I don't take the threat of US annexing Canada seriously
I watch CBC pretty regularly and all I have seen for the past month is coverage about Trump's comments about annexing us and I can't tell if I am missing something obvious or am just naive but I can't take the threat seriously and I am starting to hate that CBC is talking about it so much and that we have Canadian politicians actively addressing it rather than just dismissing it (the fact that Doug Ford went on that idiot Jesse Waters show to push back on it made me facepalm).
Cause from my point of view, let's say Trump in his immense stupidity is serious about the threat. He wants to bring back American expansionism and apparently misunderstood his history classes from back in the day and thinks "manifest destiny" is a good thing.
and given that he has installed loyalists as his heads of departments, let's even say they all either agree or are too chicken-shit to oppose it and get cancelled by Trump.
Canada would never agree to being annexed so that means Trump would have to launch a war against us to annex us. You are telling me that if push comes to shove, that the men and women in the armed forces would actually be willing to invade a sovereign nation that they might even have ties to (given Canada and American culture+society are so connected)? and you are telling me that the generals and people in power in the American military industrial complex would be willing to follow an order to invade Canada?
I mean sure, America has been known to invade countries in the Middle East for their natural resources and pretend its for national security but imo there's a big difference in being able to sell the idea to the American people and the viewers of Faux News that invading a brown country far off in the distance and saying its cause of Islamic extremism vs invading a country whose stereotype is literally that we are too apologetic and nice.
Am I missing something obvious?
And just to clarify, I am not saying that Trump isn't serious about it. he probably is and it probably has to do with our natural resources as Trudeau was caught on a hot mic saying as much in a meeting and our politicians need to address it. but for our politicians to act like there is a legit chance of an invasion seems odd to me. and the CBC talking about it so much and giving so much airtime to it is really getting on my nerves.
What I will say is the one thing that bugs me about all this honestly is just Musk and Trump calling Trudeau a "governor". not that I like Trudeau. The day he decided to break his campaign promise of election reform, he was dead to me, but I just don't like it when people dish it out when they can't take it and Musk and Trump are the most thin-skinned c**nts on the planet. If Trudeau responded to either of them on Twitter with something as condescending, they would both cry like little babies and somehow find a way to blame the woke mind virus and trans people for Trudeau being "nasty" to them.
Yes, I am telling you exactly that.
I am from Eastern Europe and I still vividly remember how little time it took for Russians to get from "Ukrainians are our brothers" to a full-scale war.
I think you severely underestimate...
Well, maybe it's just me being stereotypically East-Europeany gloomy. We will see.
I think resistance to an invasion of Canada would be higher especially since we've seen how it ends in Ukraine, but yeah. Even if the USA is a different beast from Russia, it's not impossible.
It'd be absolutely dumb as fuck, and I don't consider the chance high. But the chance is there. Recent events have shown that Fermented Mandarin is enough of a maniac for that.
As a Canadian, I'd hope at least the UK would step in if this were to happen... It's either than or stop telling us we have a king, choose one.
It's frustrating to me, as someone from the Netherlands, that our politicians have been rather silent about the whole affair considering Canadian blood has been spilled here to push the Nazi's out. I get that Russia is a priority but man, we owe you guys one and we ain't exactly paying back the debt here.
Trump is dismantling the west’s trust in the US. It doesn’t matter whether the threats are serious: his goal is to foster distrust, hatred, division and have a fractured west and a US that stands alone.
It makes more sense when you understand this is Russia’s goal.
Yeah, Krasnov has only made threats this past month but look at how much distrust he's sown. He may have unironically influenced a lot of western politics to move more left. Even if none of it is true, you don't want that drunk neighbor shouting at you every morning about crazy stuff. You especially want to minimize contact (in this case, trade) with him.
Welcome to the million dollar question, and yes at the point of "invading canada with armed forces" it does extend to "what would the average US citizen do".
It is arguably why I'm not so sure Trump is taking over America as discussed in the other topic. He might very well be transitioning us to an oligopoly from which we will not recover (although I think he's the uh...last organ failure of a long running system disease there), but direct straight up Putin levels of power i'm less certain about.
Power basically boils down to military, capital, information, infrastructure, and a few other key things. You can argue, easily, that Trumpco has a very real grip on many of these things, but the "deciding factor in case of a tie" tends to be who has the most guns, and thus the military.
The military is a VERY large organization with a very unique culture that catches a lot of deserved and undeserved criticism. In my personal experience, a lot of the military members have turned on Trump since the run up to this election and certainly after. Some remaining % of my anecdotal group still think Trump would never DO something like invade Canada and thus are sorta in the air.
No doubt, there are those who will do whatever they are told and some who hope to be told to do horrible things. One of the odd and i'm sure unintended upsides of the military being fucking massive though, is it gets really really hard to get enough. If get 500,000 active members to support you then congrats, you have 1/4 of the US military behemoth.
If the other 3/4's say "no fuck that noise", welll now you have a very well armed group of people not happy with you. Even if you get the 3/4th's and the 1/4th still say "fuck no", welll now what?
They're almost certainly distributed sure, but probably clustered enough to cause what one might call "a scene", and such a scene, like the military fighting the military, is probably going to escalate fast. There's that whole 2nd amendment thing we've been arguing about since we founded the country, and I very much doubt all the civilians are going to sit on the sidelines and wonder who wins if the military starts shooting at each other.
In short, you're lucky if it's only complete fucking chaos leading into some style of mass civil war or fracturing.
Allllll this being said, I think that so far that someone(s?) knows that soft transitioning to something more akin to an oligopoly and rolling the dice on "look no one's shooting each other, elections fucking suck anyways, and he's old, so what if they don't vote anymore" and going from there is a lot more likely to possibly work.
I'm pretty sure that boots on the ground going into canada ends with canada watching from the sidelines and considering if they want to build a wall and before or after annexing some territory while shit goes down. If we don't nuke the fuck out of ourselves first.
Mainly that Trump and Media both know that "IMMA TAKE OVER CANADA" gets headlines and conversation and hypotheticals and worries and most importantly attention. This extends to more media outlets than fox news and is arguably one of the biggest things that's created trump and the environment that led to him. I'd say for at least 10+ years.
Finally as a bonus hypothetical I do think the most hilarious outcome is just calling his bluff and saying "sure fuck it we agree. We want to be a state tomorrow".
Don't even fight about how yes the various provinces should be their own states. Just say "yep we'll take 2 senators, however many congressmen, and go from there." The fucking chaos it would cause the administration from so many vectors would be worth it if only it wouldn't also be fucking chaos for all the Canadians and US citizens.
People do tend to forget that the military is made up of people, and that those people have been taught since they first joined that they're subject to the Geneva convention. There are plenty of troops that don't like Trump and never have. Any large group of people is going to contain a lot of different opinions, and I guarantee you they noticed the VA cuts.
That sounds an awful lot like what happened at Twitter.
At least 30 percent of the federal work force are veterans. At least some of them still have friends in uniform. I'm confident that there are a significant number of people in the service who are old enough to have friends who have left for civilian life, who are getting first hand stories of Trump and Musk sponsored mayhem related to sudden involuntary job cuts.
Yes and no.
To twitters credit, I think they showed exactly how you beat people like Musk/Trump, which is yeah, call their bluff. Musk did not actually want twitter, you sure as hell don't sue and waste millions to back out of a deal you want.
To Musk's credit, he turned his loss into an advantage. Despite hemorrhaging money, yes he very clearly found a use for twitter, and correctly identified that people won't care what he does, and has obviously turned that into a huge win for him. People all over the place are calling a man a nazi and still using his platform, and I think it shows just how much most people are all talk and no action if it causes them even the slightest discomfort.
In regards to Canada:
This is a tongue and cheek, i'm not serious and there's literally no way it can happen like that for a million reasons.
Even if they said "fuck it sure" it's not anywhere near as easy as the twitter situation (which was not). There INSTANTLY becomes a massive question of all sorts of federal and state rules that now have to be ironed out, that menial detail oriented shit that trump/musk think is a waste of money and not worth the time. Your options are now either A. Piss off your new "state" with their own functioning military or B. Try to figure out how the fuck to fold in a MASSIVE country with differentiating views and opinions overnight, that btw, will have an insanely hostile populace just from a political standpoint that's getting a nice chunk of congressmen and senators.
To drive this farther OF COURSE trumpco is going to try to not fucking do any of that and somehow just treat Canada like a less represented puerto rico, even if they offered them actual state hood and they accepted, and that would be its own shitstorm that inversely somewhat boils down to "fine fuck you, we're not a state unless you treat us like one" which leaves trump back where he started in a scenario of asking can you actually enforce this? He obviously is arguing in bad faith and has 0 intention of letting Canada join the US as an actual state even if somehow they wanted to because it's faaar too out of his control.
I think you're underestimating the power of inertia.
Try to remember the first time you heard about Covid, probably some time around November or December 2019. Naturally you wouldn't have know it as Covid back then -- it didn't have a name, only being some mysterious, perhaps airborne disease spreading in Wuhan. You heard whispers that hospitals were overrun with patients, but this wasn't the first time in recent history that Chinese hospitals had been overrun by a novel coronavirus: The SARS outbreak hadn't even been 20 years ago, and for all the fear-mongering in the media, it managed to peter out by itself, right?
Did you suspect in December 2019 that there would be a global pandemic only a few months later? Could you have even imagined what a global pandemic would mean: the fear of catching the virus; the fear of spreading it to our loved ones; the loneliness of isolation; the switch to remote work for so many (or a shittier, more dangerous version of the same job for everyone else); the tens of millions of lives lost?
Now consider Ukraine in 2022. Experts doubted that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with top officials in the Ukrainian government even remaining skeptical when warned about an impending attack within days. Why should Putin invade Ukraine? Even if it were to fall quickly (as many experts suspected), what strategic value would it have? But this question is the wrong one to ask: Putin did not inted to conqueror Ukraine for its strategic value. Rather Putin, envisioning himself as someone of the likes of Alexander the Great and surrounded by yes-men who dared not question his self-assessment, convinced himself that such a realignment of the former Eastern Bloc was not only achievable but necessary.
Trump in 2025 positions himself similarly. He is currently purging top officers in the Pentagon and replacing them with less qualified, loyalist hacks. An invasion of Canada is unreasonable, immoral, and even a bit whimsical. But so what? If Trump demands it, would any of his hired yes-men dare to push back? If Trump demands it and so does his top officers, should we rely on their subordinates to resist, especially when they risk prison or death for refusing a "lawful order"?
The threat does not need to be sensible to be real. When the full force of the US government acts, people will move or they will be moved.
Before the Ukraine invasion, there was an obvious military buildup. Many people in Ukraine were skeptical because they thought Putin wouldn’t really do it, but the capability was certainly there. The US government made a lot of public warnings about it.
We haven’t seen a similar US military buildup, like happened before Iraq. It seems unlikely that it wouldn’t leak, and that nobody would prepare the public for war, like happened with Iraq? So I expect that there would be plenty more warning before anything happened.
More generally, the reason this seems so unreal is the gap between talk and mobilizing for action. It would be a lot easier to bomb with no notice. Trump hasn’t talked about bombing anyone, I don’t think?
Similarly for the pipe dream of deporting millions of people. That takes money and people. Congress hasn’t approved more money and they’re not hiring more people. They’re trying to make do with the people they have.
Sorry, I must have been unclear. I mentioned Ukraine as an example because Zelensky and his advisors doubted there would be a full-scale Russian invasion even as the Russian army built up around the border.
I don't think an American invasion of Canada is imminent nor even particularly likely. But it is something that could conceivably happen within the next few years.
Yes, fair enough. I hope the Trump administration runs out of steam long before then.
Re deportation they have also repurposed a significant number of people from other agencies. USA today
Border report
Yes, but it’s unclear how much that helps.
ICE struggles to boost arrest numbers despite infusion of resources (Washington Post)
They could be trained, though. Are there any news reports that the training is happening?
Details like people needing to be trained when mobilizing are often lost when talking about things like this at high level. It’s not impossible to overcome, but it adds delay.
I don't know how many people would constitute a buildup, but there are over a hundred thousand troops trained and ready to go immediately in the ready reserve and inactive national guard.
Calling up the reserves would be a warning sign. But there’s no news about this, and I don’t think it could be done secretly?
I don't know. It may be too big a secret to keep, but it might not. There wouldn't necessarily be a public announcement.
Let’s all be aware of what Trump, and his admin, and Musk are doing.
They play the fool and do performative ridiculous things. Like talk about taking over Canada. Or name an agency DOGE. Or call people names like “retard” in tweets.
They are flooding the media with nonsense and distractions because they know how to manipulate it. The media is not good at focusing on important topics. As noticed by Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, the media will always choose to show a high speed chase (which is unimportant and doesn’t affect most people) rather than talk about important topics that don’t have shock value. Worse, the media is captured by the oligarchs that benefit from trump’s takeover so it largely doesn’t try to correct for this obvious flaw.
Trump and Musk are apparently stupid and probably mentally ill. And yet they are successfully taking over a country by replacing apolitical positions with loyalists. Trump and many of the people around him should be in jail for sedition and other crimes and yet they are not. Because they are part of a careful and well coordinated plan that has a lot of support inside the top levels of the government and business leaders. It is likely being partially orchestrated in the kremlin. This plan is decades in the making and a lot of it was written down as Project 2025.
Well he did just fire some of his top generals, so why do you think he couldn't get a useful stooge willing to invade Canada? Trump has managed to turn the Republican party into his own cult of personality. Why do you think he wouldn't be able to convince at least 50% of America that Canada being the 51st state is a good idea?
The bigger issue is that our biggest ally is even entertaining the idea. It almost doesn't matter whether or not America will militarily invade my country.
If we don't take Trump's threats at face value, then shame on us. This is a serious threat to our sovereignty and treating it as anything less is foolish.
Why would he need to do that?
Everything we've seen supports the idea that Trump will do things on a whim, regardless of how dumb it is, or how much it will hurt regular Americans. We've also seen that anyone in power is either willing to go along with it or actively being forced out. We've seen that half of Americans are either too dumb or too hateful to even understand what's going on.
They've already got huge parts of the population willing to turn on teachers, librarians, healthcare workers, any government employees, and immigrants illegal or otherwise. I have no problem believing they could drum up hate against Canada to justify an invasion.
Basically wr can't rely on their leaders to act reasonably. We can't rely on the rest of their government to reign in their unreasonable leaders. We certainly can't relay on their population to recognize this and do something about it.
Maybe we get lucky and something else distracts them, but we should definitely be treating this like an actual threat.
Im not worried about a physical invasion but I do worry about an economic one.
I dont think most Americans realize how integrated our economies really are. Our banks have strong investments and even branches in the US and several American banks operate in Canada. Our auto sector is VERY integrated with parts going back and forth across the border on a daily basis with 'just in time' procurement. Our heavy crude oil flows south to American refineries that are specifically set up to refine only Canadian crude, where it is made into gas, diesel and many other products and then sent back to Canada to be resold to us. A lot of the food in our grocery stores comes from the US. I was even surprised to find out this week that a subsidiary of Arizona-based Viad Corp., controls most of the paid tourist attractions in Banff and Jasper National Parks, the pride of Canada. It's crazy but America OWNS a great deal of Canada already.
Which puts us in a very weak bargaining position. Add to that we have a lame duck Prime Minister who is resigning, our Parliament has been closed down for weeks and we're about to have a national election and we're in an even weaker position.
Its not that Canada doesnt have some big bargaining chips, like the power we sell south, oil, potash, precious minerals, steel, aluminum, even water... but we're still economically tiny compared to the US. Definitely a David vs Goliath scenario against a country with at least 10x the economic size.
We're proud to be Canadian and we're scrappy, so its not like we won't fight to keep our independence and control our resources, but the 'enemy' already is inside the gate and its going to be very hard to push him back out again, especially when its going to hurt us economically to do so.
The one big thing we have going for us, is that Trump and friends highly underestimate how much we love our country. You just have to look at the grocery store shelves this week where the rows of Canadian lettuce have all been sold out, and the American lettuce sitting beside it hasn't been touched and will have to be thrown out as it wilts. When push comes to shove we'll support our own first, even if it hurts us.
You can face military court for refusing orders, right? Your average guy might like Canada but few are that principled. It's not like invading a sovereign nation is an unlawful order you have a duty to refuse; they invade sovereign nations all the time.
What would happen if no one took Trumps suggestion to ingest bleach seriously during COVID?
The more powerful a person is, the more powerful their words are.
Left unchallenged, Republicans would quickly find themselves aligning towards Russia/ North Korea, and against all western democracies. It is still happening, but significantly slower because there are people standing up and saying that Trump is wrong. This is an incredibly slipper slope. For all it's flaws, USA used to prioritize capitalistic/democratic principals.