The western countries are dependent on the imperial framework of "the eyes" cooperation, other intelligence and security cooperation, NATO cooperation, similarity of financial, patent and IP regulations, similarity of legal systems, interconnectivity of their elites and various blackmail material on those, and their common crime networks (one would hope that at least mafia groups should align along some other clusters on the map, but it doesn't seem so).
Those regulations support the status of western elites, which means the elites themselves won't reform anything in any good direction.
The NATO cooperation is extremely efficient and comfort-providing - instead of countrywide mandatory conscription you have small groups of professional soldiers and military bureaucrats, military matters are not something that all the society cares about.
Instead of domestic military industries sufficient to fulfill the needs of a military you can have as much silent and respectable corruption as you wish. It's both convenient for the population and for the elites (criminals) to have a small professional military, an international (imperial) MIC framework, all not influenced significantly by domestic popular opinions.
Intelligence cooperation allows domestic intelligence services to bypass all limitations that exist for them on paper about their own citizens. It also makes every such service more powerful than intended.
Similar financial regulations lead not only to good things, like smaller cost of doing business, but also to bad things, like monopolies. Even the EU supposedly big regulations don't prevent big tech from abusing honestly whatever they want. GDPR is a farce in its actual enforcement.
Patent and IP regulations - well, that's basically a way to legal monopoly, and that's how it works. BTW, let's just remember that even trademarks are a relatively new thing legally. And copyright. And patents. And when all these were introduced, that was similar to state monopoly on alcohol beverages in some countries or state monopoly on tobacco in others, and was reasoned legally in exactly that way - authorship and right to print something should be registered for the crown to have an income from that, not because of some ownership of ideas or protection. It still works like an imperial mechanism.
Similarity of legal systems - I'll admit at some point I thought English law is the best thing after sliced bread. But I'm not so sure at this point. At some point a German court acquitted Tehlirian, after all. As an example of the main competing family of legal systems.
Elites and crime - I mean, your whole part of the world is in the "trade and denial" stage after really buying the 80s and 90s idea that democracies and institutions don't require perpetual struggle to maintain. That is, fiction of those years would usually argue with that idea, but sometimes wide masses just want to believe something so badly that no art can dissuade them. And in the 00s it was decided.
OK, too much text.
What I really mean is that for Canada it doesn't make sense to join BRICS unless it manages to pull a Brazil and somehow switch the camp from "imperial" to "fringe kingdoms".
