Canada Prepares for the What-if Moment

As I write this, Canadian military planners are working on scenarios to deal with an invasion from the United States.

This is no drill, and time in the short term is not on our side. We must be prepared.

The threat to Canada is coming, and it is serious. Canada must move quickly and with determination.

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According to a report in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s military is planning for the possibility of a North American war.

This isn’t going to be like a European ground war. Instead, the Canadian forces will utilize the immense experience they received in the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. Except in this case, the Canadians are preparing to fight like the Mujahadeen.

Canadian military scenarios assume the American army could occupy key Canadian points within the first week. Rather than try to stop the Americans at the border, Canadian troops would pull back in order to focus on counter-insurgency efforts. The objective is to create “mass casualties.”

The Canadian military is gaming out strategies studied by Canadian counter-insurgency expert Dr. Aisha Ahmad. Like the military brass, she expects that if the Americans come over the border, they would launch a quick assault on key positions.

According to Dr. Ahmad, that is “not be the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.”

Writing in The Conversation, she points out that people mistake Canadian niceness for meekness. This would not be the case if the Americans invaded Canada.

“Except for a few collaborators, my research suggests many Canadians would likely engage in various forms of everyday resistance against invading forces that could involve stealing, lying, cutting wires, and diverting funds.

She predicts that Canadian resistance would take the fight to the United States.

“The Canada-U.S. border is also easy to cross, which would give insurgents access to American critical infrastructure. It costs tens of billions of dollars to build an energy pipeline, and only a few thousand to blow one up.”

“But in this nightmare scenario, could Canadians successfully resist an American invasion? Absolutely…. a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.”

She writes that if only one percent of Canada’s population stepped up to resist, that would represent 400,000 insurgents, ten times the number of Taliban fighters.

Americans suck at counter-insurgency; Canadians would be on their home ground.

“Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest.”

And here’s where the seriousness of this issue comes home.

The federal government has announced plans to create a 300,000-person volunteer force of ordinary citizens. The Globe and Mail states that the number is actually 400,000. That’s the same number Dr. Ahmad identified as being ideal for destroying the American forces.

I hate writing this. I hate imagining it. But I hate the threats posed against democracy even more. We need to be realistic.

The American empire is disintegrating before our eyes. Trump’s threats to attack an independent, peaceful nation have escalated. He claims that he is attacking Greenland because he was rebuffed by the Nobel Prize committee.

Such an admission should have immediately caused the American power establishment to step in and find ways to remove him from power. They haven’t. Meanwhile, the rhetoric against our nation is increasing. Steve Bannon says Canada is becoming “hostile” to the United States.

The Prime Minister and General Carignan must move quickly on reaching out to Canadians about the volunteer force. It may be the one thing that gets the Americans’ attention and makes them think we are serious, and they may think twice.

This is not a drill. Time is not on our side in the short term. But our nation is unified more than at any time in memory.

The Americans will think twice if they know that we are willing to stand up to them.

We’ve got this.

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