The Defence of Canada

Means to Match Ends

(The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Québec, December 31, 1775, a 1786 painting by American artist John Trumbull)

The idea of invading Canada has never been far below the surface of the American psyche. The Continental Congress, formed at Philadelphia in September 1774, authorized its first invasion on June 27, 1775 – a year before independence.

From the War of 1812 to War Plan Red in the 1930s, by way of rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, the Fenian raids, even McKinley’s tariffs, Washington power-brokers always saw a path to Canada joining the stars and stripes.

For the past century such plans remained on the shelf. Even when the US got down to to the dirty business of organizing nineteenth-century incursions through disgruntled Canadians or Irish, American reach exceeded grasp.

They failed to reckon with Canadian loyalty, resourcefulness, patriotism & tenacity. As former prime minister Jean Chrétien said last month: “In 1776, Benjamin Franklin spent a year in Montréal trying to convince the people to join the American Revolution, and he was told by the francophones, ‘Non, merci.’”

Franklin was in Montréal from March to May, 1776 – half a year after the initial push. By late July, all invading American forces had withdrawn. Chrétien joked about burning the White House – which of course did happen, 38 years later.

The recurring American urge to dominate its northern neighbour is also an echo of the pattern of Anglo-French raids and wars – la petite guerre, in Ancien régime argot – that brought Canada and America to blows for a century before 1763.

Trump is summoning this atavism. Thankfully, most Americans know it’s wrong; as diplomat-scholar Eliot Cohen puts it: “we have tried this before, with dismal results.”

In other quarters, jingoism still punches through. Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ in-house conservative, claimed unblinkingly in January “Canada might be better off joined to our continental Republic, with the wintry 1775 defeat of Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold finally reversed.”

So Canada needs to be on guard, ready for anything, especially when today’s White House crew sets its agenda, almost like clockwork, on cue from a Kremlin delighted to see NATO allies at daggers-almost-drawn.

What will it take to defend Canada? More than ‘elbows up,’ I’m afraid.

Here is a World Bank graph of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data showing our military spending as a percentage of GDP since 1960:

It’s as if, after scrapping the Avro Arrow in 1959, we could no longer be bothered. Kennedy had stared Khrushchev down over Cuba, so the risk of a big land war was gone — or so generations of Canadian leaders believed.