The Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper had a great article on why there’s reason for Canada to be worried about US collapse or fascist takeover or both. It runs through various scenarios and is excellent, you should read it.
What I want to talk about is…related. Let’s start with the conclusion, after the case is very well made (if late, since the actually-prescient people noticed this a long time ago.)
But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
Can you think of anything more pathetic? A committee!
Here’s what I was arguing back in the 90s: To start with, we need a deterrent. It doesn’t have to be nuclear, if that gets our heinies in a twist; there are conventional explosives almost as dangerous, and we manufacture missiles.
We make lots of them — Canada is a big country. Put them on trucks, in grain silos, on trains, and move the mobile ones around a lot. Done properly there’s no way to take them out with a first strike before a lot of them launch (Israel couldn’t find Hezbollah’s launchers in a much smaller country).
Warn that, if the US invades, we take out not just their cities but hit some nice exurban/suburban spaces so the sort of people who want war know that they’ll get hit no matter what.
Canadians have spent a lot of time pretending Americans, who routinely invade, bomb, and assassinate in other countries, would somehow never do it to us. This is delusional — and always has been.
Next: We have a long border, and it has to be hardened. I’m willing to take American refugees, but I want control over it and I don’t want militia yahoos. We need more boots and surveillance, and that takes some time.
Finally, change economic policy and start doing everything possible to build our industry back up and to diversify our trade ties, while making and growing as much of what we need here. That’s eminently possible.
Of course, the US will not want us to do any of this. Having a compliant defenseless nation on their northern border is obviously in their interest. Indeed, the Chinese dream for Russia is to make it into their Canada (but less defenseless); an entire border that is completely safe.
We have no reason to take the safety away from the US; war with the US will never be in our interest. But we, have plenty of reason to get rid of being defenselessness — especially since we don’t know who will be in power in the US in the future.
Back in the 80s, the USSR ambassador to Pakistan is said to have said something like, “I do not know who will be in charge of Moscow in the future, but I know that Russia’s interests are always the same, and therefore we can be trusted. With America, what they want changes with the wind: they don’t seem to have a consistent set of interests, and so they cannot be trusted.”
The US is not a trustworthy country, even by the admittedly sleazy standards of international relations. It is becoming less and less trustworthy. Canada is rich with resources — especially water. This means we could easily re-industrialize if we simply accepted that it is in our interest to do so, rather than be a completely dependent and defenseless satrapy.
Oh, and finally, finally, we need to do everything we can to remove US cultural and political influence. As American politics has become more and more right-wing and crazy, so have ours. We have one-tenth the population of the US and a smaller economy. It is easy for US influences to swamp our politics and radicalize our population in Tea-Party-esque ways, and they have done so already, just not to the same extent as in the US heartland.
We were fools not to resist this with all our force, and if we don’t start now, it won’t matter. Like Austria when the Germans went bad, we’ll just go bad briefly afterwards.
It’s up to us. We can remain supine in the victim’s posture of, “Please don’t hurt us, we’re harmless and will do almost anything you ask!” or we can act to defend ourselves. Even if we do so, the US will remain to us what Russia has often been to Finland, and we will both have to make clear that invading or overly bullying us will HURT, but that we are no threat.
That’s just realpolitik, and we need to stop living in la-la-land and engage in it.