Canada Plans for Threats From US
Defence revival driven by fear of the US — and shaped to satisfy it
🎯 Three-Shot Burst
Canada is quietly doing something paradoxical and very Canadian: preparing for the possibility that the United States could become a threat, while rebuilding its defence posture in a way that Washington has been demanding for years.
The trigger isn’t a belief that America will invade tomorrow. It’s the realization that the old assumption — the U.S. is always a stable, benign guarantor — no longer holds.
Trump’s talk of annexation, his raid on Venezuela, flirtations with force over Greenland, and willingness to deploy troops domestically have shattered a 200-year mental model. Ottawa is now planning for spillover chaos, cyber warfare, infrastructure sabotage, mass migration northward — and, in the most uncomfortable war games, limited American incursions.
Canada has never had an equivalent of Uncle Sam, sternly exhorting its citizens to sign up to fight for their country. That is changing. Jennie Carignan, Canada’s top soldier, is looking for Canadians—whether they are 16 or 65—who will come to their country’s aid in the event of a military attack or calamitous natural disaster.
Reality check: This move is motivated by fear of American unpredictability, yet it directly satisfies American demands that allies stop freeloading on U.S. security. Canada is learning from Finland — bunkers, civilian preparedness, total-society defence — while pledging to spend up to 5% of GDP on defence and secure its Arctic sovereignty. At the same time, Canadians are being forced to confront a US economic dependency problem:
Bottom Line: Canada is hedging against America by beefing up militarily — and in doing so, becoming exactly the kind of ally America says it wants.
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🤝 Deal Corner
French-U.K. Starlink rival pitches Canada on ‘sovereign’ satellite service for Arctic military operations
Murray Brewster reports that a company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic.
“What we can provide for Canada is what we call a sovereign capacity capability where Canada would actually own all of our capacity in the Far North or wherever they require it,” said David van Dyke, the general manager for Canada at Eutelsat, in a recent interview with CBC News.
Eutelsat, a rival to Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify defence contracts away from suppliers in the United States.
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The paradox you highlighted is spot on: Canada is hedging against US unpredictability by becoming exactly what the US has been demanding. Watching the Finland model get adopted makes sense operationally, but the economic dependency charts really drive home how asymmetric this relationshp is. I worked with orgs dealing with supply chain resilience and the 'diversification of dependence' framing for satelite comms captures something critical that often gets missed in sovereignty discussions.