A journalist recently put a hypothetical to Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command: what about a feared American invasion of Canada? The idea was, Paparo said, “absolutely and utterly preposterous.” Then he added: “Would you ask me please, also, what my attack plans are for the Martians?”
Prime Minister Mark Carney is not laughing. In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, he said he had prepared for the “extreme tail risk” that the Trump administration might order military action against Canada — a very low probability, that is, with potentially severe consequences. Pressed on whether he took seriously Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state, Carney, the Times reported, “suggested that he had carefully examined the possibility of a U.S.-led military invasion.” He declined to say what that involved.
Defence Minister David McGuinty declined too, on Thursday. “All militaries in the world spend time analyzing risk scenarios,” he said. “Canadians should take it as described to the prime minister: a tail risk.”
The Department of National Defence, like militaries everywhere, keeps a vault of contingency plans, some of them decades old, CBC News reports. Retired Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie once ran the section that writes and updates them. They are amended as world circumstances dictate, he said — often when a new leader takes power in a country where Canada has an interest. “You make judgment calls on what is likely to happen, what is unlikely to happen,” Leslie said. “You consult with other departments, with other experts, and then you put it away again.”
What the scenarios look like is a matter of record and grim arithmetic. Most experts agree that a conventional American invasion is unlikely, given the vastness of Canada and the difficulty of securing it, and that in such a conflict the Canadian military would be quickly overwhelmed; resistance would take the form of a guerilla campaign. The other possibilities on the shelf are the ones history has already demonstrated elsewhere: the rapid regime change of the kind carried out when Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. commandos, or the limited air campaign fought over Iran.
Leslie said the plans would have been updated after Trump’s re-election in 2024 and pulled out again regularly since — particularly after the administration’s threats in January to seize Greenland by force. “In the context of the threats that the White House has issued against Canada … those would have probably resulted in a heightened focus,” he said, citing the 51st state talk and the maps showing Canada as part of the United States. Trump, it should be remembered, ruled out military action against Canada more than a year ago. He said he would use economic coercion instead.
Leslie was also careful about whose job this is. “What a lot of people sometimes forget is that a political leader’s first remit at the national level is the safety, security of Canadians,” he said. Reviewing the old plans would be Carney’s duty, and it would be the duty of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Jennie Carignan, to advise — “which I’m absolutely sure she did.”
In Ottawa, the subject has a pulse. “I think every Canadian worries about it,” New Democrat MP Gord Johns said on his way into the House of Commons Thursday; Canadians notice, he said, when Trump calls the country the 51st state or refers to Carney as its governor. His colleague Don Davies called the fact of such planning a “profound change” in the relationship.
In the United States, the subject mostly does not exist. Matthew Schmidt, an associate professor at the University of New Haven and a former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, told CBC that many Americans are unaware of what Trump’s words do abroad. “I don’t think I have a visceral sense of what Canadians are feeling about the United States,” he said. “We really don’t have a sense of the impact of what the president is saying has on other places.” Schmidt dismissed the prospect of military action himself, and called Carney’s examination of it the prudent course — but he wondered, too, whether it was meant as a signal. “When Mark Carney stands up and says that, it just highlights the absurdity of what the American president said.”
The probability is low. The consequences are not. So the plans were taken down, amended, consulted on with other departments and other experts. And then, in the words of the man who used to write them, you put it away again.