This is a great read in The Walrus by Wesley Wark. “How to Save Canada“.
If I had read it mere months ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. But today it presents the very real, and very dangerous challenge that we have been presented by the Trump administration.
Here is an excerpt.
…Canadians should take the rhetoric, the threats, seriously. We have to move past the kind of response once offered by our minister of national defence, Bill Blair, who described the calls for annexation “offensive” but insisted they don’t pose a genuine danger. They do, clearly.
What’s unfolding is the opening act of hybrid warfare. We know about hybrid cars and hybrid work. But hybrid warfare? Sometimes called “grey zone warfare,” the term is often credited to former Pentagon analyst and author Frank Hoffmann. It refers to the use of coercive tactics that stop short of open war to pressure or destabilize a foreign target. The German media outlet Deutsche Welle, reflecting on Russia’s actions against Ukraine and the West, defined it as an attempt to “weaken and destabilize the enemy from within.” Hybrid warfare can involve economic pressure, political intimidation, disinformation campaigns, influence operations, cyber attacks. Think of its effect on a country like termites in a house—busy, persistent, and almost invisible until the foundation is too hollow to hold.
It’s one thing to expect this from enemies. Another to see it from a friend. That’s a world that Canada doesn’t yet seem ready to face. The stakes are high. We could be subjected to a sort of “Finlandization”—when the Finns experienced overweening Soviet power during the Cold War, which left them with nominal independence; we could become a satellite state, directed from afar, like the Soviet-subjugated members of the Warsaw Pact, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia; or we could be reduced to a piece of real estate in an expanded American sphere of influence that would be indistinguishable from an empire…
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