Is Canada Ready for an American Civil War?

Pope Leo XIV reminded the world recently that “the rule of law is the foundation of all peaceful coexistence.” He was speaking on January 9, in the wake of the United States’ takeover of Venezuela and President Donald Trump’s threats against Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Iran, Syria, and Canada. As the pope warned: “War is back in vogue.”

But as far as the rule of law is concerned, the pope may well have been speaking about US domestic politics, which, like the international system, is now sliding into a lawless state of nature where might makes right, and life, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “is nasty, brutish, and short.”

Canadians are looking on aghast at the events unfolding in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a northern city of bridges and rivers that loves hockey, values higher education, upholds diversity, and as home to the Mayo Clinic, is globally recognized for its excellence in health care research. It’s a place not unlike Edmonton or Winnipeg, which isn’t much more than a five-hour drive away.

But unlike Edmonton or Winnipeg, Minneapolis is under siege, its people targeted because they are Democrats. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs Border Protection (CBP) have become the president’s private militia, which he is using to send a message to a blue state that has refused to vote for him. Under the guise of what the Trump administration is calling “law enforcement,” a radical movement towards totalitarianism in America is playing out before our eyes.

The descent of Trump’s troops upon the city—Operation Metro Surge, as the White House calls it—began on December 1, 2025. As of Saturday, after fifty-five days of occupation and the execution of another civilian at the hands of ICE, on January 24, in that city, tensions have boiled over. There are over 3,000 ICE and CBP masked and heavily armed agents terrorizing the citizens of Minneapolis. They are led by the ghoulish Greg Bovino, who relishes being the visual representation of a totalitarian federal occupation of Minneapolis. His press conference following his men’s execution of another Minnesotan was designed to further psychologically assault the population by, once again, painting the victim as a terrorist wanting to inflict maximum harm to “Federal Law Enforcement”—a phrase he repeats with perverse pleasure.

The people, however, do not appear willing to back down. Neither does Governor Tim Walz, who has mobilized the Minnesota National Guard. Nor does Jacob Frey, the marathon-running mayor. All are hanging together heroically.

President Trump has also dug in, pushing out, in all caps, on his own platform: “LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB!” He has readied 1,500 members of the 11th Airborne Division stationed in Alaska.

These two armies—the Minnesota National Guard and the brigades of the 11th Airborne—have been squared off for six days on the sidelines of the conflict playing out on the streets of the city that has been ongoing since December.

On Sunday, after the 9 a.m. broad daylight execution of Alex Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse who worked in a Veterans Hospital and was clearly trying to protect another protestor when he was beaten and shot multiple times in front of dozens of camera phones, I thought there was a chance Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and cross a Rubicon that it would be difficult to walk back from. At the time of writing, that has not happened.

America is tracking towards a version of mass civil unrest, which won’t look like the Civil War of 1861 (which killed 600,000 Americans) but will nevertheless bring widespread instability to that country. They are already there. The people have begun to wake up to the reality that the Trump administration has no interest in leaving them alone. If they want their freedom back, they are going to have fight for it.

“This is tyranny,” Minnesota’s attorney general told New York Times reporter Lydia Polgreen. “There’s no other way to put it. We’re all shocked by it. Nobody ever thought America would look like this. We now don’t have to speculate as to what American fascism looks like. It’s right outside our door.”

When you think about it, tyranny is right outside Canada’s door also. The state of Minnesota shares an 880-kilometre border with Manitoba and Ontario.

So, it is worth starting the conversation and asking ourselves what a continued escalation of this domestic unrest would this look like. Could widespread instability in the US spill across our borders? Yes, almost certainly; with a major humanitarian crisis unspooling to the south, Canada could expect potentially millions of American migrants fleeing the conflict zones. These numbers could exceed the current Canadian population. The US currently numbers some 340 million, so this is not out of the realm of possibility given the population discrepancy between our two nations.

What provinces would be most impacted? Likely Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia would bear the brunt, but the rest of the country would not be untouched.

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Would MAGA ideology be a vector that spreads the American conflict into Canada? Flashing back to the Freedom Convoy multi-week occupation of Ottawa and the blockades at Coutts and Windsor/Detroit and Emerson, Manitoba provides some indication of how that might play out.

Could skirmishes that push back toward the Canadian border eventually cross over into our territory? Could that be Trump’s entry point into war with Canada also?

Would Canada dare to intervene under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which requires states to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity? This seems highly unlikely given our own tensions with the Trump administration, but it does beg an important moral question: What are we to do if forced to bear witness to more senseless and unjustified killings of American citizens, more disappearing of so-called illegal aliens? When does Canada speak up and stand up in the face of atrocity?

In 2024, Policy Horizons Canada published a foresight document, which mapped a constellation of potential disruptions along an Impact–Likelihood, X–Y axis. Civil War erupting in the US is viewed as a high-impact but low-likelihood event. This should tell us that the Government of Canada hasn’t done a whole lot of work in preparation for it (i.e. next to none). I hope I’m wrong.

Based on what is happening in Minneapolis, my guess is that the folks at Policy Horizons—if they aren’t too busy running competitions to see which among them will be laid off—have shifted the US Civil War disruption box hard to the right on the likelihood axis. Indeed, Trump has pushed a number of the group’s identified disruptions further to the right than anyone would have been expected to predict back in the relatively quiet year of 2024.

Interestingly, Canada’s national unity unravelling is seen as a higher-likelihood, lower-impact geopolitical event than a civil war in the US. Given the way things are shaping up in Alberta and Quebec, this is another nevertheless high-impact geopolitical disruption that would appear to have shifted to the right.

Where this goes from here depends almost entirely on whether the rule of law continues to be torn asunder by the Trump administration. As the rule of law goes, so too does any form of stability in the country, unless we expect the people to succumb to totalitarianism. After watching the events in Minneapolis over the last week, I don’t think that will happen quietly.

Canada’s readiness to face multiple of these disruptions simultaneously must become a national priority. Some version of American civil war is more than an issue for the Department of National Defence to plan for. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s federal policing program must wrap its mind around the possibility also. Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness will become a critical government file in 2026, requiring intensive collaboration across all orders of government and all of society to get right.

Planning for how to deal with the unthinkable must start now. The writing is on the wall. It is time to accept it.

Adapted from “Is Canada Ready for American Civil War?” by Patrick Lennox (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.