OTTAWA — When General Jennie Carignan takes her seat alongside United States Admiral Samuel J. Paparo in Victoria, British Columbia later this month, she will not simply be hosting a conference. She will be placing Canada explicitly inside the most consequential strategic competition of the twenty-first century.
Canada will co-host the 28th annual Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense conference in Victoria from August 31 to September 2, the Department of National Defense confirmed Monday. The gathering, which rotates among partner nations and this year centres on what organizers are calling the region’s “dynamic” security challenges, draws senior military commanders from across the Pacific rim. Thirty-two countries have been invited to attend.
The meeting comes as Indo-Pacific security faces its most serious test in a generation. China’s naval expansion in the South China Sea, North Korea’s continued ballistic-missile testing, and the reverberations of the Iran-Israel-US conflict have prompted alliance partners to rethink force posture, basing rights, and interoperability. These are not abstract policy exercises; they are urgent operational questions.
Carignan’s co-hosting role alongside Paparo, who commands United States Indo-Pacific Command from headquarters in Hawaii, is not accidental. USPACOM manages the largest American military command by geographic scope, encompassing roughly half the Earth’s surface and the primary flashpoints over Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and the contested waters of the South China Sea. When Carignan and Paparo stand together before commanders from 32 nations in Victoria, the optics carry a message: Canada is not an observer in the Pacific.
Paparo has been a central figure in American defence posture adjustment since the conclusion of the Iran operation. The extended deployment of carrier strike groups like the USS Abraham Lincoln, some 266 days at sea, reshuffled Pacific naval presence in ways that allied commanders, Carignan among them, have been tracking through the spring and summer of 2026.
Canada’s relationship with the Indo-Pacific is not new, but its depth has evolved in fits and starts. Ottawa is party to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, maintains defence attachés in key Pacific capitals, and contributes periodically to freedom-of-navigation operations that the United States leads. What has been less consistent is Canada’s willingness to define itself as a Pacific defence actor rather than simply an Atlantic and Arctic one.
Victoria’s selection as host city carries its own subtext. British Columbia, sitting at the Pacific end of the country, trades heavily across the Pacific and has historically been Canada’s commercial window to Asia more than its strategic one. Hosting the CHODs conference there rather than in Ottawa signals something deliberate about where Carignan wants the Canadian Forces’ strategic emphasis to land.
The CHODs format, which convenes chiefs of defense rather than political ministers, is designed for frank military-to-military discussion that can proceed without the diplomatic filters that ministerial-level meetings require. Discussions at these gatherings typically address joint exercises, intelligence-sharing frameworks, logistics arrangements, and emerging threat assessments. The specific agenda for the Victoria gathering has not been made public.
What the Department of National Defense confirmed Monday, in language typical of pre-conference statements, is that this year’s gathering will focus on “enhancing collective security” amid dynamic regional challenges. The phrasing is diplomatic scaffolding over a harder reality: that the Indo-Pacific security architecture is under more simultaneous pressure than at any previous CHODs gathering in the conference’s twenty-eight-year history.
The thirty-two invited countries span a broad coalition of Indo-Pacific partners, ranging from Japan, Australia, and South Korea, whose security architectures are woven tightly with American guarantees, to smaller island-state partners for whom economic coercion and climate-linked instability are themselves security concerns. The CHODs format accommodates that breadth; not every invited government comes with the same agenda or the same threat assessment, and part of the value of the gathering is the shared visibility into what three dozen governments are actually worrying about.
For Carignan, the conference is also a domestic profile moment. She took command as Chief of the Defence Staff during a period of significant institutional scrutiny of the Canadian Forces, and her tenure has been defined partly by an effort to rebuild operational capability alongside institutional credibility. Placing Canada at the center of a 32-nation security dialogue, and standing alongside USPACOM’s commander while doing it, is a statement about which alliances the Canadian Forces intends to actively invest in.
Canada has faced sustained criticism from NATO allies over its defence spending trajectory, a pressure that applies with equal force to its Pacific commitments. Hosting a major security conference and sustaining the deployments, bilateral agreements, and interoperability exercises that a genuine Indo-Pacific presence requires are two different undertakings. The announcement Monday does not address what Canada intends to commit to beyond September 2.
What Victoria will produce in terms of formal outcomes is genuinely uncertain. CHODs conferences generate their most durable results in the informal conversations at the margins rather than the sessions on the official agenda. The bilateral meetings between individual commanders, the conversations that never appear in joint communiqués, often matter more than anything that gets formally signed.
What is not uncertain is the signal Canada is sending by co-hosting. Carignan has chosen to anchor Canada’s most visible multilateral military engagement this year not on its traditional Atlantic or Arctic beats, but on the Pacific, where the next decade of global security competition is most likely to be decided.
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