It’s Time for Canada to Get the Bomb (Not Really)

Threats against Canadian sovereignty from the incoming Trump administration should, however, focus the national mind on a plan for managing...whatever it is we're facing.

We’re gonna need a stronger fence. Source: Hermes Rivera on Unsplash.

It’s been a week — and it’s only Wednesday. I’ve already written about what forced Justin Trudeau to resign, that one for the Guardian. Tomorrow, I have a piece on the prime minister’s mixed legacy for the National Observer and a piece in the pipes about the coming Poilievre era for Time Magazine (a first, for me). Even with all that, there’s another big story to cover, which gives you a sense of the tremendous scale of the news week. Again, it’s only Wednesday.

Donald Trump is threatening to annex Canada with “economic force.” At a press conference earlier this week he said he wouldn’t use military force — what a relief! No, he’d stick to the economic tools in his toolbox as he takes aim at the border, which he called an arbitrary line. (I didn’t have Trump becoming an open-border activist on my 2025 Bingo card, but here we are.)

Politicians in Canada came out to say no way to Trump’s proposition-threat. Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre, Doug Ford, Mélanie Joly, etc., etc., etc. Their statements are all variations on a theme: Canada is a sovereign state and will remain so. And that’s mostly and probably true.

Probably.

Trump has long joked about making Canada the 51st state: a nice, big, Blue-voting, California North. We’ve tended to ignore or dismiss the “jokes” as the ramblings of a mad man, a negotiating position, or epic trolling. These admonitions were of the sort that counselled us to take Trump seriously but not literally. After all, it was inconceivable that the United States, Canada’s Greatest Ally™ would invade us, economically or militarily. Not with NAFTA, later USMCA, and NORAD and NATO binding us up along the World’s Longest Undefended Border™.

Never mind that a certain breed of Canadian nationalist or ideologue has been warning us for decades — and not without reason — that the US has already invaded economically, and politically and culturally, too. It wasn’t necessarily inevitable, but it was always going to be tough to avoid, being next to the global hegemon, (mostly) sharing a common language, and eyeing a market counting hundreds of millions of would-be buyers.

I don’t particularly think the US will invade Canada, though I do think Trump will squeeze whatever out of us he can manage. But I’ve also come to believe we can’t rule out something more, let’s say, belligerent from the American side. Perhaps even a few years ago that would have been unthinkable, but we’ve been told the same about the very rise of Trump, about migrant detention camps, about a coup attempt. In short, we’ve entered a time during which taking the unthinkable seriously and literally is necessary and wise, even if we needn’t let it become an immediate point of rumination and catastrophizing.

Taking Trump both seriously and literally in this case means having a national discussion about Canadian sovereignty: what we want from it, why we think it’s necessary (or not), and how we want to protect it, if indeed that’s what we wish to do. In the 1980s and 90s (and much earlier in the last century), that meant thinking about free trade and domestic industry. Free trade and de-industrialization won the day and we may have some regrets about the latter, even if there remain compelling arguments for the former.

It also meant endless discussions about saving Canadian culture, whatever that may be (outside of Quebec). As far as I can tell, there is no Canadian culture, though there are plenty of distinct sub-national cultures within the country’s borders. They comprise Indigenous, provincial, and regional ways of being in the world. One presumes those whose identity is bound up in them wish to keep them so. Accordingly, there’s a fight to be had there, but it’s the same one we’ve been concerned about for many years.

Economically, it’s beyond time to prioritize a diversification of trade and economic relationships. You might say we’ve done as much, pointing to various free trade agreements with states and regions around the world, but the fact remains that in practice, the vast, vast majority of our truck and trade — something like 80% of our experts — remains cross-border with the US. That relationship seems unsustainable and unreasonably risky at the current scale.

It’s become accepted that Canada can free ride on national defence because we’re part of the American security umbrella alongside the NATO alliance. Some say that an American invasion would be a hopeless event to defend against, so why bother trying? Pay your nickle and take your chance. But jokes about going nuclear (being serious, though not literal) aside, we ought to at least have a debate about what our defence policy should look like, what kind of hardware it should require, and what kinds of alliances we want — or need in the 21st century. Some experts will tell you our armed forces are so utterly bound up with the US that at least for us in many respects they become a distinction without a difference save for when we’re berated for not spending enough or sitting out a war. So why bother? I think we should bother.

It’s time to surface assumptions, unspoken anxieties, worst-case scenarios and taboos about Canada’s relationship with the US and place in the world, and then debate them in plain view. Who do we want to be and what do we want to protect? With whom do we wish to do business and to what extent? How many baskets should we arrange for our eggs? Is this country worth defending and, if so, why, how, and to what extent and consequence?

If we can’t come up with answers to these questions, then that will be an answer in and of itself. But I think we can and should come up with answers — and we don’t even need the bomb to do so.