John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.

2025 will be remembered as the year of reversals, a watershed moment when our sleepy naïveté was checked by an old maxim that British prime minister Lord Palmerston famously voiced in 1848: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Canadians spent more than a decade investing in an imagined reality that believed co-operation among nations could rapidly solve climate change, that decarbonizing our own and other western economies would be achieved while bolstering prosperity and employment opportunities. That Canada had “eternal allies” who would defend us, even when we didn’t bother to defend ourselves.

The path forward in 2026 and to a future with higher living standards is for Canada to live in the real world, rather than retreat to an imagined one.

Evidence that Ottawa is tacking toward reality surfaced in the days before Christmas, when........

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