The Bureau;

A chill is roiling Ottawa’s bureaucracy after the woman who crafted Canada’s policy to defend the North with American allies was fired, she alleges, after criticizing the government’s anti-American rhetoric — and shortly after Mark Carney’s government declared Beijing a strategic partner, The Bureau has been informed.

Raquel Garbers spent 28 years in Canada’s public service and helped write the country’s current defence policy. On October 15, 2025, she published an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s growing anti-American rhetoric was splitting the Western alliance and handing a gift to the country’s real adversaries, Beijing and Moscow. Two days later, according to the statement of claim in her wrongful-dismissal suit, Canada’s foreign minister stood in Beijing and signaled a shift toward a “strategic partnership” with China — a sharp reversal of Ottawa’s own recent posture toward Beijing. Weeks after that, she was fired.

Garbers, 57, filed her claim this month in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa, seeking about $2 million from the federal government. She is not a junior official, and her stature, and questions about whether Mark Carney’s government is trying to enforce a silence over the public service as Ottawa pivots closer to Beijing, are topics of conversation in Ottawa, Garbers’s legal team told The Bureau today.