Donald Trump
By Scott Taylor
It has been just over one year since Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the President of the US for his second term.
In that short interim we have gone from tolerating light hearted jests about Trump annexing Canada into becoming the 51st state through economic pressure, to entering a very real trade war replete with damaging tariffs.
The main sources of Trump's displeasure with Canada was a so-called porous border that was allowing a deadly flow of fentanyl into the US, and Canada's long underfunding of our military.
While rallying patriotism with the slogan "Elbow's up,' Prime Minister Mark Carney was quietly bending the knee to appease the US President. Despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of illegal fentanyl enters the US across the Canadian border, Carney went through the elaborate charade of leasing a couple of Blackhawk helicopters emblazoned with the RCMP logo.
Based near Ottawa at Carp, Ontario the limited range of these tactical utility helicopters means that they can only monitor a very short stretch of the Canada - US border. To date I have not seen a single report of these helicopters being involved in any drug bust.
In terms of boosting defence spending on an urgent basis, Carney pulled out a few clever moves. First he rolled the Canadian Coast Guard into the Department of National Defence adding a fourth branch to the Canadian Armed Forces, thereby adding nearly $3 billion to the defence budget.
Then there was the sizeable boost in pay for all CAF personnel. Depending on the rank level service members saw their pay increase by between 8 -20% with the lower ranks receiving the higher percentage. Additionally some trained specialized tradespersons were offered signing bonuses to enlist and retention bonuses are used selectively to decrease the number of veterans taking their release.
So, a big boost was given to Canada's defence budget without adding actual combat capability or modernizing existing aged weapon platforms.
However, despite his promise to the contrary, Carney's Liberals will not meet the NATO spending goal of 2% of Gross Domestic Product on defence by the end of this current fiscal year, which falls on March 31, 2026. Promises made, promises broken.
Now it would seem that Canada is back on Trump's radar for all the same reasons that he claims the US needs to possess Greenland. Last Wednesday at the World Economic Former in Davos, Switzerland Trump singled out Canada for being reliant upon the US for protection.
In discussing his proposed 'Golden Dome' missile defence system Trump noted that Greenland's territory is necessary for the success of such a system.
He also noted that the 'Golden Dome' would by virtue of geography also protect Canadian airspace.
This in turn led Trump to call out Canada as being 'ungrateful' for this future protection. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us. By the way, they should be grateful but they're not," Trump said. "I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn't so grateful — they should be grateful to the U.S., Canada. Canada lives because of the United States, Remember that, Mark [Carney], the next time you make your statements," Trump told the assembled world leaders.
So with Canada still very much in Trump's sights, it seems that our senior military leaders are finally considering a scenario wherein the US deploys military force across our border. A recent Globe & Mail article headlined 'Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion" was not very re-assuring. It turns out the best case scenario according to our strategic brain trust, would be to disperse our regular and reserve forces to fight a Taliban style insurgency.
Looking at this from the flip side, any US military planner would have a tough time coming up with a sophisticated invasion plan. In a normal near-peer conflict one of the first objectives would be to neutralize the enemy's air defence capability. Canada does not possess any.
The handful of airworthy CF-18 Hornets at CFB Bagotville and CFB Cold Lake would be of little use in an environment where, thanks to our joint NORAD alliance, our US counterparts know their exact whereabouts and readiness.
Our Royal Canadian Navy cannot put 50% of their warships out to sea on any given day and most of their sophisticated combat systems are made in the US. No doubt those systems come complete with 'kill switch' technology to keep them from ever being used against the US Navy.
So if indeed it is to be an insurgency defence of Canada, I daresay Canadians should be better at it than the Taliban, the Iraqis and the Vietnamese. That's right, for the record, America is 0 for 3 in their attempted hostile occupations of foreign soil.
What is truly insane is that Canadian military officers are even having to war game such a heretofore unfathomable scenario of a looming US invasion.
