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Showing posts with label The Tyee. Show all posts

Monday, 12 January 2026

The Arrest of Mark Carney will bring Peace and Prosperity (satire from Halifax Examiner and The Tyee): Tim Bousquet

[Editor’s note: This satirical opinion piece was originally published in the Halifax Examiner. Editor Tim Bousquet was prompted by the Washington Post editorial board’s apology for President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, ‘to the point that I could lift entire paragraphs and just change a few words.’]

August 5, 2026
Washington Post
The Editorial Board

Monday night’s U.S. raid to arrest Canadian leader Mark Carney is the culmination of President Donald Trump’s ambitious policy to bring peace, prosperity and freedom to North America.

From a purely legal perspective, the justification for capturing Carney is as sound as January’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The objective of both operations was to arrest, rather than kill, people suspected of a crime, who are now receiving due process in the U.S. court system.

The Trump administration has carefully framed the Ottawa raid as a domestic U.S. law enforcement operation rather than a military attack, unveiling a new criminal indictment of Carney after he was seized. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff emphasized that federal agents were on the ground in Ottawa as well as soldiers, and he referred to Carney and his wife as “the indicted persons.” Vice-President JD Vance posted, “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a mansion in Ottawa.” During a Tuesday arraignment in a federal court in New York, Carney and his wife pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors have indicted many foreign leaders for U.S. criminal offences, including Panama leader Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989 and Maduro in January. There is nothing novel about the arrest of Carney.

The case against Carney is strong. As Mr. Trump declared last year, the United States is experiencing a “public health crisis caused by fentanyl and illicit drugs flowing across the northern border into the United States” and Canada had failed to do anything about it. In fact, tens of thousands of Americans die each year from fentanyl-related overdoses, and Mr. Trump has said the amount of fentanyl seized at the northern border was enough to kill 9.5 million Americans.

Despite this, Carney’s government has downplayed the crisis, and his federal police force has denied there is a crisis at all. “There is limited to no evidence or data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. or Canada to support the claim that Canadian-produced fentanyl is an increasing threat to the U.S.,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokeswoman Marie-Eve Breton defiantly.

Carney’s government has proved itself either incapable or unwilling to address this crisis. Mr. Trump first attempted to force Canada to respond responsibly by imposing high tariffs on the nation, but the Carney government proved intransigent. So Carney’s arrest was needed for the protection of innocent Americans.

But as the court process plays out for Carney, let’s not lose sight of the broader geopolitical benefits of bringing Canada into the American governance system.

The United States was born of a war against European imperialism, yet despite victory in the War for Independence, European empires maintained a hold over most of North America. But with Mr. Trump’s bold capture of Nuuk in May, Greenland has been freed from Danish imperialism. Now, with the arrest of Carney, the continent can be freed of the last vestiges of British imperialism.

There is a long history of the Canadian Supreme Court, a holdover from the medieval monarchial courts of England, interfering with elections and local governments, most recently with its decision to void the results of the independence referendum in Alberta. The court ruled that the referendum was invalid because of the advertising purchased by oil companies, a clear attack on the rights to free speech that free people everywhere hold dear.

However, the referendum wasn’t really about creating an independent nation of Alberta; rather, it underscored the failure of the Canadian government, the moribund child of empire, to hold together as a cohesive polity that could serve the everyday needs of people across the vast and varied northern stretches of the continent. Despite its enormous mineral and oil wealth, Canada has failed to perform economically, and its people are the poorer for it.

And here is the opportunity. As with the once-independent countries of Texas and California before it, Canada rightly should become a state under the flag of the United States. With the help of Washington, a post-Carney Canada could finally see free and fair elections and the establishment of a secure and prosperous economy integrated with the rest of North America.

Let freedom ring.

Monday, 17 February 2025

If US invades Canada!

Don’t Test Us, Trump. It Won’t End Well for You

A war would be disastrous for both countries. Especially the US.

Aisha Ahmad 13 Feb 2025The Conversation

Aisha Ahmad is an associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto. This article was originally published by the Conversation.SHARE:

588 Comments

As President Donald Trump relentlessly threatens

to annex Canada, some Canadians are worried that

an American invasion could one day become a reality.

How would that scenario play out? Looking at the sheer size of the American military, many people might believe that Trump would enjoy an easy victory.

That analysis is wrong. If Trump ever decides to use military force to annex Canada, the result would not be determined by a conventional military confrontation between the Canadian and American armies. Rather, a military invasion of Canada would trigger a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States.

But in this nightmare scenario, could Canadians successfully resist an American invasion? Absolutely. I know this because I have studiedinsurgencies around the world for more than two decades, and I have spent time with ordinary people who have fought against powerful invading armies.

The research on guerrilla wars clearly shows that weaker parties can use unconventional methods to cripple a more powerful enemy over many years. This approach treats waging war as a secret, part-time job that an ordinary person can do.

Guerrillas use ambushes, raids and surprise attacks to slowly bleed an invading army, and local communities support these fighters by giving them safe havens and material support. These supporting citizens can also engage in forms of “everyday resistance,” using millions of passive-aggressive episodes of sabotage to frustrate and drain the enemy.

Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest without resistance. There is no political party or leader willing to relinquish Canadian sovereignty over “economic coercion,” and so if the U.S. wanted to annex Canada, it would have to invade.

That decision would set in motion an unstoppable cycle of violence.

Even if we imagine a scenario in which the Canadian government unconditionally surrenders, a fight would ensue on the streets. A teenager might throw a rock at invading soldiers. That kid would get shot, and then there would be more rocks, and more gunfire. An insurgency would be inevitable.

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The myth of Canadian ‘niceness’

This idea may shock Canadians today because they see themselves as friendly and affable people. However, Canada’s current self-image of “niceness” exists only because they’re at peace. War changes people very quickly, and Canadians are no more innately peaceful than any other human beings.

When your child is dying in your arms, you become capable of violence. Once you lose what you love, resistance becomes as natural as breathing.

Except for a few collaborators and kapos, my research suggests many Canadians would likely engage in various forms of everyday resistance against invading forces that could involve stealing, lying, cutting wires and diverting funds.

Meanwhile, the insurgents would unleash physical devastation on American targets. Even if one per cent of all resisting Canadians engaged in armed insurrection, that would constitute a 400,000-person insurgency, nearly 10 times the size of Taliban at the start of the Afghan war. If a fraction of that number engaged in violent attacks, it would set fire to the entire continent.

Canada’s geography would make this insurgency difficult to defeat. With deep forests and rugged mountains, Canada’s northern terrain could not be conquered or controlled. That means loyalists from the Canadian Armed Forces could mobilize civilian recruits into decentralized fighting units that could strike, retreat into the wilderness and blend back into the local communities that support them.

The Canada-U.S. border is also easy to cross, which would give insurgents access to American critical infrastructure. It costs tens of billions of dollars to build an energy pipeline, and only a few thousand to blow one up.

What about American airstrikes?

But wouldn’t the Americans crush the rebellion with missiles and drone strikes? They would try, but that approach to counter-insurgency won’t work.

In fact, it is a well-known booby trap of insurgent warfare. The harder more powerful nations strike, the larger and more fragmented the insurgency becomes, making it impossible to achieve either a military victory or negotiated agreement. Canada’s rugged terrain would protect insurgents from those types of attacks, while global outrage at the bombings would only boost support for the rebellion.

Americans have already been defeated by insurgents in many parts of the world because they could not escape this trap. If they dare to invade Canada, they would create this unsolvable security problem on their own soil.

Russia and China rise to power

How could Canadians pay for this decades-long insurgency? The answer lies in every single historical example of the old adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The prospect of Americans becoming trapped by an insurgency on their own continent would delight Moscow and Beijing, which could easily establish covert northern passages to send weapons to the insurgency. Financing an insurgency is an effective way to ensnare and bankrupt a rival power, as counter-insurgency operations are exponentially more expensive than the price of a few arms shipments.

A chronic violent insurrection in North America could financially and militarily pin down the U.S. for decades, ultimately triggering economic and political collapse. Russia and China, meantime, would enjoy an uncontested rise to power.

Forewarned

This scenario would guarantee the destruction of both Canada and the United States. No one in their right mind would choose this gruesome future over a peaceful and mutually beneficial alliance with a friendly neighbour.

Nevertheless, if Trump is reckless enough to think the violent annexation of Canada is an achievable goal, then let it be known that all these horrifying outcomes were predictable well in advance, and that he was forewarned.