American Fascism Is A Canadian Problem

It is not a mere matter of morbid curiosity that has us focusing so much attention on the United States. It is the knowledge that authoritarian states tend to expand, that the American dictator has repeated numerous times that he wants to annex Canada, that whatever happens in the land of our largest trading partner will affect us, making a totalitarian US both a military and economic threat to Canada.

While Canadians overwhelmingly oppose Trump, and are going out of their way not to travel to the United States, it is the concern that there are still Canadians who support the American dictator. There is an awareness that his Canadian minion is currently campaigning to regain his foothold in Parliament through an Alberta by-election, and a tangible fear that Poilievre would roll out the red carpet for an American take-over. His style, his policies, his priorities, his purpose, all match.

On both trade and defence, Canada is far more at the mercy of the United States than we would like to admit. Last week’s last-minute reversal on the Digital Services Tax is a powerful example.

The federal government has been seized with how to deal with American social media and commercial internet giants for years. The attempt to make social media pay domestic media for links to news has driven the Canadian information environment to the far right. The attempt to make them pay their fair share in taxes has driven investment out of the country while failing to collect an extra cent in revenue. On our own, this approach is a losing battle — Apple’s market capitalisation alone is roughly twice Canada’s entire GDP.

Amazon, Google, and Meta (facebook) also have market caps one to two times the size of Canada’s entire economy. Apple’s annual worldwide revenue is greater than Canada’s annual federal tax revenue. In the social media world that we should have dominated, we are featherweights. For these companies, it is relatively easy to ignore us or simply cut us off rather than deal with our isolated requirements.

As for their politics, it is worth remembering that the faces of Meta, Google, and Amazon stood shoulder to shoulder with Elon Musk at Trump’s swearing in, standing in front even of the new cabinet. We should not expect any of them to bend over backward to please Canada.

These companies hold enormous sway over both the American government and the Canadian economy. What happens to them in the United States, and what they get away with there, necessarily affects Canada.

Militarily, Canada is virtually inextricably linked to the United States. While Prime Minister Mark Carney has committed to “reviewing” the order for F-35s, but this is only the very edge of the integration of our armed forces. NORAD leaves the defence of our airspace in American hands. Americans have threatened our Arctic sovereignty for over half a century as they eye the ever-more accessible Northwest Passage as an international trade route. This has been treated with the severity of a diplomatic irritant rather than a genuine sovereignty issue over that period.

But that’s changing. With an American President who has stated, repeatedly, that Canada should become part of the United States, we have to consider what the ramifications would be.

His Immigration and Customs Enforcement secret police service now has a budget larger than Canada’s entire military, and we can expect its loyalty to the American government to be on the level of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Russian Rosguard. Their loyalty is to the leader, not the constitution.

We can expect ICE to gather intelligence on Canadian opponents of the American regime with all that implies. If the Americans ever prosecute their leader’s desire for annexation of Canada, not only do they have the military resources to crush our armed forces in a conventional war, their command structure has direct control over our own defences in a number of key areas.

We have natural resources, vast land, and fresh water that the Americans want, that an increasingly unhinged administration may want to take by force. There is a reason Trump is allowing Putin free reign in Ukraine; he needs the precedent.

The United States has objectively become a threat to Canada’s national security. They can no longer be considered a reliable ally. And if one NATO country invades another, will Article 5 apply? There is no guarantee anyone will come to Canada’s aid, given both the antagonist and the fact that Europe is largely tied up helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion. Concurrently fighting the United States and Russia is not an enviable position for any of our allies.

It is in Canada’s interest, then, for the United States to be a functioning constitutional democracy. At the moment, our neighbour is none of functional, constitutional, or democratic, and every move they make has a direct and significant long-term impact on Canada.

We cannot afford to be simple spectators, enjoying our popcorn as America implodes. We cannot control their outcome, but we can and must do everything we can to protect ourselves from it. That starts by recognising the threat.