facts no longer support.
A Blunt Message From Banff
Hillman said she had been struck, in recent weeks, by how many executives still talk as though normalcy is just around the corner. “She’s been surprised to hear so many business leaders say in recent weeks that they expect things to settle out eventually,” as The Canadian Press reported from the forum. Her point was not that the relationship is broken beyond repair, but that the mental model Canadians have relied on for decades — deep economic integration as a permanent, self-evident strength — no longer describes how Washington sees things.
That message, she said, simply doesn’t land with President Donald Trump and his administration, and she suspects the underlying sentiment predates Trump’s arrival on the political scene altogether. Americans, in her telling, retain real respect for Canada, but their decision-making is unapologetically self-interested. Her prescription was correspondingly blunt: Canadians “have to ‘be able to count on our own resilience'” rather than assume close North American trade ties will always be on the table.
She wasn’t entirely pessimistic about where this leaves the relationship. “Any relationship is better when there’s deeper mutual understanding of each other and I think Canadians are coming to understand our neighbour better than before,” Hillman said, adding that the shift is “motivating our country to maybe take on some of those characteristics of self-reliance, self-interest, making decisions that are best and primarily just for ourselves.”
She found some company on stage. Christopher Sands of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies described what’s underway as “a re-founding of the Canada-U.S. relations” — and framed it as a positive development, calling it “a marriage of equals, or at least self-reliant, confident countries.” It’s a reframing that asks Canadian business to stop thinking of Washington as a junior partner in a shared project and start thinking of it as a counterpart whose interests happen, sometimes, to align with Canada’s.
Decades of Assumptions, Undone
The forum’s own framing underscored the stakes: this year’s theme was “thriving in chaos,” and organizers didn’t shy away from naming the moment. Lois Mitchell, the former Alberta lieutenant-governor who co-chairs the event, said in a release ahead of the conference that “rarely have participants seen a world with such a litany of turmoil and ruptures to the international order,” even as she noted many leaders are “successfully navigating uncertain waters, currents teaming with undertows and disruption.” This was the 27th year of the gathering at the Banff Springs Hotel, and its agenda — sessions on global security, strained Canada-U.S. relations, artificial intelligence, even space travel — reflected an event trying to prepare executives for a genuinely different operating environment rather than a temporary rough patch.
The roster of speakers hints at how broadly this anxiety has spread across sectors: alongside Hillman and Sands, the forum featured Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and executives from Shell Canada, Canadian National Railway Co. and Telus Corp. — companies whose fortunes are tied, in very different ways, to how goods, energy and capital move across the border.
The Productivity Reckoning
Hillman’s warning arrives alongside a parallel message from inside Canada’s own economic institutions. Speaking to a Vancouver audience, a Bank of Canada official warned that tariffs are heightening the urgency for Canada to address its long-standing productivity problem, according to Business in Vancouver’s reporting on the event. The pairing of these two warnings — one about the durability of the trade relationship itself, the other about Canada’s underlying competitiveness — points to the same underlying diagnosis: Canadian businesses can no longer treat frictionless U.S. market access as a substitute for building resilience and efficiency at home. Tariff pressure doesn’t just squeeze margins directly; it exposes how much of Canada’s growth model has depended on that access remaining cheap and predictable.
That’s precisely the assumption Hillman was warning against. If tariffs are structural rather than cyclical — if they reflect a durable shift in how Washington calculates its own interests rather than a passing political mood — then productivity improvements at home stop being a nice-to-have efficiency project and become a competitive necessity.
Betting on Defence and Diversification
Ottawa’s own policy responses suggest the government, at least, has stopped waiting for a reset too. Business in Vancouver has reported that British Columbia is positioned to see $20 billion in defence spending as Ottawa pursues what it has described as “lethal” domestic growth in the sector — language that signals a deliberate push to build out Canadian defence-industrial capacity rather than lean on integrated North American supply chains by default. B.C.’s Jobs Minister, Ravi Kahlon, has separately said the province intends to actively compete for a share of rising federal military spending, according to Business in Vancouver’s coverage of his remarks.
Taken together with Hillman’s comments in Banff, this reads less like a series of disconnected announcements and more like the outline of a strategy: if the old bet on seamless U.S. integration no longer holds, redirect capital toward sectors — defence, domestic manufacturing capacity — where Canada can build leverage and jobs regardless of what happens in Washington. It’s the policy expression of the same instinct Hillman described among the public: an emerging preference for self-reliance and self-interest as organizing principles, rather than an article of faith in cross-border partnership.
Who Wins, Who’s Exposed
The uneven way this shift is playing out matters. Companies and regions positioned to capture new domestic spending — B.C.’s push to attract defence contracts, for instance — stand to gain from Ottawa’s redirection of capital toward sectors insulated from U.S. trade policy. Firms whose business models still assume frictionless, low-cost access to the American market are the ones most exposed to the scenario Hillman is describing, particularly if tariff pressure persists rather than easing.
The Bank of Canada’s warning about productivity adds another layer to who’s exposed: businesses that have relied on scale advantages from integrated cross-border supply chains, rather than on genuine efficiency gains, may find that tariffs remove a cushion they’d taken for granted. That’s a harder problem to solve quickly than diversifying export markets or chasing new domestic procurement — it requires investment, retooling and, often, years of lead time.
What’s notably absent from the public record so far, at least in what’s been reported from the Banff forum, is a clear sense of how much of Canadian business has actually internalized Hillman’s warning versus how many are still, in her words, expecting things to “settle out eventually.” That gap — between what a former ambassador with direct experience of Washington’s calculus is telling them and what many executives apparently still believe — is itself one of the more revealing details to come out of this year’s forum.
Our Take
What strikes us most about Hillman’s remarks isn’t the warning itself — plenty of officials have said tariffs and trade friction are here to stay — but the specific target of her frustration: business leaders who, in 2026, are still operating as though a reset is coming. If that’s genuinely the prevailing assumption in Canadian boardrooms, it suggests a lag between how policymakers and diplomats are recalibrating and how the private sector is actually allocating capital.
The defence-spending numbers and the Bank of Canada’s productivity warnings, read alongside Hillman’s comments, look to us like early evidence of a coherent national response taking shape — one built on redirecting spending toward domestic capacity and treating competitiveness as urgent rather than aspirational. But a $20-billion defence commitment in one province, or a single Bank of Canada speech about productivity, is not yet proof that Canadian business broadly has made the mental shift Hillman is calling for. The more interesting question the sources raise, in our view, is whether that shift happens proactively, sector by sector, or whether it only arrives after more companies get burned by clinging to an assumption of normalcy that the people who actually negotiated with Washington are now explicitly telling them to abandon. Sands’ framing of a “re-founding” built on self-reliance is an appealing story if Canada actually builds the productivity and diversified capacity to back it up. Whether that happens, or whether it remains a talking point at forums like Banff’s, is the story we’ll be watching over the next several budget and trade cycles.
This is a Commentary piece: analysis and editorial perspective from Canadian Business News, clearly distinguished above from the reported facts it’s based on. It is not financial, investment, or legal advice.
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