I don’t hate Alberta. I quite like it, actually. I am frustrated by some Albertans who exhibit such hostility to the rest of us because we don’t worship the oil patch with the same fervor they do.
But in the scenario where invasion is a realistic threat, who knows what the rest of the US forces would be doing? Would they even have those overseas bases? If so, wouldn’t they be even more imperialistic, instead of being mostly peacekeeping missions? How much more would the US have spent on their military in such a world?
The point is, if they wanted to, they could swamp any investment we could ever make. All we’d do is provide a few more speed bumps for them to flatten out.
So the point remains: what would you have done differently, that you would have actually (at the time) wanted to do, and been allowed to do, politically?
I fully agree. There is a fundamental issue, from before my time (I joined the CAF in '79, though I was in the militia for a year in '77) that I don’t have an answer to. It is, IMO, a weird chicken-and-egg situation in which somehow the government and the citizenry convinced each other that national defence was not just unimportant, but bad. This is part of the frustrating peacekeeping mythology that I served through. (I was serving in NDHQ in Ottawa in the late '90s when the story of the Battle of Medak Pocket surfaced in The Ottawa Citizen. It had been so successfully buried (because having Canadian peacekeepers involved in a 20 hour firefight in the former Yugoslavia would look bad) that none of us, a large office of army, naval, and air force officers and senior NCMs, had never heard of this.)
This is tied up with my above paragraph, insofar as Canadians generally don’t care about national defence and aren’t prepared to prioritize the operational capability aspect of it. Instead, other priorities such as regional development, national unity (eg Quebec and ROC) are more important, regardless of the cost.
So we have, more than once, squandered money stupidly in badly managed acquisition programs. So, it’s not a function of defence spending that we could have done so much as defence spending that is efficient and directed to an operational capability. The VICTORIA class submarine program, and the EH-101 contract and subsequent cancellation, are good examples.
Additional examples of us not taking this seriously, sending troops - in woodland camouflage - to combat operations in a desert environment, using the defence budget as a bank account for deficit reduction in the '90s (combined with non-surgical personnel reductions that left the whole military human resource structure significantly damaged for a subsequent decade or two (I was professionally involved with this btw) which significantly reduced corporate knowledge as well as a messed up junior to senior rank ratio structure). In the late 2010s/early 2020s the then commander of the RCN, Mark Norman, took steps to address a significant operational requirement for at-sea replenishment capabilities. Various accusations landed him in court (he was vindicated) due to false accusations of unethical behaviour on his part.
Obviously, we’ll never be able to defend ourselves without an alliance structure. However, we should be able to at least be credible and, in defence circles, we aren’t.
This.
Note that any “too difficult to be worth it” strategy depends on the Americans having rational leadership. An irrational leader doesn’t do cost-benefit analysis, or if they do, view costs and benefits differently from normal people, or convince themselves that the facts on the ground support the course of action they prefer even when the truth is obviously otherwise.
Yes to all that, but even if we’d been serious about our spending at that time, it would have been directed to supporting missions over seas as a NATO member, or as UN peacekeepers. It would not have been positioned in a way to effectively repulse a US invasion.
You may have problems getting the Pusateri’s sauce. They declared bankruptcy for all the locations including the central commissary except the Avenue and Lawrence flagship store. Unless they are using a co-packer or licensing it, expect it to disappear.
During Trump’s term, mostly, yes. They’re not melting down their aircraft carriers, either.
I already said that to this point there’s nothing the taxpayer would have accepted. First sentence of my past paragraph.
NOW we should be increasing our infantry, training them more in insurgency tactics, and creating the organization and doctrine needed for that. Ottawa and the nearest major bases should be made much harder targets. At the very least we have to be able to hold out long enough for insurgency supplies to be distributed and hidden and for a government in absentia to get out of the country.
It’s irrational to invade Canada at all, but here we are. The idea is to keep hurting them in the hopes of the irrational leader being replaced (and frankly, targeted assassination must be on the table.) If it takes twenty years, so be it. And honor demands it.
The USA is a soft target for insurgency. It’s too big, too open, too hard to internally secure to effectively fight an insurgency.
Honestly, I think we should be doing that now. By the time they invade, it would probably be too late
Who was it here that suggested increasing the PAL training? Do that, coupled with subsidies to buy guns for those who pass. Long guns really aren’t a problem with respect to crime, so get a lot out there.
More advice on buying Canadian.
(Limited gift link.)
But the first would have been a display of seriousness that would have demonstrated some credibility. And another area which we have seriously neglected is our Arctic. No offense to our Canadian Rangers, but I just don’t think that that’s good enough. We have no real military presence up there at all appropriate to the length of coastline.
We have been working on Nanisivik Naval Facility but, like everything else defence-related, especially with ever-warming climate in the Arctic and increasing belligerence in the world, it has not been prioritized. And, in the '80s there was some excitement with the possible acquisition of serious ice-breaking capability for our coast guard (Polar 8), which was cancelled in 1990.
Our defence and sovereignty efforts are haphazard and unfocused and this is reflected in our warship acquisition processes. We typically get a new class of ship that is top of the line for its size and the time, and then we coast for 20 or 30 years, at which point that class has reached obsolescence and our national shipbuilding capability has aged out. So we scramble, have to go through the national navel-gazing process of distributing cash regionally while hoping that a/some shipyard(s) catch up with the rest of the world. We do this rather than incrementally implementing technical advances which would allow us to keep up in a more efficient fashion.
We would be well served to use countries such as Australia as an example. In our case, we don’t need to be some semi-superpower wannabe, but we could, at least, look like we give a shit about our own defence.
A nuclear program. If Canada had built nuclear weapons back when the US was under rational leadership and there was no chance of a pre-emptive conquest to stop it, then this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
But again, who would have succeeded at that? If the Conservative parties had proposed it, they’d have been called paranoid warmongers. If the Liberal party had proposed it, it would have been called yet another boondoggle intended to waste taxpayers’ money.
In retrospect, we should have done this, but realistically, it never would have happened.
As an American my understanding of Canadian politics is exceedingly limited. But watching how the Democrats here in the US have been committing slow suicide in the name of “the norms”, “bipartisanship” and “civility” I’ve no problem in believing Canadian politicians would walk to their own nation’s destruction like that.
I believe the answer is conscription. This sends a stronger we-will-fight message than nuclear weapons, where the question always is whether you would dare use them…
If, at the end of the current 30 day pause, Trump institutes tariffs, again saying you need to accept annexation, a short period of military training for most 19 year olds, with obligation to be called up for duty in event of war, would IMHO be the best response. Conscription might even intimidate him. At least a few countries Trump respects better than Canada have it.
Politically impossible? Almost certainly. Peacetime conscription goes against Canadian tradition. But if Canadian, I’d send both Poilievre and Trudeau a letter advocating it.
No one worships oil. The sooner we find an alternative the better. I work in that area now. BUT, what benefit to Canada is it to leave 100’s of billions of dollars in the ground when no one on the planet is doing similar? The blind stupidity of doing so is baffling. Nothing Canada will do to prevent pollution by implementing carbon taxes or blocking pipelines will result in any meaningful difference. It actually makes things worse. The only way to make a difference is through new technology used to displace the existing technology and having the funds to implement them.
Government can’t do it because no matter what they do, they turn a $7B pipeline into a $34B pipeline. A pipeline that was built along existing right-of-ways and should of been a rubber stamp. Consultation should have been a couple of million informing people of potential construction delays on road crossings or bypass points around communities.
Learn from Ukraine and start a national drone building and stockpiling program. IMO, this would be key to an effective insurgency.
Historically, we have very good relations with Ukraine (we have the 2nd largest population of ex-pat and ethnic Ukrainians, outside of Russia, which is number 1 in that category.)
So in theory we could work with them and learn from their expertise, but they’ve got to be very careful not to damage their tenuous relationship with the US.
Yep, a lot in Sask, like my relatives- from Carpathia, which is part of Ukraine.
I know about the bankruptcy but the flagship store on Avenue Road is the one I always go to, though I’m not there very often since having moved away from the area. It never occurred to me that it might impact their marvelous pasta sauce.
If your supposition is correct, it would affect not only the store-made sauces but all the other freshly prepared foods, too. That’s one of the major attractions of Pusateri’s, and if they no longer have that it will become a different and much lesser store. Still, they’re notable for the high quality of their deli items, meat counter, fish counter, and produce. But the quality and variety of their prepared meals was awesome.
Incidentally, one of the surprising ingredients in their semplice marinara sauce is carrots. It turns out that the purpose of carrots is to absorb some of the acidity from the tomato sauce without having to add sugar. It’s probably one of the reasons the semplice is so alluringly mellow.