Public Biography
Denis Charbonneau is a spokesman for Global Affairs Canada, the department of the Government of Canada responsible for the country’s diplomatic and consular relations. He has served as a departmental spokesman since 2019 and is the official most frequently authorized to respond to inquiries from the American press, a role colleagues attribute to what one described as “an unusually high tolerance for questions that should not have to be answered.”
Mr. Charbonneau was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, and holds a degree in international relations from the University of Ottawa. Before joining Global Affairs Canada he worked in the provincial civil service and briefly as a translator, an experience he has credited with teaching him “to say the same thing calmly as many times as necessary.”
He came to broader American attention in July 2026, when he was asked to respond to a United States Senate bill that would abolish the border between the two countries on the theory that a mass migration of Canadians would improve the United States. His reply — that Canada had “no plans to invade the United States, now or at any point” — was widely reported and, by his own account, “the first sentence of that kind I have ever had to prepare in advance.”