Canada’s foreign-policy debate is asking an increasingly urgent question: what kind of power can Canada exercise in a world where the old assumptions about international order no longer hold?

Recent debates have ranged from redefining Canada as a “principal power” to renewing its role as a middle power working through flexible coalitions. Both approaches have merit. But they share an underlying assumption: that the central question is how much power Canada possesses.

What Can Canada Make Possible With the Power of Others?

In an international system where influence is increasingly dispersed among states, regional organisations, multilateral institutions, and other networks, power is rarely located in one place. One actor may have access, another legitimacy, another resources, another political leverage. The challenge is often not the absence of capacity, but the inability to connect it.

This is where Canada may have an underused source of influence.

Canada does not need to become a great power to matter more. Nor does it need to lead every initiative. Its comparative advantage may lie in something less conspicuous but increasingly valuable: helping actors with different capabilities work together when none can achieve the desired result alone. Call it connecting power. Canada’s own Ottawa Process, which produced the global ban on landmines in 1997, is an early illustration of exactly this: Ottawa held no special leverage over the states that made or stockpiled mines, but it organised a coalition of sympathetic governments, mine-clearance experts, and campaigning non-governmental organisations that could act where Ottawa alone could not.

The concept is simple. Its implications for Canadian foreign policy are not.

Not Soft Power, Not Mediation

Connecting power is not another name for soft power. Nor is it simply mediation. Soft power is the ability to attract and persuade. Mediation seeks to bring opposing parties towards an agreement. Connecting power is different: it is the capacity to bring together actors whose resources, access or legitimacy are different but potentially complementary. Soft power might have let Canada praise a ban on landmines from the sidelines. Mediation would have required two warring parties willing to sit down together. Neither fits what Canada actually did in the 1990s: it assembled sympathetic states, mine-clearance specialists, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines into a single negotiating track, after a United Nations disarmament forum in Geneva had failed to agree on one.

That distinction matters because many international problems are no longer........

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