Damn straight. You could call it Red and White Dawn. 
Beeeaavverrrs!
So, how’s Thursday for you guys?
I know. 
It was a two-drinks-later post directed not at any specific poster here, but rather those Americans who don’t have much geographical knowledge of Canada.
Of course, I think SDMB members are likely to have a wider and deeper grasp of issues geopolitical than people, Canadian or American, who are watching the Jerry Springer Show right now instead of hanging around here.
HUmmm. Well, if the troops were the reserves, say in Calais, ME, unfortunately, a lot of them are related to Canadians and that would just cause confusion. When they drew the border many years back, a lot of families got divided so people here just go back and forth to visit family all the time. And they intermarry all the time. And our newspaper has local news for Grand Manan, etc. So at OUR border, there is no border, except for those men in uniform that always want to stop you and ask stupid questions about if you are carrying chicken or lemons.
AND, I shop at the big Supermart in St. Stephen so if that had to end it would really, really, make me mad. So, don’t even think about it. :mad:
HUmmm. Well, if the troops were the reserves, say in Calais, ME, unfortunately, a lot of them are related to Canadians and that would just cause confusion. When they drew the border many years back, a lot of families got divided so people here go back and forth to visit family all the time. And Canadians and Americans intermarry all the time. And our newspaper has local news for Grand Manan, etc. So at OUR border, there is no border, except for those men in uniform that always want to stop you and ask stupid questions about if you are carrying chicken or lemons.
AND, I shop at the big Supermart in St. Stephen so if that had to end it would really, really, make me mad. So, don’t even think about it. :mad:
You might consider that when the secret police kill people, the bodies don’t generally wind up in the morgue. Instead, they wind up in MASS GRAVES:
This is separate from the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in Saddam’s regime in wars against Iran and Kuwait, by his brutal put-down of insurrections by Shiites after the first Gulf War, and by his attempt at genocide of the Kurds. And in those cases, the body count would have been much higher had the U.S. and Britain not created the northern and southern no-fly zones to protect those populations.
That’s 290,000 people, or maybe as many as 400,000 in the last 20 years who simply… vanished. One day you overhear a friend telling people that he hates Saddam. The next day, your friend is gone. And so is his family. No one talks about it, but everyone knows what happened. They’re never seen again. That’s 15,000 to 20,000 people a YEAR.
So let’s keep that in mind when we talk about the cost of the war. It might also explain why more than 70% of Iraqis are optimistic about the future, despite all the violence going on.
Vive le Québec! Vive le Canada… libre!
I’m actually kind of surprised by how strong an emotional reaction this thread engenders in me. I have in my mind a picture of the boreal forest and of American agent orange poisoning its thin soils, of tanks in faraway but familial cities like Calgary and Toronto, and bullets flying through walls and flesh of innocents and their homes.
And my reaction is: No American tank will ever be made from the Sudbury ore body, if I have any say in it. The people of Northeastern Ontario are one with all Canadians, and the forests and the lakes are ours to protect. My mother is british-anglo, my father quebecois, my friends are from every region of the Canada, their families from every region of the earth. A nation which raises arms against us demands that we drive them back to their side of the Great Lakes so we can go back to building a better world.
Which is a lot stronger reaction than I expected. :eek:
But I’m a flying instructor: I can fly a plane and teach others to do so. I can paddle a canoe. I was a Cadet and a child of the forested lands: I can live off the land a bit if I need to; find food, build shelter, flee and hide when needed. I can use a rifle, I can throw a rock. I can blow up trains; if the Dutch did it to the Nazis, I can do it to the US invaders. Can I kill a man? I don’t want to have to… but I think I could.
The people of my homeland have spent a generation healing the lands and lakes from the devastation of the twentieth century, have spent five generations building a just society. No invader will destroy either if I have any say in it. I have snowshoes, skis, arms and a brain, and I will use them to defend both.
All that said, do I expect an invasion tomorrow? No, flatly no. In the next town over, Americans serve side by side in the NORAD HQ at CFB North Bay. Battle between the two countries is not likely now. But I’ll admit, a lot of my friends, and me, too, are starting to have a long term, low-level, lack of trust of the US. We have the horrible fantasies of fifty years from now when the US is starving for oil and water and other resources, and they look greedily northwards. It may sound preposterous, it may not even be reasonable, but deep in the back of our minds, we’re starting to wonder. Young people that I know don’t immediately take for granted anymore that the Americans are the good guys, and the idea of a US attack has, for some people around me, gone from ‘laughably unimaginable’ to just ‘far-off and unlikely’.
Let’s hope it never happens.
I’m Canadian - I just happen to have infiltrated ranks here and have married One Of Them. The “of the North” bit refers to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where I lived when I signed up.
My name is Corrine, and I am also Canadian.
On reading a bit further, I see that RickJay has come in to tell you so.
That was you?
MAY sound preposterous? Howabout IS utterly preposterous. Why would the US spend hundreds of billions of dollars to invade Canada when we could just BUY what we need from Canada for a tiny fraction of the price?
An invasion and occupation of Canada would require an army of tens of millions. We don’t have it. It would take years to put one together, during which time Canada would have plenty of opportunities to:
a) Shore up her defenses
b) Form alliances with various other countries (including China, which buys a huge amount of mineral resources from Canada) to prevent the USA from attempting an invasion
c) Build her own atomic weapons. There’s no doubt that Canada has the brainpower and the resources to build nukes. She hasn’t bothered because it never seemed useful or necessary. But if it were clear that the insane, theocratic, evil Yanks of your paranoid fantasies were planning a massive invasion, Canada could and would build or buy a nuclear arsenal in a hurry.
Get this straight: NOBODY in America has the slightest desire to conquer Canada. We couldn’t do it any time soon if we wanted to. It would be EXTREMELY costly in every sense to attempt it. The rewards couldn’t possibly justify the price.
So for God’s sake, Canadian lefties, relax! Get some rest. You’re safe, honest!
Hmm… of course, if I WERE an evil Yankee theocrat planning an invasion, that’s just what I’d WANT the naive Canadians to think…
/evil Yank mode
Muahahahahaha!
/end evil Yank mode
-XT
Geez, I’m not a lefty.
Read the thread. Nobody’s afraid it’s going to happen, it’s just a thought exercise as to how such a conflict would play out.
I didn’t say you were, or even that the OP was. I understand that this started out as one of a hundred “what if” posts played strictly for grins.
Wolfstu, on the other hand, clearly IS a Canadian lefty who fears this is a real possibility (re-read his post, and tell me he isn’t).
Well, I certainly wouldn’t call myself a lefty. And do I fear a US invasion?
Decades from now, when things have changed greatly, will it happen? I said:
All I’m saying is that in the back of my mind, once in a while I wonder what the world will be like in several decades, should there be major changes in the situation. I even made it clear that I don’t think such a thing is even reasonable; that it’s probably preposterous to imagine it happening, even with major swings in attitude and environment.
But I brought it up to address the widely accepted “Americans and Canadians are best buddies” thing that was mentioned upthread someplace. As children, my friends and I grew up in a world where “America == good” and “USSR == Bad”. But now we live in a time where it’s not an extremist position to think that the US unjustifiably invades countries when it wants something. And where the US opposes Canada, lately, on trade (lumber, beef, etc), sovereignty (the NorthWest Passage), and other issues when it suits the US. Everyone recognizes that these are not issues over which war happens. But to some, it means we don’t automatically get to be in the Americans’ good graces. And if you take “America is willing to invade countries when it suits it” and “America doesn’t have automatic deference to Canada” and extrapolate them several decades in a worst-case construction, I think it’s at least marginally reasonable to imagine that the probability of conflict between the two countries goes from “zero” to “extremely remote”. Or as I said the first time: from ‘laughably unimaginable’ to ‘far-off and unlikely’. I don’t think I can qualify this any more strongly, except to say that this isn’t even s description of a prediction, but an explanation that there’s some distrust of the US in the air.
I’m not saying it will happen. I’m not saying I expect it to happen. I’m saying that, in my experience, there are at least some Canadians who no longer completely trust or love the US reflexively, in a way that is minor, but worth noting. And that I can imagine an exotic scenario in a dystopian world where things could go horribly wrong.
As has been pretty solidly explained in this thread, there are plenty of reasons for even a fascist, war-mongering, dystopian-future-novel US with a Robot Nazi President not to invade Canada. It’s be horribly difficult and almost surely less profitable than just working out trade deals, and result in no shortage of retaliation from Great White Guerillas. 
So! Who’s going to join my resistance cell in the extremely improbable and completely fictitious US invasion of Canada?
Allow me to quote elder statesman Red Green:
“This is Canada. We’re pretty much left of everything.”
The concept of the US invading Canada just fails to register as a possibility to me even if it is just a thought experiment. I guess I’d have to say that, if the US troops were given the order to attack Canada, what you might see if the Mother of All Desertions as the US troops said, “What? You’re kidding! Fuck you, I quit.”
A more likely scenario would be Canada invading the US. The Loon That Roared, so to speak.
I don’t expect that Canadians would take up arms against an American invading force. We really don’t have anything significant to fight for other than a separate identity and a superior health care system that isn’t really all that critical to our young people who would be the ones to risk their lives.
We would still have access to American movies, music, the internet and the SDMB. It just wouldn’t be that difficult to live like Americans.
It’s probably to the right of most of Europe. I thinks Canucks just say that because they’re comparing themselves to the Yanks, who are pretty much right of everything.
We surrender! We’ll accept ice hockey as our national sport. We’ll use weird-looking multicolored money with the Queen’s picture on it. We’ll play football by Canadian rules and put maple syrup on baked beans. We’ll even call our sofas “chamberlains.” If only we can get in on your national single-payer health-care system, we surrender!