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Canada Is Already at War with the US—We Just Don’t Know It Yet
In history’s long arc, Canada is but a glimmer of a nation. And whereas there was a time when the accident of our favourable geography led us to believe that our existence would be eternal, regardless of how much or how little we invested in the trappings of self-reliance, that is decidedly no longer the case.
Talking points- Canada faces hybrid war from the US: tariffs, propaganda, intimidation
- Canadians still cling to the idea that the old alliance will return
- Survival depends on breaking decades of dependence on Washington
Being surrounded by three oceans and sharing the continent with our big brother, the global hegemon, was mostly great while the familial relationship lasted. But our continued existence as a liberal democracy in North America is by no means guaranteed. Canada has been under a constant barrage of lies since nearly the very start of President Donald Trump’s second term when he started floating the psy-op of Canada becoming the fifty-first state. The trade war was concocted on the demonstrably false notion that Canada was a major source of illegal fentanyl and illegal aliens in the United States. This fantasy was used to invoke the national-security grounds to justify substantial tariffs across the board on Canadian trade, which have been in play to varying degrees ever since.
Most recently, this hybrid form of trade and information war hit a high-water mark with a threat of increasing the tariff rate to 100 percent on all Canadian goods entering the US if Canada “makes a deal with China.” Combined with this threat was a reversion to calling Canada’s prime minister “Governor Carney,” a practice that had ceased after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down.
There is evidence to support that the leaders of our national security apparatus on both the bureaucratic and political sides believe that the warfare is an aberration. Canada’s minister of national defence insists that beneath the White House’s rhetoric lies a solid, layered foundation of co-operation. “We are moving in lockstep,” David McGuinty told iPolitics at the end of 2025. CSIS director Dan Rogers struck a similar note this past November, saying that it was “in Canada’s best interests” to maintain a strong security and intelligence partnership with the US.
It goes on. At January’s Conservative convention in Calgary, Pierre Poilievre delivered a nearly fifty-minute speech that did not mention the threat Trump’s regime poses to Canadian sovereignty. And even while opening a new consulate in Greenland, itself under threat of US expansionism, Foreign Minister Anita Anand emphasized her desire to continue “to build ties with the United States.”
There is a sense, in other words, that we still have a trusted defence, security, and intelligence partnership with the United States. That the American security guarantee that underlies both North American and European stability still holds. And that, ultimately, beneath the surface, everything is just fine, and that this will come right in the end. These are comforting beliefs, and it is understandable why we’d want to accept them. But this line of thinking fundamentally misreads the United States today. How it is bandwagoning with Russia rather than balancing against it. How it is aligning with the world’s autocratic nations under the dystopian banner of the “Board of Peace.” How it is rapidly taking on totalitarian tendencies.
Trust in the US rests on the assumption that it remains fundamentally a democracy. And that, because of this, eventually the Trump administration will be replaced by a kinder, gentler group of political leaders that abide by the rule of law at home and are interested in restoring the rules-based international order abroad. Like everyone else, I’d like nothing more than to see this play out according to the standard plot line in Western literature and film, which has led us to believe the good guys always win—that trial and tribulation lead to relief and restoration.
In 1942, George Orwell implored the reader to dispatch with the propensity to see fairy-tale endings and come to grips with the reality that fascism as a force in the world seeks to entirely extinguish liberalism. “Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run . . . But why should it?”
Why should it, indeed. Is there any evidence that it does?
If we step outside the twenty-four-hour news cycle and try to make sense of the pattern in the longue durée, there is something more sinister that we appear to be missing.
At the level of rhetoric, Trump and his administration will continue to belittle us by calling us the fifty-first state, mocking our sovereignty (claiming Canada “lives because of the United States”), making false claims about the extent to which Communist China holds influence over the federal government, even claiming they are going to somehow put an end to hockey. These insults and threats are designed to normalize a condition of enmity between the US and Canada. They are designed to delegitimize the idea of Canada. They are an absurdist denial of our independent statehood—on repeat—until it begins to ring true.
The rhetorical psy-ops have combined with a very real and targeted form of trade warfare designed to destabilize and ultimately cripple critical sectors of our economy, like auto manufacturing, aluminum, steel, and softwood lumber. This is the weaponization of interdependence. As the subordinate state in the continental hierarchy, Canada now finds itself in a very precarious position. We have been forced to rapidly attempt to eliminate our interprovincial trade barriers and diversify our global trading partnerships in order to unwind decades of increasing trade and investment interdependence with the US.
Beyond overt trade actions, the Trump administration has engaged in discussions with members of the Alberta Prosperity Project in an ongoing effort to coordinate the breakup of Confederation. Multiple meetings over a period of months between the leaders of the APP and members of the Trump administration have raised concerns about dangerous parallels between American efforts to embolden and empower Alberta separatism and the Russian plot to lever a separatist movement in the Donbas into an invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainians were completely taken aback by how quickly and aggressively their neighbour turned on them and how effectively they turned a loose thread of a fringe secessionist movement into territorial acquisition.
The 2025 US National Security Strategy states explicitly that “we will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” The collusion between the APP—a MAGA aligned movement—and the Trump administration must be understood as tactical moves in support of the strategy’s ultimate goal of hemispheric dominance.
The so-called “Donroe Doctrine” that has come to encapsulate the US National Security Strategy, has Canada squarely in its sites. It articulates a form of resource imperialism as its central ordering principle, which entitles the Trump administration to seize assets across the hemisphere at will. The stunning US takeover of Venezuela should have been a very clear warning shot to every country in the hemisphere. The rules-based international order? According to its 2026 Defence Strategy, nothing more than a “cloud castle abstraction.” No one is safe. Canada, like all of the rest of the resource-rich nations in what the US now considers its own backyard, is looked upon as real estate to be acquired.
On the day-to-day management of the Canada–US relationship, Trump has shown a willingness to create a form of chaos designed to disorient and rewire our perceptions of normalcy. Cases in point are his threats to decertify Canadian airplanes and block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge until the “United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect we deserve.” He also threatened to scrap the Canada–US–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA)—a trade deal he negotiated.
There’s every indication that Trump intends to keep at it. He will wage a simultaneous trade war and information war until he decides to up the ante even further. He and his administration will mock us, threaten us, gaslight us, and undermine us at every opportunity. This will all happen with increasing frequency and volume until, eventually, there will be an opportunity to annex us.
And yet we hang on to the alternative reality in the hopes that we can somehow meaningfully renegotiate CUSMA and miraculously return to the “before times.” We hang on to the hope that the midterms in November will be both free and fair, succeeding in bringing Congress back onto the field to constrain Trump’s maximal executive power. We still choose to believe, in the face of Trump refusing to rule out seeking a third term, that this will all be over with on that fateful day late in January of 2029 when the president peacefully transfers power to his successor.
We hang on to the hope that he wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly. And yet, not more than a few hours’ drive from the border of our most populous province, he turned a private militia on his own people in a multi-month occupation of a city in a state that voted against him three times running. He’s occupied that city with heavily armed, masked storm troopers, recruited specifically for the purpose of enforcing not the law but his MAGA agenda. He funded that force at a rate more massive than our generational investment in the Canadian Armed Forces. We have witnessed broad daylight executions, watched little Liam Ramos in his blue bunny toque being whisked a thousand miles away to a detention centre in Texas. But we seem to not have understood the significance of all this.
In the eyes of the Trump administration, Canada is just another big blue state—another Minneapolis. This is because we are a liberal, democratic, multicultural mosaic, because we believe in minority rights and public health care and the right of a woman to choose. We believe in a free press and a fair vote. We believe in the rule of law and the principle of police independence. We believe in science and objective reality. And because of this—and because of our small population and enviable natural resources—we’ve become its target.
Our collective imagination of war comes from the experiences of our countrymen in the trenches of the Western Front, on the beaches of Normandy, on the grey seas off Halifax, in the Kapyong Valley, and the Panjwayi Valley. These were brutalizing wars, but they played out on a defined battlefield marked by uniforms, flags, and rules. There was an order to them that was easily demarcated from peacetime.
Can anyone argue now that we are at peace with the US? Psychologically, accepting nightmare as fate is difficult. Denial is the first in the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief that progresses through anger, bargaining, depression, and finally to acceptance. We need to get to acceptance quickly. Things don’t always work out in the end. We have to face that and accept that our worst nightmare as a nation has become our reality. As the great Canadian political economist Abraham Rotstein once wrote, “much will have to change in Canada if the country is to stay the same.”
Much will have to change in Canada if the country is to remain the same. We have, as our prime minister said at Davos, “the capacity to stop pretending.” We can take the sign out of the window and, in doing so, accept the fundamental shift in the dynamic of the Canada–US relationship that has come upon us.
We must, without hesitation, look after ourselves. What this means in practice is that we must mercilessly identify our own weaknesses that have derived from an over-reliance on the US since the end of the Second World War and work tirelessly to make them strengths.
That might mean we need to build a world-class foreign intelligence service that stands apart from the existing agencies within the Canadian national security community. We need to consider options for mandatory military service, and we need to rapidly develop a defence industrial base that is capable of providing sovereign capabilities to the Canadian Armed Forces. We need to consider a hardened land border.
Perhaps, most importantly, we need to figure out how we can come together to do all of this. Our national unity is paramount to our survival. We are at war with the US.
The post Canada Is Already at War with the US—We Just Don’t Know It Yet first appeared on The Walrus.
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