The comments were extraordinary, but didn't cause much more than a ripple
The green shoots of rational thought may finally be surging out of the ground in the current imbroglio between Canada and the United States. In his recent interview with the New York Times, Prime Minister Carney made a good many appropriate conciliatory noises, without backing down an inch on the legitimate points of Canadian sovereignty that he has been making.
It
was perhaps foreordained that before this exchange reverted to reasonable
civility between apparently responsible people, it was necessary that reference
be made to the possibility of armed conflict between Canada and the United
States.
I’ve described this elsewhere as equivalent in likelihood to
an invasion of Martians or of angry elves commanded by Santa Claus. In the
early 1920s Canadian Lt.-Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown, in charge of
strategic planning, conceived of a conflict with United States in which Canada
would take the initiative by storming across the border, seizing cities east
and west. He was regarded at the time as possibly deranged and transferred to
other tasks, but was revived decades later by militant anti-Americans in Canada
as a clairvoyant folk hero.
Of course, there have been moments in the distant past when armed conflict on the Canada-U.S. border was a legitimate consideration. The admirers of the founders of the U.S. Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, commended themselves for doubling its size of America by the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, while shrinking the defense budget.
They
failed to notice that in disbanding the army of 20,000 trained soldiers that
the first president, General George Washington, and his chosen successor John
Adams had maintained, they lost all deterrence against abusive conduct by the
Royal Navy. The British imposed a naval blockade on the United States and
overwhelmed the commerce of New England with smuggling from Canada, and
Jefferson invoked the insurrection act in border areas.
President Madison, principal author of the Constitution of the United States and one of the greatest lawgivers in history, rising above Hammurabi, Justinian, and Napoleon, plunged into the war of 1812 unaware that he had no forces whatever to expel the British from Canada. He was also unable to overcome the loyalty of the French Canadians to the British crown, which they had promised in exchange for the freedom of religion, language, and the Civil Code that had been assured to them in the Quebec Act of 1774.
Many years
later, in the last months of his life in 1826, Jefferson described the conquest
of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” Only if you had the troops to march.
When Canada became an independent country, July 1, 1867, the minister of defense and the militia, Sir George-Etienne Cartier, in preparation for anticipated cross-border attacks by the American Fenians, recent immigrants from Ireland, fugitives of the famine full of hate for the oppressions of the English in their home country, managed the astounding feat, which would not be easily duplicated today, of raising an armed and trained militia of nearly 40,000 Canadians near border crossing points with the United States from New Brunswick to Southwestern Ontario.
This deterred the Fenians, and at the
Washington conference of 1871, our first and shamefully desecrated prime
minister, John A. Macdonald, joined and was a key player with the British
Empire delegation in working out a comprehensive settlement of all American
grievances with Britain and gaining the clear recognition of both great powers
of Canada’s independence.
The principal British motivation for acceding to the requests of Macdonald and Cartier and the Liberal leader, the publisher of the precursor to the Toronto Globe and Mail, George Brown, and others, for an independent Confederation consisting of all the settlements strung along the American border, was that after the terrible American Civil War, Canada was vulnerable to the victorious Union army.
Slavery had been abolished in the U.S. at the cost of 750,000 American lives in a population of 31,000,000; five states had been smashed to rubble and scorched to ashes by the Grand Army of the Republic commanded by Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.
With all due respect to the Prussians, these were the greatest army and generals in the world. The deterrent power of the Royal Navy, the war-weariness of the enervated but triumphant American Union, and the statesmanship of the chief founder of our country prevented an American assault on Canada to avenge itself against Britain.
Apart from the eccentric James H. Brown, no one of any
official seniority at all has raised the prospect of war on our border since,
until Mark Carney inexplicably volunteered it last week.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada, suggesting it should become the 51st U.S. state to resolve trade disputes and access critical minerals, though he has also described military invasion as "highly unlikely" and preferred "economic coercion."
Nature of Threats: Trump has posted edited images of the U.S. flag covering Canada and claimed the border treaty is invalid, with administration officials echoing the "51st state" rhetoric.
The positive aspect of this extraordinary musing from our prime minister is that it failed to roil the waters of Canadian-American relations. The prime minister was placatory and eloquent in his remarks about the United States to the New York Times and unexceptionable in his comments at the United Nations.
And President Trump in one of the busiest weeks of his nearly six years in the White House, focused at the United Nations on the Iran and Ukraine conflicts, the imminent demise of the failed communist state of Cuba, and the arrival of the president of China for a ceremonious and apparently cordial state visit.
This meeting appeared to produce some
de-escalation of Chinese support for Iran and renewed assurance that the United
States would not attempt to alter the arrangement on Taiwan made by President
Nixon with Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Chou En-lai in 1972.
Mark Carney has expressed his hopes for economic growth and encouraged the major projects office to address the most promising proposals raised at the Canada investment conference last month. The implication, though not confirmed as a certainty, is that he is winning the struggle with his environmental conscience and will promote Canada’s sensible capitalization of its immense potential as an exporter of oil and natural gas.
The concept of
privatizing airport management is being considered, as has been successfully
done in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, to build a sovereign fund to assist
in the advancement of the major projects. Not only has this the makings of a
workable plan, but it possesses some of the grandeur that Canadian federalism
has always required to prevail over provincial tendencies to decentralization.
Such a program could be an inspiring reenactment of the
spirit of the Canadian Pacific Railway, one of the wonders of the world when it
was built across the Canadian Shield, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which
brought ocean shipping to the great cities of the eastern and central interior
of this continent. If this is what the Prime Minister intends, he will have and
deserve widespread support.