By Daniel Béland

June 7, 2026

HELSINKI — When I arrived at my hotel in Tampere last week, there were dozens of people gathered outside watching something together. As I approached, the nature of the campfire became clear. It was the final game of the World Hockey Championship, in which Finland was beating Switzerland.

Just the previous day, Finland had eliminated Canada but no one in Finland teased me about it. As much as Finns and Canadians take our hockey seriously, our new, next-level bilateral relationship is Reasonable Bedfellows, not Heated Rivalry.

On June 3rd, Finnish President Alexander Stubb mentioned Canada in a speech about his vision for a potential expansion of the European Union to 40 countries: “Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada was the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 51st state of the United States?”

Regardless of whether one thinks Canada should join the EU, this statement points to President Stubb’s positive perception of our country and its political leadership, an affinity that was on full display in mid-April when he visited Ottawa.

Stubb’s variable-geometry bromance with Prime Minister Mark Carney unfurled like a rom-com montage, with the two of them performing hockey drills with the Ottawa Charge of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL).

As Politico put it in their coverage of the visit, Carney and Stubb are “Two centrist dads trying to save the world.”

Yet, the close relationship between the two world leaders extends far beyond photo ops and hockey — the national sport of both Canada and Finland.

As Politico also put it: “Donald Trump’s detonation of the rules-based order in 2026 has lashed them together as the intellectual leaders of a new counter-movement offering a way for centrist liberals to survive the storm.”

Trying to reshape geopolitics and transatlantic relations, these two leaders quote and text each other regularly, and they share a focus on what Stubb calls “values-based realism,” a term that Carney explicitly borrowed from him in his viral Davos speech back in January.

They’ve both published prescriptive policy bestsellers — Carney’s Value(s): Building a Better World for All landed in 2021, Stubb’s The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order appeared earlier this year.

Not only do the two leaders have a lot in common, so do their countries. Beyond their shared passion for hockey, Canada and Finland are two Arctic powers and liberal democracies that share similar northern landscapes and harsh winters.

From a geopolitical standpoint, these two countries also share something else: they each share a long border with a nuclear-armed “great power” at a time when that label is evolving amid a disrupted world order that has firmly defined both the United States and Russia as threats to sovereignty and democracy.

The post-democracy agendas of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have made Canada and Finland partners in geopolitical sanity.

Their geography creates, for both Canada and Finland, shared vulnerabilities of the “David-and-Goliath” variety, with Finland more accustomed, historically, to a potentially belligerent Russia than Canada is to a hostile America, but with both sharing a need for like-minded allies. Both sleep with elephants that could charge at any moment — which creates a strategic overlap of shared intelligence.

The post-democracy agendas of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have made Canada and Finland partners in geopolitical sanity.

In Finland’s case, the most momentous shock from its neighbour came in February 2022 with Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. While Canada does not have a land border with Russia, we have to deal directly with that country in the Arctic and we also strongly support Ukraine in its heroic war against Putin’s expansionism.

Ruled by the Kingdom of Sweden from the middle of the 12th century, Finland became an autonomous duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809 and declared its independence in 1917, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. After a bloody civil war fought by Finnish and Russian troops, Finland became a Republic in 1919 and a member of the League of Nations the following year.

In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, which lost more than 10% of its territory in what is known as the Talvisota, or Winter War. A second Soviet invasion — the Continuation War — took place in 1944, after which Finland lost even more land while having to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, out of a drive for self-preservation and through a process known as Finlandization, the country maintained a neutral stance, remained out of NATO, and developed strong trade ties with the Soviet Union. Involved in the European Economic Community starting in 1973, Finland became a member of the EU in 1995, and it adopted the euro four years later.

Despite the end of the Cold War and the process of European integration, Finland remained neutral geopolitically until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which dramatically increased public support for NATO membership — from 28% in January of that year to 62% in March to 76% in May.

This provided the political licence for Finnish political leaders including then-President Sauli Niinistö to end the long policy of neutrality and join NATO on April 4 2023, a development unimaginable just a few years earlier.

Since 2022, Finland has gradually increased its defence spending while maintaining conscription, which is enshrined in the country’s Constitution.

In Finland, I have seen many young conscripts travelling by train across the country, a significant presence of the military in everyday life and a reflection of the compulsory military service other European countries like Belgium, France, Germany and Italy abandoned over the two decades that followed the end of the Cold War.

Finland’s post-2022 transformation in foreign policy and geopolitical posture is an object lesson for a Canada dramatically affected by the return of Donald Trump to the White House, with the arbitrary tariff wars, threats to sovereignty, and economic trolling that have come with it.

Although Canada is a much larger and more decentralized country than Finland, it is an example of national leadership through consensus-building in the face of adversity that contains useful takeaways pertinent to Canada’s own relationship with a fast-evolving neighbour.

At a moment when Canada and Finland share the fate of being forced to react swiftly to threatening political decisions made by powerful neighbours, the Carney-Stubb relationship matters disproportionately.

Beyond hockey and aphorisms, it could prove to be just as significant as other transatlantic friendships have been to previous coalitions against unhinged tyranny.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University.