20 hours Ago By John Ivison
Article content This week, John Ivison is joined by academic Thomas Juneau to update predictions he made on the show nearly 18 months ago about the dangers of a second Trump administration. Juneau, a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a former analyst in the Department of National Defence, said in 2023 that Trump would hit the ground running and threaten this country’s security and prosperity with a protectionist agenda. Ivison asked Juneau if Trump’s repeated reference to Canada becoming a 51st state, and even fears about a U.
S. invasion, should be taken seriously. “I take it seriously, but not literally,” he said.
“Is the U.S. going to invade Canada? No, it won’t.
I don’t believe that...
Will Canada become the 51st state of the United States or the 51st, second, third, and fourth, or whatever form? No, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Constitutionally, in the U.S.
, that would be insanely complicated. There’s massive opposition to it in the U.S.
, let alone in Canada. “Republicans know, even though they don’t say it out loud too much, that more Canadians would vote Democrat than Republican. So in a country that is so tightly divided, this would just not be in the Republicans’ advantage.
“(But) it’s important not just to dismiss it and say, ‘(Trump’s) a clown, he’s just saying that.’ “What he’s serious about is intimidating us. It’s bullying us.
It’s completely changing the way that we’ve been doing business with the U.S. for decades now to soften us up, to destabilize us, to extract concessions on the trade side, on the security side.
I think that a lot of the public debate has either been taking it seriously and literally, which I think is not appropriate, or not taking it seriously or literally. And that is also not appropriate. He’s serious about hurting us and changing the way we do things.
But no, we’re not going to become the 51st state.” When Juneau last appeared, he warned about the threat to the web of institutions that have protected Canada., which is precisely what is happening.
Ivison asked if Canada was prepared for this possibility. “The web of institutions that I was referring to, NAFTA, NORAD, Five Eyes, NATO, and even international law in general, which the U.S.
hasn’t always respected, but typically respects a fair bit. What these institutions do is that they dilute that serious power imbalance and give us a better chance to manage the relationship with the U.S.
in a way that is not as disadvantageous as now it could be if power is by far the most important driver. That’s something that we forgot a lot about in Canada. That web of institutions matters a lot.
“So to go specifically to your question, in 2022, I co-led a task force with former national security advisors, former directors of CSIS, deputy ministers and so on, ambassadors. We gave a serious warning about Canada’s lack of preparedness on the national security front and the intelligence front in general. It was not specifically focused on the U.
S. and Trump. But we clearly raised the alarm bell specifically on that issue by saying that if Trump came back, we were in serious trouble.
Did Canada prepare after that? No. Right now, we need to be in full crisis mode. But at some point, we will need to look back and have a conversation about why we consistently, over years and decades, neglected these national security and defence issues.
Would we be in a perfect position towards Trump today? Of course not. We would still be a far smaller country and Trump would still be Trump. But we would, to my mind, be in (a better) position, if we had more seriously invested in defence, in diversified trade and security relationships, in national security and so on.
” An interview between Postmedia’s Brian Lilley and former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, this week suggested that the president’s repeated references to Panama, Greenland and Canada are part of a grand naval strategy to contain the Chinese and Russian navies. Ivison asked if Juneau agreed that an obsession with hemispheric defence could explain Trump’s apparently disconnected comments, and whether Canada could find common cause with Washington on Arctic security. “Do I buy Bannon’s explanation that all of this is driven by a very coherent grand strategic vision of hemispheric defence? Not fully, no.
I do think that it’s possible that Trump has some ideas at this level. Bannon is close to MAGA world in some ways, but he is not in government anymore..
. There are many problems with what Bannon said in that interview but one of them fundamentally is that he quite explicitly says that it’s a vision of hemisphere defence against China but also against Russia. (Yet) how do you explain that as we speak, (the U.
S.) is completely capitulating and Trump is giving Putin and Russia a lot of what they want, not only on Ukraine, but also, according to some media reports, removing some U.S.
forces from Eastern Europe? How is that consistent with the vision of containing Russia and China? “That being said, and this is where the last part of your question is really important, the U.S. is our only neighbour.
And that’s not going to change. Geography has extraordinarily powerful gravity..
. We have to make this work. It’s not going to be as easy and as beneficial to us in the future as it was in the past.
But right now our priority has got to be to salvage this, to manage this. “We have to save the defence and security relationship. Can a future prime minister Carney or a future prime minister Poilievre, or who knows somebody else, go to Trump and offer a grand bargain and say, we are going to raise defence spending by 33 per cent a year for the next five years to reach 2.
5 per cent of GDP or whatever it is...
As Bannon says clearly in that interview, there is scope for a deal here, if Canada does its part, which is as yet undefined.” Ivison pointed out that Trump does not seem to think Europe is a priority for America’s national security and might even withdraw troops from the continent. He asked Juneau whether this would mean NATO, as we have known it, is dead.
“There are, in the best of cases, serious question marks about the future of NATO. Are there scenarios where NATO dies and shuts down? That’s a catastrophe, but it is plausible. Are there scenarios where there is a new modus vivendi , a kind of new balance that establishes itself between the U.
S. and Europe, whereby the U.S, is less involved in Europe, but they continue to work together on issues of interest to transatlantic security (and) a new balance that is found? That’s also a possible scenario.
” Ivison asked if Canada needs to rethink its intelligence-gathering arrangement in the Five Eyes. “The Five Eyes will be affected for sure. Beyond the Five Eyes, Canada has direct bilateral cooperation with the U.
S. on information, intelligence sharing, coordination, and so on that is extremely close and is extremely important to us..
. The extraordinary thing for Canada as part of the direct bilateral intelligence relation with the U.S.
and the Five Eyes, is that we receive far more than we give. (But) the U.S.
benefits from this too. So is that going to completely stop? I can clearly see scenarios where the Five Eyes continues because it is to (America’s) advantage. “That being said, what is absolutely extraordinary in the Five Eyes and unique in the world is the level of trust.
It’s the openness. Do they tell each other absolutely everything? Of course not. It’s intelligence.
But they share a huge amount of stuff, which in the intelligence world is extremely rare. So if that trust is damaged, right, given the political nature of all these relations now, then the Five Eyes will be affected and by definition that will affect our national security.” On trade, Ivison asked if Trump has been chastened by the market reaction to his announcement of tariffs on Canada and Mexico, or whether his need to generate revenue from tariffs to bolster America’s balance sheet means he will impose 25 per cent tariffs at the end of the month.
Juneau said tariffs would be extremely damaging to the U.S., in terms of unemployment and inflation.
“If there is hope, it is that Trump will not fully implement everything he wants to do on the tariff side. He will do some of it, he’s already done some of it and he will do more, let there be no doubt. (But) Trump does respond to certain things.
First of all, he responds to economic indicators. The clear, easy economic indicators. The stock market, the inflation number, (rather than) subtle debates about economic policy.
He does not care about that. But as you said, when he announced the 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the stock market started going down. That’s where I find that there is some hope that resistance will build.
“ Ivison concluded by asking Juneau if he is encouraged by Canada’s response. “Well, no, I’m not encouraged by our response so far. Our response pre-2025 was consistently underwhelming.
This is the most difficult crisis that Canada has faced in decades. So it’s not like there’s an easy answer just waiting to be plucked off a tree, if only somebody would do it. “The political instability in this country, having a lame duck prime minister, having uncertainty on even whether we’ll be having a federal election in the spring, April, May, June, all of that makes it difficult.
Once we have a stable prime minister, after what I hope is an election as quickly as possible...
then we really need to sit down, have a brainstorm of the type that we have not had in recent years and offer a grand bargain to the U.S. on the trade side, which will involve painful concessions.
“There will not be a return to the status quo, whether it’s concessions on supply management, the digital services tax, the carbon tax and so on. On the security side, (we need) massive increases to our defence budget and serious commitments – not ‘we will do this by 2032’ – but serious commitments, on Arctic bases, ballistic missile defence, and so on. The U.
S. will remain our most important partner. That’s not going to change.
And so the issue now is to cut our losses, manage the relationship as best we can, while also keeping an eye on diversifying relations.” National Post Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here .
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