U.S. President Donald Trump’s jest about annexing Canada in December of 2024 had the effect of galvanizing Canadian patriotism and driving an unlikely Liberal Party win over the putatively pro-Trump Conservatives in Canadian federal elections in April of 2025. Fear of appearing disunited drew sufficient Canadian voters from the separatist Bloc Québécois and the far-left New Democrats to the two mainstream parties. Canadians continue to worry about the implications if Trump’s territorial aspirations are achieved in Greenland. Canada’s Arctic Archipelago is equally sparsely populated and weakly defended, and a move to occupy Greenland might embolden the U.S. administration to seize the virtually unpopulated Queen Elizabeth Islands north of the Northwest Passage.
There is no conceivable military solution for Ottawa to deter a U.S. annexation of Canada. A nuclear weapons program aimed at Washington would be slow, quickly detected, easily intervened against, and would take decades to match the U.S. arsenal. Besides which, the last time nuclear weapons ownership was subjected to a democratic process in Canada in February 1963, it felled the minority government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Two other occasionally cited measures intended to raise costs on the U.S. are mass conscription, which, post-annexation, could be converted into insurgent resistance.
4.6 percent of Canadians of both genders fall into the 19-20 age cohort, which, if half are fit to serve, would produce half a million conscripts a year. Although that 2005 cohort is 20 percent smaller than those born in 1965 or 1985, this shortfall can easily be made up for by mandatory service for new and healthy citizen-seeking immigrants. This could be accompanied by an annual two-week refresher exercise or simulator, up to the age of sixty. This presumes a 24-month stint of service consisting of a 4-month basic training and 8-month trade qualification. Technical trades, which impart marketable skills like piloting, and service in the air force and navy, may be extended beyond a two-year term of service.
Ancillary legal protection for the employment security of conscripts, education subsidies for those completing service, and alternate forms of public service for those deemed militarily unfit would be additional considerations. There may be extensive dispensations against foreign or even extra-regional deployment and a lottery system to guard against nepotism. The private costs borne by the citizens in the form of delayed schooling, careers, and family must also be publicly recognized. Ideally, conscripted sub-units, attached to regular formations, will be gender segregated to avoid the frolicking atmosphere of a summer camp typical of cadet organizations.
There are, however, serious issues with conscription or any conventional military solution. Even if Ottawa matched the U.S. per capita defense spending ($2,329 versus Canada’s $622), which would require a fourfold increase in expenditure, the lack of an economy of scale would still leave Canada with at best only one-ninth the firepower of the invader. The U.S. 10th Mountain Division in upstate New York, not more than a two-hour drive from Ottawa from a possible crossing at Kingston, has more ready infantry battalions than the entire regular Canadian armed forces. Perhaps a large Canadian militia, numbering in the millions, would check any casual invasion plan by Washington, but this light infantry would at best contest the cities and countryside near the U.S. border, not Canada’s vast hinterland. Without mechanization and heavy investment in drone-assisted artillery and air defense, the militia would face slaughter opposite even the U.S. Army National Guard. Furthermore, military conscription, on the cusp of a revolution in military affairs when drones and military automation will significantly reduce the need for mass unskilled soldiery, is an outdated solution. These measures will not deter a U.S. administration determined to acquire Canada’s natural resources and willing to leave a rump, incontiguous, and disintegrated Canada.
Organizing an insurgency atop conscription in Canada by widely distributing firearms to patriots, hotheads, and the usual criminal element that volunteers during periods of civil strife wildly misreads the history of resistance by industrialized societies to foreign occupation. The 63-day 1944 Warsaw Uprising by small-arms-equipped yet united Polish insurgents against the German army saw an unprecedented 200,000 killed and 700,000 deported. The U.S. has sufficient experience and public support for militarized policing within its inner cities and a patriotic rationalization for foreign wars like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam to justify the application of extreme levels of violence for years in a pacification of Canada. There are other measures Washington can adopt.
First, the U.S. occupier would easily play regional divide and conquer and rely on marginalized communities to provide paramilitaries against the majority. Canada will come to resemble German-occupied Yugoslavia, with regional and ethnic resistance movements in a state of civil war against each other. Second, as evinced by CUNY Professor Peter Liberman’s study Does Conquest Pay?, modern urban populations are remarkably reluctant to rise up because, despite social media, social bonds are much shallower than between either farmers or early twentieth-century organized labor. Rural communities, typically conservative, are the least likely to rise up but most likely to do so effectively because of their superior collective action. Leaders of labor movements, of which there are diminishingly few in Canada, are the most likely to resist early but often pursue ideologies anathema to the mainstream.
In one of his case studies, Liberman demonstrated that the cost of German occupation of France was less than the benefits of resource extraction. Contrary to popular perceptions, many French were inimical to the French resistance movement. Thus, there will be no Canadian Taliban, IRA, or ETA, despite the superficial nationalism on display in hockey crowds. The complete absence of a French Canadian insurgency to oppose the October 1970 suspension of civil rights and army occupation of Quebec is an accurate predictor of Canadian resistance. Soviet occupation of much of Eastern Europe, Chinese incorporation of Hong Kong, and Spanish repudiation of Catalan independence are contemporary examples.
Most importantly for the prospects of conscription and insurgency, Canadian politicians are a specialized class engineered to win elections in the short term, not primarily to protect Canada. This is evident in the similar defense spending profiles of all of the major political parties since 1968, from the NDP on the far left to the Conservatives, and the never-ending DEI social experiments inflicted on the armed forces and intelligence agencies. If the 10th Mountain Division advanced on Ottawa from its base in upstate New York, the Canadian regiments would likely be ordered to stand down or, at most, make only a temporary display of defiance outside their base gates at Petawawa, Gagetown, and Valcartier. There would be no organization of an insurgency.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s failure to respond to Trump’s initial joke-threat was symptomatic of his poor understanding of Canadian history and his solemn duty of preserving Canada’s disparate communities united against isolation and annexation. Massive ethnic immigration into Canada from the end of the nineteenth century had not invalidated the necessary alliance between Anglophones, Francophones, and the First Nations, without which Canada would have spun apart. It is a tragedy that all three communities have since allowed primary and secondary school history classes to shift into particularist nationalism, having forgotten their common endeavor and fate. Without French Canadian militias supplementing regular British troops, Canada would have gone extinct in 1776 and 1812. This tripartite bond was key to the strategic assimilation of new Canadians.
Anglophone Canadian voices in the press frequently accuse Francophones of cultural intolerance as manifested in Bill 21 and implicitly accept a passive form of the 1839 assimilationist Durham Report that is provocative to Francophone aspirations. Yes, the government of Canada can be accused of a form of cruelty in its residential schools, though assimilation into a society of ever-improving technical skills is the main purpose of most education systems. Francophone separatism, in the form of an independent Quebec, northeastern New Brunswick and Ontario, and southwestern Manitoba, would leave Ottawa in a worse strategic dilemma than West and East Pakistan, the United Arab Republic, or East and West Malaysia. If Alberta, which is politically buoyed on an oil industry originally created with Ontario and Quebec investments, were to separate, Canada would be neatly Balkanized into four easily digestible slices (British Columbia, mid-Prairies, Ontario, and Atlantic Canada). Quebec would be far more likely to be annexed to the U.S. and assimilated, like Louisiana, once it is independent.
The moral basis for U.S. interventions, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America, is almost always made on the grounds of the superiority of U.S. governance as manifested in higher standards of living. At present, the U.S.’s per capita nominal GDP of US$66,000 is 50% higher than Canada’s US$44,000. While Canada’s post-secondary education system compares favorably with those of the U.S., Canada’s research universities and federally funded research are insufficient to mitigate a serious brain drain to the United States. Currently 70 percent of graduates from Canada’s top-ranked technology institution, the University of Waterloo, move to the U.S. for employment opportunities. A significant increase in federal funding is necessary to nurture tech research start-ups in Canada, and a dollar investment is more politically impactful than defense spending. Ideally it would supplement a two-percent floor on the defense budget. This author had the opportunity of being involved in a round table organized by Member of Parliament Frank Baylis in 2016 that addressed the lack of government assistance to Canada’s high-tech defense industry. Canada’s strongest deterrent, and surprisingly not a temptation for a U.S. invasion, is pushing past Canada’s reputation as a primary resource exporter and demonstrating high levels of technological innovation, even if continuing to suffer from lower levels of productivity.
The Trump administration’s disruptive re-tariffing policy is also an opportunity for the federal government to incentivize Canadian reindustrialization. It is also a convenient moment for Ottawa to reduce its dependence on foreign military hardware and explore Canadian alternatives to the P-8, MQ-9B, F-35, and their associated electronic systems. The lesson of the Ross Rifle is that this process will manifest plenty of politically embarrassing false starts and technical deficiencies. However, unlike the Avro Arrow program, where Canadian government officials submitted in abeyance with foreign interests to destroy design plans, there will be no regretful shame.
The lack of a widely held conviction in moral superiority was the key cause of the U.S. failure to conquer Canada during the War of 1812, not military action. The dislike in New England for the Virginia-based presidency of James Madison and his Anglophobic policies led merchants in Boston to clandestinely supply both the Royal Navy conducting the blockade off the U.S. coast and the British army deployed in Canada.
The U.S. calculus of occupying Canada today includes the costs of incorporation. Americans are wary of cultural dilution by sudden torrents of new immigration, as evinced by the deportations of ethnic Latinos starting from post-independence Texas. Canadian values may therefore emulate a cultural Trojan horse, shifting average future U.S. sentiments against precisely those constituencies most likely to support an invasion. Most Canadians believe correctly that though Canada’s income per capita is significantly lower than that of the U.S., quality of life is immeasurably higher because of socialized medicine and lower poverty and violent crime. What Americans don’t know is that the infectious Canadian emphasis on work-life balance will rob Americans first of their intense commercial entrepreneurialism, then of their technical innovativeness, and eventually of their great power status. It is not surprising that it is in Canada’s national interest for the U.S. to remain globally preeminent and to allay these outcomes.
Canada’s ability to break out of a possible future U.S. occupation depends less on whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power and more on the extent to which the U.S. successfully dismantles Ottawa’s federal bureaucracy and provincial health care systems, integrates the provinces into a system of economic prosperity, and disassembles Canada’s Francophone and indigenous separatism. If these conditions are not reversed within a generation, then Canada will have been irreversibly integrated.
