(Bloomberg) — For months, many Canadians hoped Donald Trump had lost interest in making their country the 51st US state — his plate full with turning Washington and the global trading system upside down.
Those hopes are fading.
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The shock capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump’s ramped-up talk of seizing Greenland have rattled Canada, forcing citizens to take seriously the US president’s past threats to Canadian sovereignty. The administration’s declaration that “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE” makes Trump’s earlier comments about annexing Canada seem ever less like mere insults aimed at former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or negotiating tactics in his trade war with current PM Mark Carney.
A blunt column in Canada’s largest national newspaper went viral this week warning of the possibility that Trump may use “military coercion” against the country. The authors’ advice: Learn from Finland’s defenses against Russia. Expand the civil defense force. Build a national drone strategy, inspired by Ukraine’s example. And think about the unthinkable.
“It’s all about changing the calculus,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, one of the authors and a Canadian academic who researches global security. “If there is an attempt to use military coercion against us, it needs to be clear that it’s going to be enormously costly.”
The fear has even inspired its own dark comedy. A widely-shared story on The Beaverton, a satirical website similar to The Onion, sported the headline, “Mark Carney turns off geolocation on phone just in case.”
While Trump’s actions have unnerved leaders around the globe, Canadians have particular reason to worry. After all, with Greenland, Trump and his advisers are seeking control — even raising the possibility of military action — of a territory that is democratic, strategically located in the Arctic, and part of NATO. Canada is all of those things, too.
“I think many officials in Ottawa just find it hard to believe that we’re in this space, no matter what the evidence is,” said Wesley Wark, a former adviser to the Canadian government on security and border issues. He called Trump’s moves on Venezuela and Greenland “final wake-up calls for Canada that will underscore the reality that the United States is not the country that it used to be.”
Less clear is what Canada can do to dissuade Trump.
Carney won office last year vowing to stand up to Trump, saying the president “wants to break us, so America can own us.” Since the election, however, he has avoided antagonizing his US counterpart, even as he tries to ramp up trade with China and other countries to lessen Canada’s dependence on its southern neighbor. Carney this week called for the US to respect the sovereignty of Greenland and Denmark, of which the island is a territory, without addressing Trump’s past threats to Canada.
Most analysts doubt the US military would invade Canada. “I still do believe that’s in the realm of science fiction,” said Stephanie Carvin, associate professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and a former national security analyst for the Canadian government. “But I do believe — now more than ever — that the United States is willing to cripple the Canadian economy in ways that suit the president’s whims.”
She sees the developments in Venezuela, with Trump asserting control over the country’s immense oil reserves, as emboldening him. “The president now will be much more willing to engage in adventurism in a quest to dominate the Western Hemisphere,” she said.
Philippe Lagassé, an associate professor at Carleton who specializes in defense policy, said one plausible scenario could involve a problem that Canada can’t handle on its own, such as a major natural disaster or attack on its electrical supplies to the US. “The United States will deal with it for you, at least under this administration, and it may not choose to leave. Or it may choose to make demands of you,” he said. “What can Canada do to forestall the possibility of the United States arguing that it needs to intervene in Canada for its own security?”
Canada’s military isn’t built for a more hostile world. Its regular and primary reserve forces total fewer than 100,000 people to defend the second-largest land mass on Earth. Natural disasters and other duties, such as a NATO mission in Latvia where Canadian soldiers are stationed, stretch its resources.
Carney’s government is boosting soldiers’ pay to help recruitment and allocating tens of billions of dollars for new fighter jets, submarines and other equipment — all of which will help Canada, at long last, meet the minimum NATO spending level of 2% of gross domestic product. There’s also a nascent plan, reported in the Canadian media, to build a force of 100,000 reserves and 300,000 supplementary reserve troops. But most of those steps will take years.
Then there’s the possibility of the US interfering in Canadian politics.
The oil-rich province of Alberta — which has long chafed under Ottawa’s control — may be headed toward an independence referendum, with a few so-called “Maple MAGAs” holding out hope of not only leaving Canada but eventually joining the US. A separatist organizer, Jeffrey Rath, told Bloomberg News he has met with US State Department officials three times and they are supporting his cause. He declined to name the officials, and the State Department declined to comment.
Early polls suggest the Alberta separatists are likely to lose. But the referendum opens the door to the risk of foreign meddling, according to Homer-Dixon and his colleague, Adam Gordon, a former legal adviser to Canada’s foreign affairs department. They have drawn up a scenario where “grey MAGA money” and disinformation campaigns are used to help the separatist cause, or perhaps sow distrust in the results if the independence effort fails. Canadians, they say, should think about what it would mean if the US, in the aftermath of an Alberta vote, decided to send troops into northern Montana.
Trump’s attention is elsewhere now, but it will swing back to Canada. The countries are starting a scheduled review of the trade deal Trump signed in his first term: the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It has the potential to become a forum for the airing of every Washington grievance against Ottawa — its small military presence in the far north, its approach to sectors such as agriculture — and for Trump’s negotiating style of exerting maximum leverage against smaller trading partners.
The existing deal means that about 85% of Canada-US trade is currently tariff-free, exempted from Trump’s 35% import taxes against other Canadian goods. But that blessing is also a sword of Damocles for Canada — as Trump merely has to threaten to cancel the exemption or blow up USMCA to create havoc.
Businesses overwhelmingly say ending the trade accord would hurt the US economy. But in the short term, it would be catastrophic for Canada, which sends almost 70% of its exports south across the border.
To slash that reliance, Carney set a public goal in October to double Canada’s exports to other countries over the next decade. Building that economic counterweight means brisk diplomatic pivots. Despite calling China the biggest security threat to his country in April, Carney next week will become the first Canadian leader to visit the Asian giant in almost a decade, after years of frosty relations.
Since becoming prime minister, Carney has worked to improve Canada’s relations with Trump, which had grown toxic under Trudeau. He removed some of his predecessor’s counter-tariffs and digital services tax. And the boost in defense spending addresses one of Trump’s key complaints about America’s NATO partners.
None of those concessions, however, led to a detente on tariffs. And they carry the danger, analysts say, of the steady erosion of Canadian sovereignty.
“Are we already a vassal state, and we just won’t admit it to ourselves?” Lagassé said. “I start to worry that at some point the more concessions you give in order to maintain market access, the more that you are willing to give up in order not to be further threatened, you eventually end up in a situation where you are basically a tributary.”
–With assistance from Danielle Bochove, Josh Wingrove and Mario Baker Ramirez.
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