Victor Davis Hanson: Why Is Mark Carney Preparing for an American Invasion?

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. I am going to mention Canada again. I know we’re getting tired of this subject because, after all, Canada is our closest ally, closest friend, the country that is most like the United States, or so we’ve been told. But [Prime Minister] Mark Carney is doing things that we have never seen or heard before in Canada.

His latest is he tells a reporter that, yes, he has thought of preparing the Canadian military to prepare for an invasion by the United States. That is absolutely insane when the United States has protected, since World War II, the entire North American continent.

Canada has never had missiles launched into its airspace. It has never had its claims, extravagant though they are, in the Northwest Passage and the Arctic challenged by China or Russia or any hostile power due to the U.S. military.

The idea that the protector of Canada, the protector who allowed Canada to disarm, is preparing an invasion is absurd, and it’s an insult.

And Carney is doing this, once again, to jack up opinion in Canada for a new nationalism to avoid the great dissatisfaction in Alberta and Quebec, and especially to try to influence the midterms in the United States and to otherwise mask his unpopular socialist globalist agenda.

But when he said to the world that the United States, he thought, could invade Canada militarily, and when he reached out to Communist China and is basically seeing them as one of its two new trading partners, given its record in cheating on trade, its human rights violations, and the horrendous legacy of the Communist Party since Mao Zedong in China, and he’s preferring that now over the tradition of American friendship.

And then at the same time, as he warned the world that he was preparing or he could prepare for an American invasion, at the same time he’s reached out to the EU, the European Union. Canada has 75% of all of its trade and its exports with the United States. It has 5%—5%—with the EU, and yet he’s reaching out for a new trade partner as if he thinks the EU, which is one of the most protectionist entities in the world, is going to drop its tariffs and its barriers to benefit Canada’s 5% trade with the EU.

This is insane.

More importantly, he doesn’t quite understand that of all, in this dispute, it’s over 2%. The tariffs are over 2% of the trade, which everybody agrees was almost tariff-free.

All the United States was saying is that we’re tired of 250% tariffs once we get over a certain number of exports into Canada, and we don’t like, at the 11th hour, slapping 5% on our digital media companies so that we have to subsidize your acculturation in Canada or promote the French language or Indigenous people, and these are American companies.

We don’t do that to Canada, of course. And we did resent, at the last moment, telling us that you were going to allow cheap Chinese metals to come into your economy so that they can be reassembled and sent as finished vehicles into the United States and therefore allow China to avoid tariffs. We resented that, but it still only represented 2%, and yet that sent Carney wild.

He doesn’t realize, though, what he’s getting into, as I said. Not only do his children live there in the United States, not only did he go to school, as they did, in the United States, not only did his 91% investment portfolio reside in the United States, but Canada is the most favored nation of all the nations in the world as far as tariffs go with the United States.

Canada is the only country, as I’ve said before, where you can come into the United States without a visa and work immediately for six months, as 1 million Canadians do as I speak.

Canada doesn’t have to deal with 10,000 illegal immigrants coming from Latin America on their way into North America. It doesn’t have to deal with the dangerous cartels that kill 100,000 Americans in some years. It doesn’t have to deal with Chinese fentanyl going into Mexico to be repackaged as designer drugs to kill Americans.

It doesn’t have to deal with that because the United States is a barrier to Canada. It has the longest unenforced border with the United States. We don’t treat Canada the way Mexico treats us, or rather, we ensure that Mexico doesn’t treat Canada the way it treats us.

People in Canada are not sending back $65 billion out of their economy. All we’re saying is that year after year after year, Canada should try to reduce a $50 billion surplus.

It should try to at least match or exceed the NATO promise that it made to spend 2% of [gross domestic product] on defense, and it needs to discuss any other issues in a sober and judicious manner rather than walk out at the 11th hour and tell nobody.

And so, what’s gonna happen is we’re watching—when he said the latest, Carney said the latest about a veritable war, the American people’s ears perked up.

And you can talk all you want in Canada about elbows out and how chauvinistic you are and how you’re gonna cut off the tar sands oil to the United States and all the terrible things you’re gonna do, and you’re going to get China on your side and the EU.

They’re not going to do it.

The United States has a $30 trillion economy. It’s $10 trillion larger than the EU. It’s $10 trillion larger than China. There are no transportation costs for Canada just to walk across the border with 75% of its trade.

What Carney is basically saying is: I’m not gonna tell you what I said in these negotiations and why I walked out. I am going to misrepresent it. I won’t give you a transcript. I got my ministers to back me up. No discussion.

He’s saying this because he had ulterior political motives. But he sacrificed the viability, not just the economic viability, the viability of Canada, which was heavily reliant on the U.S. military, the goodwill of the American people, and the U.S. economy.

I’d just like to finish why he’s doing this and why the Canadians are reacting in such a Pavlovian manner to follow his prompt.

This is not the Canada that we used to know that was proud, confident, had a glorious record in World War II, a strong military, a strong economy, developed in a very sober and judicious manner its rich treasure house of natural—sir, not after Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney.

We in the United States did not cause this problem. We did not say to Canada, “You better let in 45% of your current population from foreign countries who were not born in Canada or their parents weren’t born, and they’re not gonna be assimilated and integrated in melting-pot fashion.”

We did not say, “Forego all of the rich fossil fuels in your country. Stop pipelines to other provinces from Alberta and stress green energy, solar power in frigid Canada, so to speak.”

We did not say to you, “Craft your economy so of all the 30-something industrial Western nations, you will have the least amount of per annum GDP growth.”

We did not do it, much less [President] Donald Trump. He did not say to Canada, “You can’t have the same familial GDP as we are. You have to be $30,000 to $40,000 poorer per person and per family than we are.”

We didn’t say to the Canadians, who are a strongly moral and ethical people, “You shall lead the world in assisted suicides, 5.1% of all your deaths, 19,000 people a year, ostensibly to save overwhelming health care costs for people who may be terminal because the economy doesn’t support that. The economy doesn’t support open borders and the amount of immigrants who are coming in. The economy doesn’t support fulfilling your defense needs. The economy doesn’t support fair trade with the United States that’s symmetric.” But we didn’t do that. Your leaders did.

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