Author: James Horncastle | Assistant Professor and Edward and Emily McWhinney Professor in International Relations, Simon Fraser University
Intro:
As the Donald Trump administration in the United States continues to threaten Canadian sovereignty — including a recent suggestion that Alberta could secede from Canada and join the U.S. — Canadians, like many others in the world, finds themselves in a period of extreme uncertainty.
Trump’s continued violations of the rules-based international order means Canada can no longer rely on its partners to the same extent as it has in the past.
The world must, as Prime Minister Mark Carney recently noted, accept the current climate as it is, rather than looking to the past.
To do so, Canada must develop a defence policy that can meet the country’s needs. The Canadian government’s recent budget envisions a significant increase in defence spending over the next several years. The problem Canada faces, however, is one that all middle powers face: an inability to compete with great powers in a conventional war.
The Canadian government must therefore pursue non-conventional means to overcome conventional weakness. Simultaneously, the country must be cognizant of the implications of alternative defence policies. The former Yugoslavia provides a harrowing example.
An excerpt:
The biggest vulnerability is the enemy eliminating their command-and-control functions early in the conflict. The U.S., as seen in Iraq in 1991, excels at these types of operations. Russia, while not as effective, attempted to do the same against Ukraine in the early phases of its full-fledged invasion.
For a smaller country to survive such an attack, it needs to ensure that resistance can continue regardless if centralized command is compromised.
Under the theory of total national defence, countries decentralize command and control functions to prevent them being eliminated.
The extent to which countries do so varies. Individual units may operate at the local level without centralized guidance to maintain the struggle against an opponent. In short, even if an opponent succeeds in eliminating the central command of a state, its army and people can continue the struggle.
I said it a while ago that Canada needs a ready made resistance force, similar to what the British did prior to, and during, ww2. I don’t mean random jackasses with guns, I mean people actually trained to fight and resist and who are given weapons that are secretly stashed and the stashes are only know to a handful of people in the groups.
Think Swiss system but on steroids. It won’t happen any time soon because as someone else mentioned here we won’t have much time (and it takes time to recruit people, vet them, and equip them. Especially when secrecy is important). Also given the anti-gun stance that Carney abd Trudeau have been taken and only getting stronger even a complete reversal of public opinion on gun control won’t make that change happen soon.
Looks like we might actually need to build that Great Canadian Border Wall
The whole presumption that we’ve got years before Trump takes Alberta & annexes Canada, using Greenland to snuff our EU-lifeline, is an absurd joke.
We’ve got weeks or months, at most.
Trump’s going to do to Canada what Russia’s been doing to Ukraina, but 10x.
That tippingpoint’s coming, quick.
No sooner than mid-Feb, but … ANY time after then.
10x the force AND 10x the speed, too.
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Bookmarking your comment so I’ll come back around July to see if it’s true… do you have evidence for these claims? Not that it couldn’t happen, but my read of the situation is that Trump is more likely to die of a stroke than to launch any sort of invasion of Canada.
As 1 yt video, which had a doctor remarking on his condition, explicitly stated:
he’s already had a stroke: the droopy side-of-mouth, the coordination problems, etc…
& the earlier MRI was about that, too.
My point is that a stroke can remove ANY subset of someone’s brain, & in his case, it’ll remove the humanness & the humaneness, leaving the ideological-ruthlessness, savagery, & drive.
Selective removal.
WHEN enough “believing” is torquing some event, THEN conventional-probabilities can go out the window: mind is an actual force-of-nature ( as the non-evolved existence of airliners proves, & as intentionally modifying one’s brain through meditations also proves ).
Rasputin was too-hard-to-kill precisely because of the force that unconscious-mind was pouring into making him be the representative of unconscious-mind’s ego-myth, in that context, on those believers.
Trump’s the same, in the current context.
Conventional-probability isn’t as applicable as it would pretend to be, once powerful unconscious-mind gets committing in something…
I’ve other evidences, but since this is a Western discussion, & Western cultural-prejudice automatically-contempts that mind is real in the ways that my frame-of-reference has tested & found-to-be-true, then just contempt my position as being “not based in Physicalism/Materialism/Existentialism”, & that’d be good-enough for those Confucian & Western religions.
His phase-change will be coincident with the same kind of phase-change among multiple lives, though,
some aligned as his committing is aligned, others aligned the opposite direction.
Were you the kind to find that … yeah, maybe mind or LivingSpirit could actually produce measurable-results in history … then I’d recommend Eknath Easwaran’s “The Bhagavad Gita” to you ( beautiful work, his ), simply for a concept buried in it for all to see.
There are Equilibriums ( Ages we call them, now, the root-guru of the Christians, benJoseph, called his Age “the current generation” ), & there are Punctuations between those Ages.
We’re now in a Punctuation ( not even gotten really going, yet ).
We’re now in the last survivable Punctuation of this world’s lifecycle.
It’s cyclical.
Here’s a truth that no Christian will readily accept:
There’s a stock symbol used in the biblical predictions/“prophecies”: that of an empire being represented by a great all-consuming monster, with iron teeth, & weaker & weaker materials going down, until clay feet.
That symbol represents BOTH the Roman Empire AND the US of A’s empire.
IOW, it represents the all-consuming empire at the end of an age, and NOT some specific one, but ANY one, see?
It’s cyclical!
Our cycle just happens to be moar worser than the previous cycle.
So, the destruction of the Roman Empire was BAD.
This time, though, it’ll be ABSOLUTELY WORSE.
& when you reach a sufficient level of unconscious-mind power, in a situation, then you’re engaging humankind’s collective-unconscious-mind’s global-commitment, which massively changes the rules.
So, I’m saying that this punctuation is going to … pop the Status Quo “governor-device” from our world, & replace it with the Destroyer-Heart current, which always has short-term ( mere-decades ) advantage in such Punctuations.
& that if that requires some temporary medical “miracles” … that that IS within humankind’s unconscious-mind’s power.
Exactly the same as people who’ve just been in a crash sometimes display superhuman-strength in prying-open wrecked cars.
Same substance!
just different use, is all.
Everybody devout to Physicalism/Materialism/Existentialism ought contempt everything I’m saying, because I hold that those are all falsified by physics ( spooky action at a distance itself can’t happen, in those regimes, in their pure/absolute forms, & since experiment has proven spooky action at a distance, to distances of over 100km, then pretending otherwise is ideology, NOT physics ).
Anybody who’s got the scientific-guts to hold to Empiricism’s method: simply wait & see!
well, as a method, it works.
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I didn’t give Trump permission to invade Canada
Did the people in Democrat states, whom ICE is waging war against, give permission for their states to be avalanched by ICE forces?
Permission is, in Trump’s lingo, “for losers”.
He’ll act, not ask, once he’s got the dictatorship he “NEEDS”, & the constitution is overthrown.
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But how can he do this without permission from a fresh parsnip?
I want you to be wrong, but it looks like conservative politicians in Canada have been pushing for him to focus on Canada instead of Greenland. Alberta makes us the softest target in the Western Hemisphere with the UCP and CPC ready to legitimize his actions.
The Yugoslavia example is very worrying. Who knows how they would have fared in an invasion, but just normal politics was deadly.
In the modern digital world it doesn’t seem necessary to decentralise much, since lines of communication can be very durable, if not necessarily fast. Even North Korea has data going in and out. If chain of command is clearly established and enforced ahead of time, and forces are numerous, integrated, nicely hidden away and given initial orders, I don’t expect decapitation would work well. Not in the Canadian cultural context.
I hear the Taliban has been an inspiration in these wargames. That works, they’re definitely hyper-central.
The US kidnapping Carney won’t cripple the government but it will cause a major outrage. Unlike Maduro Carney is popular and was duly elected.
I don’t like Carney for many reasons, but I did vote for him and I don’t want him abducted or assassinated.
Carney, or other establishment politician has yet to renounce a single us empire lie since davos speech. Our military mission is still to subjugate to us empire as force amplification.
Op gives example of Finland. The only threat to Finland comes from joining nato and engaging in russophobia antagonism. Our military mission must renounce treating Russia as enemy and ending the bs about them being artic threat.
Changing our mission, means the opportunity to be bribed to cooperate on canada defending the us through norad
You definitely want the Canadian government leading the army from Alert.
Eh. Doing a civilian government in exile and leaving the military in country makes more sense.
I have to wonder how deep in the arctic it would be practical for the guerillas, even, to go. They’re going to need food from the south at the very least, and it’s a lot of gas and days on snowmobile to get to Alert.
