Or maybe, there’s a growing problem.
Er, I think you may be looking at the wrong government agency. The NSIRA is an internal watchdog agency that just examines the agencies that actually carry out intelligence to make sure they aren’t doing anything illegal/unethical or blowing money. It doesn’t actually carry out intelligence activities. It’s not really relevant to this discussion. There is no way in hell this agency is off in spending by an order of magnitude, they don’t have that much to do.
Intelligence in Canada is carried out by CSIS, which has an annual budget of $700 million; the armed forces itself, for which is intelligence budget is impossible to obtain as it’s buried in the national defence budget but is certainly a big chunk of cash; and on crime, the RCMP, which again is buried in their annual budget but is millions more.
Dammit. What I was looking for was something like Canada’s analogue to the the Brookings Institution, or rather Brooking’s national security wing. Or RAND. Or the Carnegie Endowment. Or the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The US has a vibrant national security community. If Canada is to overhaul its national security posture, it needs to be prodded by forces outside the government, which like all institutions struggle with internal reform and reorientation.
Is this a topic that Trump has broached?
To my knowledge, he wanted to deal with Canadian fentanyl smuggling.
Just because Canada has issues, let’s not help Trump by making him the driving force behind correcting them if you’re the one making the suggestion, not him.
But likewise, let’s call out the media for only bringing up fentanyl, if Trump was talking about a larger basket of issues.
If bein prodded by the danger of Donald Trump doesn’t move them, nothing will. We have an existential threat next door and they sure don’t look like they’re taking national security measures to deal with it, so I hope they’re keeping it VERY hush hush.
Oh sure it is. He only recently came up with the fentanyl thing, it not being much of a problem. Prior to that he said tariffs were because the USA was “subsidizing” Canada, but that message wasn’t as effective as he hoped, so they switched it up. Sometimes it’s that Canada is “very unfair.” But defence spending/NATO obligations has been an American frustration for awhile.
The thing is that logically now while Canada should definitely spend more on defense, we should probably be spending DIFFERENTLY than planned. Canada already planned some $150 billion, starting basically right now, for two major projects; the CF-35 project meant to replace the CF-18 fleet, which is $70 billion if we’re lucky, and the River-class (which will end up being called Fraser-class in time) missile destroyer project, which conservatively will run $80 billion to built out.
Those projects made sense a year ago. Canada’s role in NATO, as it has always been in the Western alliance, is disproportionately the exercise of contributing to Allied naval and air supremacy, because of our geographic location and the extreme likelihood any war we’d be in would be overseas, or ON the seas. Makes perfect sense. Even with a fairly large army in WWII were were much heavier as a percentage of our armed forces in our air force and navy than our allies. And in that view, the F-35 and River-class are awesome, modern weapon platforms.
But now we have to honestly ask ourselves what we’d do if the Americans invaded us, which is now a real threat - unlikely, but possible. In such a scenario, we have nothing to defend ourselves with. Nothing. Our navy would not really factor in at all except for a brief and hopeless defense of Halifax and Esquimalt which really wouldn’t be worth sacrificing those assets as opposed to having them flee to a friendly country, and our air force isn’t deployed correctly and wouldn’t last two days anyway, their bases would be blown off the map. Our army is not in any way deployed for the physical defense of this country. We have no local air defense weapons of any kind deployed in Canada, don’t have units deployed specifically to defend any particular city or place of value, and our soldiers don’t even drill much for such a thing. Our army is horrifically underequipped and the larger combat formations are basically wherever there was a base with the room for them, not necessary where it makes any sense for them to defend from an American attack.
So now, maybe we should be pouring money into making Ottawa, at least, and our major army and naval bases WAY harder targets, and preparing for a long term resistance war. This is of little value to NATO, but it’s spending. Though I don’t think that’s what the Americans wanted.
Oh, I don’t know. If Canada starts making noise that it’s arming itself against American aggression (to whatever minor extent), this will be spun by the Trump bullshit machine as Canada being an untrustworthy hostile neighbor, thus fueling further belligerence. Which is not to say Canada shouldn’t prepare— rather that Trump would welcome a marketable escalation in war talk.
All of which is now rather far afield from the original thread, but still.
That’s my concern. The Americans will cheerfully jump on any “provocation.” You’re already seeing whispers of “hey of course we’d never attack… as long as they don’t PROVOKE us” on social media accounts. That’s deliberate. “Provoke” is a more vague term than “attack.”
It’s why the idea of building nukes is just not possible anymore. Could Canada do that, sure. But it cannot be hidden; it’s a huge industrial effort and in a free country, no matter how secretive you tried to be, every major power on the planet would know a month in to the effort, tops. The USA would absolutely go to war then.
I think Canada having nuclear weapons would be a pointless waste of money and contrary to our basic peaceful ideology. A stronger military is justifiable in various defensive scenarios, but nuclear weapons present a doomsday scenario that one hopes would be a deterrent but may not be. I do, however, wonder whether it’s true that such a development could not be hidden. It might be a case of “hiding it right in the open” since Canada has a viable nuclear industry that produced the advanced CANDU technology. The scale of activity at CNL couldn’t be hidden but its purpose might be.
Also, Canada is not Cuba. The Americans were freaking out in 1962 because Cuba at the time was a Russian-controlled puppet state. The Cuban Missile Crisis was over having Russian nuclear missiles right off the US continental mainland, at a time when Russia was a clear nuclear threat.
If I’m not mistaken, the CANDU design is purposefully such that it doesn’t produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about that.
We produce large quantities of yellowcake, but turning that into U238 requires lots of specialized centrifuges whose procurement wouldn’t go unnoticed. If we really wanted a bomb, we could have one in very short order by making a bunch of centrifuges, but everyone would know about it.
Realistically if we wanted a quiet nuclear weapons program we’d need to build some new reactors (cuz climate change!) with undocumented capabilities to produce weapons-grade material, although that would still leave the issue of keeping the in-the-know people from spilling the beans.
There’s also the minor issue of delivering the warhead, assuming the plan isn’t to smuggle it across the border and drive it to Mar-a-Lago in a truck. We do have some rocketry expertise, but reliable missiles that can evade air defenses is not a trivial ask.
All in all, probably not a worthwhile avenue to pursue even if we think the US is definitely likely to invade. Better to recruit additional light infantry and train them in counter-insurgency tactics (because that involves training them in insurgency tactics).
I don’t know why Trump would want to suggest that Canada come to grips with the reality that the US is no longer a reliable democratic partner. Canada’s reorientation wouldn’t occur to mollify the US, though if they are wise Canada will publicly emphasize their long run friendship with the US, while making contingency plans. No conflict there.
Trump can only adjust tariffs unilaterally for national security issues: that’s what the fentanyl accusation is about. It shouldn’t hold up in court; whether it will is another matter. Kevin Drum:
I think it was John Roberts who wrote that courts are required to take government justifications seriously, but they aren’t required to pretend to be idiots. This seems like a case that could fit his dictum.
The ship of state doesn’t turn on a dime. As a rule, governments drag their feet when faced with existential threats that are not immediate: action on asteroids and climate has been slow. This is especially the case when the times call for creative thinking. That’s why I emphasized that Canada has to deepen their national security NGO bench. (As does, oh, New Zealand).
The plan I outlined above (greater emphasis on drone warfare and asymmetric warfare) has the advantage of ostensibly being the in US national interest (we’re friends after all and this is of course all about assisting Scandinavians and Swiss in case of Russian invasion) while simultaneously making Canada a much more bitter pill to swallow imperialistically. It also takes into account the imbalance in population and economic capacity.
Honestly, Canada is uniquely well positioned to figure this puzzle out. How do you grapple with the reality that great powers are reliable and predictable most of the time, but not all of the time? And that the political forces inside the great power that talk loudest about international credibility in fact care least about it? This is a struggle that calls for analytic sharpshooters, not aerial bombardment. We need a worldwide rethink, and Canada is part of the front line.
I think Canada has gained a degree of protection from Trump’s brazen frankness. No one would accept some flimsy pretext at this time. However, how much protection the concern of the international community offers is an open question.
The conflict in Ukraine has made a strong argument for the current use of drones. Although it still needs heavy equipment, presumably Canada is more interested in defence than offense. The US is allegedly well behind on this development. Lot of good Economist articles about it; don’t want to hijack this thread.
The more I read about Sheinbaum the more I like her.
There is no chance the courts would overturn Trump’s tariff orders. Zero. The Supreme Court will never, ever do that.
The US is being taken over by fascists. Canada needs to get ready, and of course preparation for asymmetric warfare and infiltration into the USA must be part of that.
It cannot. Absolutely no chance whatsoever. Putting together a nuclear weapon in a closed society on the other side of the world wouldn’t be easy to hide. In an open society right next door to a power that IS spying on us and will only spy more, it’s a crazy idea. I mean, we’d have to start lying to the IAEA, or prohibiting them from coming in (the IAEA monitors ALL spent fuel, from which we’d have to get the plutonium) which right there pretty much makes us a rogue state. The steps involved are very different from any current activity we take.
The Eleventh Province
I disagree. Say you’re correct though. Sue anyway. Anything that slows things down or gums up the works is good. Trump has backed down multiple times and we’re only in the 3rd week.
Well, Canada has a jump on step 1: the US is by far the most overwhelmingly Canada-infiltrated country on earth. Hell, I’d look favorably upon merger with the Canadian constitution. We’re clearly having a bender in Southern Canada: time to hand over the keys.
For a lawsuit about tariffs to “gum up the works”, it would have to go before a judge that is willing to stick their neck out enough to sign a restraining order on the entire Federal customs service. Unless a suit has that effect, it is eminently ignorable. And if some district judge somewhere were to stick their neck out and do that, an appeal of that restraining order would get filed tout suite in the circuit court. Rinse and repeat to SCOTUS. You’ll get maybe a few days, probably less than a week.
No way. Our Constitution is based on rep by pop. You’d overwhelm us in any election, and then change our country.
Solve your problems in your own country, using your own political tools.
Or, Prime Minister Macdonald said to a cabinet minister who wanted Macdonald to take over an unpopular issue: “Skin your own skunks, Charlie.”
Maybe, maybe not. Do it anyway.
I never said not to do it. Of course you try every avenue you can, resources being sufficient.
But don’t expect that the “works” will be “gum[med] up” for very long.
The only way I see for Canada to obtain nuclear warheads is to steal them.
Or to buy them from a very corrupt nuclear power.
Well there a source with plenty not that far away.
And if a cute, defenseless & forlorn Canadian asked really politely, surely Uncle Sam could spare a couple?
We have 4 nuclear armed subs that are currently home based in Scotland and the Scots do moan about that from time to time. Maybe the King could transfer a couple to Canada as part of some new mutual defence treaty.