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And how many brigades is Carney raising, 'to build our strength at home'? What about H-bombs, is he making any of those? Long range missiles? Attack drones? The Canadians are buying some... from the US.
Canadian leadership is basically unserious, they're pussies and losers I think. Same with Australian leadership or European leadership with the possible exception of Poland. They talk and talk and talk about rearming but do very little. Germany raised one new brigade, Poland raised 5, France is raising 1, the British army is still shrinking. A brigade is not a very large force, roughly 3-5000 men.
Australia is buying imaginary AUKUS-class and likely-imagined Virginia class submarines from America (they probably can't be made since the US is too slack to build enough for their own needs). The Australian surface fleet is in complete shambles. There are many more pressing needs than national defence apparently, like giving enormous amounts of taxpayer money to NDIS disability scammers or propping up house prices.
These people talk about partnerships and free trade agreements (and EU integration for Ukraine) but sign no alliances. They talk about reform but do nothing substantial or make things worse in dull, boring ways. They fundamentally have no concept of what they're actually supposed to be doing as leaders, their notion of leadership is some combination of 'make people-pleasing sounds' and 'follow legalistic/moralist codes without regard for the outcome'. At no point does leadership enter the equation for them. It doesn't matter if they have to spend a fortune on welfare for tax-leeching rapey migrants, if they have to build a fish disco for a nuclear plant or wreck their energy market. They'll do all this and find some way to defend it when it's unpopular.
They have no real concept that those are bad things and should be stopped. Some of them (Denmark) have cottoned on that voters don't like the rapey migrants and moved against that particular policy. But they still aren't real leaders, real leaders would foresee this issue from a base-level understanding of reality and their national interests and never even consider it. It's the difference between retracting your hand from the stove after being burnt and not being so stupid to touch the stove in the first place. Real leaders write new laws, establish new principles and adapt their policies to the times proactively. Trump may be wrong and foolish in many respects but he is at least a real leader.
So Carney can 'stop pretending' and 'name reality' but what strength is he building? Canada has three understrength brigades and only one deployable overseas + some training/reserve forces, the whole Canadian army might easily disappear in a single battle. And acting together, what is that? More conferences and blathering? What is he going to do with one deployable brigade? Pretending is all he can do.
I think there are two or three countries in the world which might invade Canada or parts of it. Obviously the US, China and perhaps Russia.
Oversea invasions are hard logistics-wise, and oversea invasions into the backyard of another superpower who has a self-interest to not let rivals gain a foothold are harder still. (Though relying that the US would follow its strategic interests might be foolish. There is probably a world in which China allies itself with Trump by marrying a kid of some CCP functionary to one of his kids. Still unlikely.)
Before Trump, the US invading Canada or parts of it were not much of a concern for political reasons. Now with Trump openly contemplating actions which might utterly wreck NATO, that has changed, because wrecking NATO would also be a major downside of taking a piece of Canada.
If the US wants to take one of the big Canadian cities near the border, I think an extra brigade or ten will not help Canada much. I like your idea about hydrogen bombs, though. As a bonus, Canada would not even need long range missiles, there are plenty of targets in convenient reach of SRBMs. Hypersonic tech might be useful though. Or just lots of decoys.
The strategy could be: If you invade one of our cities, we will nuke a single city of similar size, thus turning the net outcome negative for you. If you retaliate proportionally, that will be the end of that round of aggression, otherwise we will respond proportionally (up to our stockpile size, naturally).
Of course, having more countries with nuclear weapons makes the world more dangerous. Which is doubtlessly a reason why previous US presidents embraced defensive pacts like NATO, where most members have no need to develop nukes.
And at the current stage, Canada does not need nuclear deterrence. But if you extrapolate between MAGA from a decade ago over MAGA today to estimate MAGA in a decade, you might find that you want to have figured out the Teller-Ulam design and built a stockpile by then. Not that I think Canada is trying at the moment, but optimistically that might change if Trump invades Greenland (or Iceland, by mistake).
The whole idea of Canada engaging in nuclear deterrence against the United States is so absurd it must derive from some extremely advanced form of TDS/MAGA-derangement syndrome. But could it happen, you've put your finger on the fatal flaw: A US that deranged could win, because both the country and the stockpiles are larger. Take out Toronto and Ottawa, make a separate peace with Quebec, and annex the rest. The US could survive the losses of part of NY and DC.
The point would not be to win, it generally rarely is with nuclear war. The point would be to make the victory unappealing to the aggressor.
For example, Putin thought he could enact a quick regime change, install a Russia-friendly oligarch and turn Ukraine in another Belarus. If that had worked, it would have been a big win for him. Today, even if Ukraine surrenders unconditionally tomorrow, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for him, given the stockpiles, lives and funds he has sunk into his war, and the fact that it would take two generations to persuade Ukrainians to see Russians as their countrymen rather than their occupiers.
Again, this does not help you against a madman who does not care about grand strategy, and is willing to lose against China just to show Canada how to behave. But you should generally treat your opponents as sane, even if they provide evidence to the contrary, because it is in their interests to be seen as vindictive madmen.
The US won the first one.
And yes, MAD is supposed to work as you say. But a sane US leader isn't going to attempt to take over Canada, and a deranged one isn't going to care.
That is very contingent on political factors. Two years ago, I would have said that no sane US leader would try to take Greenland from Denmark, either. These days, the question boils down to how serious one should take Trump's threats and what one thinks of his mental health.
Get rid of NATO, and Canada:US is not totally dissimilar to Ukraine:Russia. In both cases, the smaller country is culturally similar to its bigger neighbor, and most of the people speak the language of their neighbor. A shared land border makes an invasion logistically feasible. The big neighbor outspends the little one by a huge factor (6.5x for RU:UA pre-open-war, 30x for US:CA). Both are non-fundamentalist, industrial nations with low TFRs whose populations are unlikely to engage in asymmetrical warfare against occupiers at a similar rate as the Taliban did, especially if the takeover was done quickly without a lot of bloodshed.
Of course, Canada is much larger than Ukraine, but also more urban. The military advantage of the US is much larger than Russia's, most of their cities are close to the US border (Ottawa is less than 100km from the US, while the distance between Russia and Kiev is about 300km) and I do not see vastly outnumbered Canadian forces turning their cities into Gaza by trying to defend them one block at a time. Nor do I think that their rural population, cut off from critical resources like gasoline and maple syrup would be very willing to forgo their creature comforts to fight a Talibanesque insurgency for a few decades.
Like Greenland, Canada has a lot of lands in the arctic whose resource exploitation will become more feasible due to global warming. Also like Greenland, its northern parts cover relevant ICBM paths towards the US. It also has lots of fresh water which might be crucial for regions of the US due to climate change.
I do not think that Putin was insane to try to enact a regime change in Ukraine (though opting for a long war when his surprise attack failed was obviously a bad call), merely evil. Likewise, if Canada and the US drift apart politically as RU and UA did, I would think it evil but not insane of a US president (or emperor) to try to annex Canada.
No US leader (sane or otherwise) has attempted to take Greenland from Denmark by military force. Trump actually threatened nothing but tariffs. Not ruling out something is not the same as threatening it, and not ruling things out when asked is something that is both characteristic of Trump AND characteristic of the US (which, e.g., has never ruled out first use of nuclear weapons).
Certainly the US could take Canada, militarily. It's not going to happen under a sane leader. An insane leader could take Canada, militarily, even in the presence of a nuclear deterrent.
Now, yes. Canada now is just like Ukraine in 2014.
This could change fast. Ukraine in 2014 was hopeless wreck, Ukraine in 2022 was something else.
Perhaps, but not in the way/with the implications you're expecting.
The US invading Canada would have Battle of Baghdad (2021) levels of resistance, and the vast majority of Canadian heavy industry sits within conventional artillery range without the US even having to cross the border. (The reverse is not true.) Now, since that industry is the only reason the US would really want to invade, they probably wouldn't start laying the factories to waste, but the point remains that Canada simply can't depend on domestic war materiel production.
If the US wanted to take Canada tomorrow, they would accomplish that task with little effort and have the English-speaking part integrated within a year (since it basically already is). Quebec might give them some trouble, though, since there's a language barrier there, and even the part without a language barrier will be the most radicalized; it'd probably take long enough for the French to reinforce them militarily. They have an unsinkable aircraft carrier ~20km off the Quebec coast already; it's French (and thus EU) territory.
At that point I expect Canada = Quebec to petition for admittance into the EU as a member state. Most of the border problems for English Canada are obviated by losing the hard border with the US.
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