Canada if the US collapses

The most disturbing thing about the January 6th riot and Trump coup attempt has been the reaction of American politicians. Despite being witnesses and targets of the attack, politics as usual has persisted, including Trump’s dominance of the Republican party.

This suggests a substantial danger that Americans in power will choose the victory of their tribe over the other above the endurance and peace of the union.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon writes:

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

During my international relations undergrad, profs often told us about how for most of Canadian history the biggest threat to Canada’s sovereignty has been invasion from the south. If mass political violence does erupt in the US — likely accompanied by a mass sense that the federal institutions of the supreme court, congress, and the presidency do not hold legitimate power over the whole US populace — it’s hard to believe that the US-Canada border would be respected in the uproar.

Of course it’s undiplomatic to talk in public about what will happen if your neighbour and strongest ally falls into civil war or ceases to be a democracy. Nonetheless, given the pathologies in American politics and society, it’s something Canadians must consider with growing seriousness and urgency.

54 thoughts on “Canada if the US collapses”

  1. There’s a Word for What Trumpism Is Becoming

    The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy.

    By David Frum

    …

    Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Postpresidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.

    If a big-enough movement agrees with Trump that Babbitt was “wonderful”—if they repeat that the crowd of would-be Nancy Pelosi kidnappers and Mike Pence lynchers was “great”—then we are leaving behind the American system of democratic political competition for a new landscape in which power is determined by the gun.

    That’s a landscape for which a lot of pro-Trump writers and thinkers seem to yearn.

  3. Pingback: Canada If The US Collapses - Apex Breaking News Today

  4. Russell, Peter H. “Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests.” University of Toronto Press, 2019. p. 39-42

  10. Carter said he had hope that the deadly attack on the Capitol “would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.”
    But politicians, he said, “have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes” and “seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed.”
    “I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home,” said Carter, who in his post-presidency started the Carter Center, a nonprofit that monitors free elections around the globe.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/05/politics/jimmy-carter-democracy-jan-6-oped/index.html

  11. The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it

    Stephen Marche

    The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions

    …

    The United States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.

    You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.

  16. Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a “cold” civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state to secede from the Union.

    The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be “time to split the country.”

  19. SMETHPORT, Pa. (AP) — Some Democrats here in rural Pennsylvania are afraid to tell you they’re Democrats.

    The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge their party affiliation publicly. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, the few that remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

    “The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

    The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from many parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the nation’s political landscape.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/world/us/2022/02/17/the-brand-is-so-toxic-dems-fear-extinction-in-rural-us.html

  20. https://newrepublic.com/article/165986/what-if-trump-wins-2024

    Heather Cox Richardson
    Historian and professor at Boston College

    If Trump, or someone like him, wins election in 2024, I would expect to see the end of American democracy. If that sounds apocalyptic, it’s worth remembering that we have had just such a scenario in the United States before, in the American South between 1880 and 1965. In those decades, although there were always elections, state legislatures had rigged the electoral system so that white Democrats would always win. Essentially, the region was a one-party state that had abandoned the rule of law.… It was the realization that the United States had abandoned the rule of law that inspired lawmakers to protect democracy in the 1950s and the 1960s through a series of civil rights acts and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Now, by rolling those protections back, Republican-dominated legislatures are threatening to re-create that one-party system, but this time, the demographic skewing of our Electoral College means those states can install a president. The one-party system of the early twentieth century South will become national. I don’t think enough people realize how bad it will be.

  22. This is what Republican rule will inevitably resemble, and it will hardly end with a bizarro version of the January 6 Commission. If the GOP retakes the House of Representatives, the two years of legislative gridlock that follows will be the quaint part. Republicans are certain to use their investigative powers to launch myriad mind-bending inquiries, bogging down American politics until the 2024 election with whatever the right’s outrage du jour happens to be. Expect hearings about critical race theory and gender; about Anthony Fauci and the origins of Covid-19; about testicle tanning and whatever else Tucker Carlson is droning on about in the early months of 2023. They may also do their own version of calling for the invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which allows Cabinet officials to remove a president deemed unfit for office, by insisting on cognitive tests or other investigations into the president’s mental well-being.

    It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that in the two years, Republicans will strive to impeach President Joe Biden more times than Democrats did Trump, who was impeached (for quite legitimate reasons) twice during his presidency. In all likelihood this will kick off with a fun house–mirror version of the first Trump impeachment, with lengthy investigations into Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine. But it will hardly end there. In fact, odds are good that the desire to impeach Biden will become the Republican Party’s next big test of purity, with those unwilling to fully participate in the Grand Guignol marked as RINO outcasts.”

  23. All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6 insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/red-and-blue-state-divide-is-growing-michael-podhorzer-newsletter/661377/

  24. The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections. And that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections, he calculates.

    The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

  29. “People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment and discrimination,” Walter writes. “They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the 21st century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.”

  31. US political violence is surging, but talk of a civil war is exaggerated – isn’t it? | US news | The Guardian

    …

    Wintemute wanted answers and they stunned him. A survey for his California Firearm Violence Research Center released last month showed that half of Americans expect a civil war in the United States in the next few years. One in five thought political violence was justified in some circumstances. In addition, while almost everyone said it was important for the US to remain a democracy, about 40% said that having a strong leader was more important.

  32. Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence: First Report from a Nationwide Population-Representative Survey

    …

    The analytic sample included 8,620 respondents; 50.6% (95% Confidence Interval (CI) 49.4%, 51.7%) were female; mean (SD) age was 48.4 (18.0) years. Two-thirds of respondents (67.2%, 95% CI 66.1%, 68.4%) perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” but more than 40% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.” Half (50.1%) agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” Among 6,768 respondents who considered violence to be at least sometimes justified to achieve 1 or more specific political objectives, 12.2% were willing to commit political violence themselves “to threaten or intimidate a person,” 10.4% “to injure a person,” and 7.1% “to kill a person.” Among all respondents, 18.5% thought it at least somewhat likely that within the next few years, in a situation where they believed political violence was justified, “I will be armed with a gun”; 4.0% thought it at least somewhat likely that “I will shoot someone with a gun.”

  33. There is also recognition by the FBI and DOJ that the indictment of a former president who is likely to run again is unprecedented. Not only this, but polarization and antipathy between the two political parties has reached a level unseen since before the Civil War. Indicting Trump is likely to set off violence. Worse, convicting him and sending him to prison could set off a chain of events that could expedite the dissolution of the United States, as internal pressure within red states mounts to formally cease the recognition of the authority and legitimacy of the federal government. Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland are both keenly aware of this possibility, which may dissuade them from an indictment, arrest, and prosecution.

    https://newrepublic.com/article/167625/trump-prosecution-mar-a-lago-justice-department-outcomes-bad

  34. Americans are increasingly talking about civil war. In August, after the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Florida home, Twitter references to “civil war” jumped 3,000%. Trump supporters immediately went online, tweeting threats that a civil war would start if Trump was indicted. One account wrote: “Is it Civil-War-O’clock yet?”; another said, “get ready for an uprising”. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, said there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump was indicted. Trump himself predicted that “terrible things are going to happen” if the temperature wasn’t brought down in the country. Perhaps most troubling, Americans on both sides of the political divide increasingly state that violence is justified. In January 2022, 34% of Americans surveyed said that it was sometimes OK to use violence against the government. Seven months later, more than 40% said that they believed civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years. Two years ago, no one was talking about a second American civil war. Today it is common.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/06/how-close-is-the-us-to-civil-war-barbara-f-walter-stephen-march-christopher-parker

  36. More worrying is the prospect of widespread political violence within the United States. Such a prospect may have been “fanciful only a few years ago,” according to the report, “but it is very real today.” In an interview, University of Ottawa political scientist Thomas Juneau, one of the report’s directors, was clear that all-out civil war in the United States remains unlikely. Yet Juneau can foresee circumstances in the US that should keep Canadian officials awake at night: “Imagine a scenario where you have a contested election and both sides ask Canada to recognize them because they want international recognition.” The smart short-term move for Canada would be to “shut up and hope for the best.” But “whether it’s the good guys or the bad guys who end up winning, we have a neighbour who is not only extremely vulnerable domestically but also annoyed at us. That’s a huge problem,” Juneau warns, “one that could easily reach the scale of an existential problem for us.”

    American political violence may also involve complicated and unpredictable spillover events in Canada. Would a right-wing populist uprising in the US inspire copycat action in Canada? Would Canada accept political refugees from the United States? If so, how would we respond if a nascent authoritarian American regime demanded their extradition? What if Canadian citizens enlisted as combatants in an intra-American armed conflict—how would a volatile American government respond to perceived incidents of Canadian-sponsored terrorism?

    https://thewalrus.ca/how-an-unstable-us-threatens-canadas-national-security/

  42. At the Cedar Rapids event that followed, Trump homed in on attacking “crooked” President Biden while continuing to harp on his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was rigged and, even further, that Jesus and God would declare him a winner now. “I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win [in California], I think would win in Illinois, and I think it we’d win in New York.”

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/donald-trump-iowa-campaign-caucuses-2024-false-election-claims-1234908453/amp/

  43. When Justin Trudeau meets Joe Biden at the G7 summit in Italy this week, Trudeau will probably not ask whether the United States is at risk of erupting in civil war in the next few years.

    A think tank housed within Trudeau’s government is already pondering that question.

    In a spring report titled “Disruptions on the Horizon,” a quiet office known as Policy Horizons Canada proposed American civil war as a scenario that Ottawa should consider preparing for.

    This hypothetical was tucked into the middle of the 37-page document, which sketched the possibility in 15 spare words: “U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.”

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/11/canada-us-civil-war-00162521

  47. “The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig, a highly regarded conservative former federal appellate judge, said.

    The conservative justices have repeatedly done Trump’s bidding even though they don’t begin to face the intense pressures that Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges face. Erdoğan has sometimes purged and blackballed judges seen as insufficiently loyal, while Orbán’s high-ranking allies have berated less obedient judges as “traitors”.

    The US supreme court has ruled for Trump in a startlingly high percentage of cases this year. It has issued 24 decisions from its emergency docket (often without giving any reasons) and ruled in Trump’s favor about 90% of the time.

    In doing so, the court has repeatedly vacated injunctions that lower courts had issued after concluding that Trump, with his 209 executive orders, had egregiously broken the law. Adam Bonica, a Stanford political science professor, found that in Trump administration cases decided between 1 May and 23 June, federal district courts ruled against Trump 94.3% of the time (82 out of 87 cases), often after looking closely at the facts. In contrast, the supreme court ruled 93.7% of the time for Trump (15 out of 16 cases), often without taking a close look at the facts.

    “The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said, adding that the court is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/06/supreme-court-donald-trump

  48. Kirk’s assassination did not simply constitute another data point in a years-long trend. It reflected a recent, even sharper acceleration in political violence. And it set off its own cascade of aggravating events: a crackdown on free speech, a probable copycat attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas, and in late September, Trump’s order to U.S. generals to “handle . . . the enemy within” and treat American cities as “training grounds.” “They spit, you hit,” he commanded. Trump’s opponents, meanwhile, have amped up their rhetoric. “You’ve got to fight fire with fire,” 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in a late September speech.

    Intentionally or not, U.S. political elites on both sides of the partisan spectrum have encouraged the mobilization of the country into two separate, fighting camps. This violent polarization is visible on the streets: this year, Tesla dealerships have been the target of nearly 100 politically motivated attacks and ICE officers are facing assaults; Trump has responded with increasingly aggressive threats to treat predominantly Democratic cities like “war zones.” And tens of millions of Americans who have not committed political violence now say they support it.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-new-age-political-violence

  49. Canada could be hit hardest by U.S. political upheaval, report warns

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/canada-could-be-hit-hardest-by-us-political-upheaval-report-warns/

    A new global risk assessment is warning that no country would be more “profoundly affected” by a political upheaval in the U.S. than Canada.

    Published Monday, the Eurasia Group’s “Top Risks For 2026″ report cites deep economic, security and geographic ties that leave Canada especially exposed to instability south of the border.

    Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, identifies what it calls a potential U.S. “political revolution” – driven by U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to consolidate power, “capture the machinery of government, and weaponize it against his enemies” – as the most significant threats to global stability this year.

    According to the report, Canada is exposed because it is closely tied to the U.S. through geography, trade and defence, meaning sudden political or policy changes in Washington could have an outsized impact on Canada.

    Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy told CTV’s Your Morning Thursday that those risks are already becoming more visible.

    “The Trump administration has a view that they are the masters of the Western Hemisphere, and they can do what they want to whomever they want, whenever they want,” Axworthy said, warning that Canada must be prepared for a more aggressive and transactional U.S. approach to national security and geopolitics.

  50. RISKS THAT MATTER MOST FOR CANADA

    https://www.eurasiagroup.net/issues/Top-Risks-2026-Implications-for-Canada

    Top Risk #1 (US political revolution) is the key driver of political and economic risks to Canada in 2026. Trump’s systematic effort to dismantle checks on his power and weaponize the machinery of government against his political enemies will inevitably reshape not only Canada-US relations, but the Canadian economy and Canadians’ engagement with the rest of the world.
    Trump’s political revolution calls assumptions underpinning Canadian foreign, trade, and defence policy into question. For decades, Ottawa was comfortable with ever-deeper integration with the US. Canadians seamlessly navigated the US political system, cultivating allies from the White House through Congress to state governors’ mansions. And reliance on the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, greatest military power, and democratic leader paid off. That calculation no longer holds.
    The US-Canada relationship will be unusually personalized and volatile, leaving businesses exposed to potential backlash. Washington now turns on the whims of a single, mercurial man and an administration committed to implementing a radical new vision of American governance. That will spill over in unpredictable ways; any perceived slight from Ottawa risks inviting punitive action. Canadian companies and investors could become collateral damage in the US political revolution.
    For continued US market access, Canadian officials and firms will need to navigate Top Risk #9 (Zombie USMCA). The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, or CUSMA) will not be formally renegotiated, extended, or terminated in 2026—it will stagger on as a “zombie,” neither fully dead nor alive. The good news is that tariff exemptions for CUSMA-compliant goods will keep free trade on life support, leaving Canada (and Mexico) with lower average effective US tariff rates than much of the world. The bad news is that Trump will use sectoral tariffs on goods such as autos, steel, and aluminum—sectors he is bent on reshoring to the US—as leverage in endless negotiations, where Washington will seek to divide and conquer Ottawa and Mexico City.
    To make things worse, Trump does not like Canada’s tough, detail-oriented approach to trade negotiations. Carney will struggle to sell the kind of concessions on market access or defence purchases that Trump could tout as a win. While Carney’s promises of new infrastructure projects and “buy Canadian” procurement could build economic resilience over the long term, they will not ease near-term tariff pain for Ontario automakers, Quebec aluminum producers, or British Columbia loggers. Firms that built continent-wide production lines and export strategies will face another year of trade uncertainty, and the rest of the Canadian economy will feel the chill.
    Top Risk #6 (State capitalism with American characteristics) will compound the economic risks to Canada. Trump’s emerging system of extracting payments, equity stakes, and investment-for-tariff-relief deals from governments and companies will continue to degrade the business environment in the US while heaping pressure on Canadian firms to participate in the pay-to-play model. That will create a perverse incentive structure in which companies that operate above board will be disadvantaged in what is still the world’s largest and most innovative economy and consumer market.
    Top Risk #3 (The Donroe Doctrine) implies a fundamental shift in Canada’s geopolitical environment. Trump’s assertion of US primacy in the Western Hemisphere will keep Canada on the defensive, with Carney forced to balance the defence of Canadian sovereignty with the reality of strategic dependence on the US. In that context, the reconstruction of the Canadian Armed Forces—with a focus on Arctic capabilities and infrastructure—will be an urgent priority, with Ottawa working to build domestic capacity, partner with European NATO allies, and show the US that it can defend its own backyard. Canadians should also watch US intervention in Venezuela closely: With Maduro’s ouster, Venezuelan heavy crude oil could begin to displace Canadian crude exports to the US over the long term.

    OTHER RISKS

    Canada’s efforts to diversify its trade and defence partnerships away from the US will face challenges from Top Risk #4 (Europe under siege). Governments in the UK, France, and Germany are weak, divided, and focused on short-term survival in the face of resurgent political radicalism on both the left and the right—as well as a fundamentally hostile US administration. While Carney has prioritized ties with non-US NATO allies, Ottawa’s three most important European partners will have their hands full in 2026. All three face paralysis at best and destabilization at worst—and at least one government could fall before the year is over.
    Meanwhile, Eurasia Group’s Top Risk #5 (Russia’s second front) will expose Canada to Russian hybrid attacks. Canadian military personnel are serving with NATO forces in the Baltic states on the front line with Russia, and Ottawa has long been a vocal contributor to Ukraine’s defence against President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion—both of which make Canada a target for Moscow’s grey-zone activities. While Europe’s rearmament will create opportunities for Canada and Canadian firms to deepen strategic and commercial ties with the continent, pressure on NATO states to respond to Putin’s provocations risk pulling Canada into a NATO-Russia crisis this year.
    Top Risk #7 (China’s deflation trap) will exacerbate Canada’s trade diversification challenge. China’s economy is stuck in a trap of its own making, with prices, consumer confidence, investment, and demand spiralling downward—and Beijing will not do anything to stop it. Instead, state-driven investment has created overcapacity in high-tech manufacturing, which is now being dumped on the rest of the world—part of the reason why Canada still has 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs). Reducing those tariffs would mean affordable EVs and reduced Chinese tariffs for Canadian goods such as canola, but it would hit the Ontario auto sector with cheap competition while risking blowback in trade talks with the US. And weak Chinese economic activity means sub-par demand for Canada’s abundant natural resources. It is a no-win situation for Ottawa.
    Relatedly, Top Risk #2 (Overpowered) will pull the Canadian economy in two directions. On one side, China is cementing its dominance in clean energy technologies such as EVs, batteries, and solar power; on the other, the US is doubling down on its fossil fuel export and consumption model. The Carney government has decided to do both: using tax credits and other incentives to attract investment into clean energy technologies, critical minerals, and domestic manufacturing, but pivoting back towards fossil fuel exports and infrastructure in search of economic growth and energy peace with Alberta and Saskatchewan. Time will tell if the strategy pays off.
    Top Risk #8 (AI eats its users) embodies the risks and opportunities for Canada in building domestic AI capacity. Many leading (mostly American) firms are pursuing extraordinary AI capabilities but shifting towards extractive and socially dysfunctional business models to do so. With little regulation governing their behaviour, the Trump administration is likely to lash out at countries that impose their own standards on US tech firms. We have already seen that with Canada’s Digital Services Tax, as well as legislation governing online streaming and news—currently among the thorniest issues in bilateral trade talks. Yet much of AI’s potential will come from smaller, leaner, purpose-built models—exactly the niche where Canada’s AI ecosystem is positioned to thrive. If Canada can withstand US pressure and sustain the funding necessary to develop and retain AI talent, there is no ceiling on the future growth of the Canadian sector.

  51. His invocation of Czech dissident and writer Václav Havel was clearly tailored for a mostly European audience, who understand better than anyone who he was and what he represents. But it’s his specific reference to Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” that should get everyone’s attention. It uses the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign with communist propaganda in his shop window, not because he sincerely believes in what it says but because he wants to avoid trouble with those in power and protect his own interests and safety as much as possible. But in doing so, the agnostic greengrocer is making a choice in favour of what’s happening around him. “By this very fact,” Havel wrote, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

    The same is true, Carney believes, for the “rules-based international order” that countries like Canada are still clinging to — one he effectively declared dead. “It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down,” Carney said. “The question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to this new reality. We must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls — or whether we can do something more ambitious.”

    All of this is a clear rebuke to the Trump administration’s worldview and its ongoing attempts to bully former allies into submission. Carney could have gone down the path laid out by premiers like Danielle Smith, who continues to believe that the best way forward with Trump is continued flattery and cooperation. “I remain convinced that the path to a positive resolution with our US partners lies in strong, consistent diplomacy and a commitment to working in good faith toward shared priorities, rather than angry rhetoric and retaliation,” she said in a recent statement.

    The prime minister clearly does not agree with that approach. As he said in Davos, “the powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”

    The biggest question now is what this will cost us, and who is actually willing to pay it. Conservatives who are tempted to side with Trump or reflexively criticize the prime minister would do well to remember what Stephen Harper said last February at an invitation-only event promoting his latest book. “I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing,” he said. “I would accept any level of damage to preserve the independence of the country.”

    https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/01/20/opinion/mark-carney-just-shook-world

  52. The Canadian military would be “foolish” not to draw up plans on how to respond to a U.S. invasion, says an expert on Canada-U.S. relations.

    The Canadian Armed Forces is reportedly looking at employing insurgency-style tactics like those used in Afghanistan in the unlikely event that the U.S. military attacks Canada.

    “They’d be foolish if they didn’t, if only because Donald Trump has said he’s concerned about Greenland. He’s concerned about the threat from Russia and China in the Arctic. Sub out the word Greenland for the word(s) Baffin Island or Iqaluit or any other sort of place north and you’d have a potential for American troops up there,” said Asa McKercher, the Hudson Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at St. Francis Xavier University’s Brian Mulroney Institute of Government.
    Article content

    Canada’s top soldier, Gen. Jennie Carignan, was out of the country Tuesday and unavailable for comment.

    “As is routine, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces conducts analysis on a variety of scenarios, both real and hypothetical, to ensure readiness,” Kened Sadiku, who speaks for DND, said Tuesday in an email. “As a matter of operational security, and as a critical element of our defence, we do not confirm such matters in public.”

    While a U.S. invasion of Canada is “very, very, very unlikely,” McKercher said it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

    https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-military-united-states

  53. A Canadian insurgency would be effective because many Americans wouldn’t want Canada to be invaded, he said.

    “This would create big problems potentially within the United States itself,” McKercher said.

    Many Canadians would resent an American invasion, “and could make life difficult for Americans,” he said.

    “If it came to that, what would prevent Canadian military members or insurgents from going across the border at any of the many, many points along our border that aren’t patrolled, and blowing up bombs in American cities? It’s inconceivable, but a crazy thing that I think clearly is on the mind of very serious people.”

    Citing two unnamed senior government officials, The Globe and Mail reported that the model being developed “was a conceptual and theoretical framework, not a military plan, which is an actionable and step‑by‑step directive for executing operations.”

    McKercher said it’s “reasonable” to expect that Canada’s military would be unlikely to stave off a U.S. invasion for more than a day or two.

    “We have a very small military; they have a very effective military,” McKercher said. “They have the ability to destroy our command-and-control centres, target our logistics networks, they’re aware of where all our bases are. There’s not a lot of hiding that we could do, probably, from American cruise missiles and drones.”

  54. WASHINGTON — U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent commented Thursday on the separatist movement in Alberta — making him the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration to weigh in on the province’s politics.

    While appearing on the right-wing TV station Real America’s Voice, Bessent claimed Canada won’t let Alberta build a pipeline to the Pacific.

    “I think we should let them come down into the U.S., and Alberta’s a natural partner for the U.S.,” he said.

    “They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people,” Bessent said, adding there’s a “rumour that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not.”

    When asked if he knew something about it, Bessent said, “People are talking. People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/we-should-let-them-come-down-into-the-us-bessent-weighs-in-on-alberta-separatism/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *