In 1921, the Canadians formulated a plan they called Defense Scheme #1 to invade the United States. This was not a serious plan to conquer North America, but was a contingency to be deployed in case they discovered that the US was plotting to annex Canada.
That condition is currently valid.
The idea was that Canadian militia would come charging down our highways to distract and disrupt our preparations, to give Great Britain time to come to their aid. The situation has changed; I don’t think King Charles III is going to be much use in this hypothetical war. Still, it’s a good plan to shake up our unjust invasion.
Lt. Col. “Buster” Brown even scouted out the eastern prong of their invasion plan.
Brown even undertook some very informal (though probably grossly illegal) reconnaissance missions in and around Vermont, near the border – scoping out bridges, locks and railroad lines, and chatting with locals in taverns. Lippert’s telling of these missions and their reports are the most amusing parts of a dark alternate historical scenario. Brown apparently found Vermonters to be “fat and lazy but pleasant and congenial,” and suspected there were “large and influential numbers of American citizens … [who are] not altogether pleased with democracy and have a sneaking regard for Great Britain, British Law, and Constitution, and general civilization.” He suspected alcohol-deprived Americans might welcome their new Canadian overlords, and the barrels of illegal Canadian whiskey they’d bring with them.
That condition is mostly valid. We are fat and lazy and clearly many of our citizens want a king, but not a British one — they want a king who is fat and lazy, like them. Also, Prohibition is over, so the barrels of Canadian whiskey aren’t as enticing as they once were.
The Pacific prong of the invasion is already doomed. There has been a massive build-up of military force in Washington state since 1921 — that’s the home of JBLM.
The Canadian flying columns would have been deployed in trucks, packed with guns, explosives and soldiers. Historically, flying columns have utilized horses, though in this interstitial period between equestrian warfare and modern mechanized tank warfare, trucks seem most likely.
That collection of casual Canadians in trucks full of rifles and whiskey would be met by the 7th Infantry Division, the 8th, 189th, and 191st Brigades, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and a swarm of cocky fighter pilots who are well-practiced in the art of strafing and bombing lines of trucks. Stay home. “Independently directed units of unarmored Ford trucks packed with rowdy prairie province roughnecks packing TNT and machine guns” are not going to hold up well.
The central prong, on the other hand, has potential. We’re still weakly defended here in the Midwest, and swinging through the Dakotas with their ripe ICBM silos dotting the landscape would give Canada the opportunity to become a nuclear power. Then the lovely progressive state of Minnesota might not offer much resistance — I know I’d be out there on the side of the highway happily waving my Canadian flag (note to self: buy a Canadian flag to prepare).
A century of military development on the US side means that Defense Scheme #1 is grossly obsolete, but the idea of Winnipeg thrusting deeply into Minnesota is somehow arousing. Especially if they’re planning to serve drinks first.
I, for one, will be awaiting the forces invading Vermont from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with biscuits, hot tea, and local craft brews.
And, honestly, I think HM would sign off on giving the Royal Navy something fun to do.
What is the Canadian drink?
I mean they have maple syrup plus Molson and Labbatts beers~wise memory (of Canadian GP sponsorship signs) serving but… 9
Considering how many maps of the US leave the Upper Peninsula of Michigan off (implying that they think it is part of Canada), it is possible that Canada could just take it and nobody would really notice.
Don’t forget the Tim-bits!
Don’t forget, the US did invade Canada: July 12, 1812, William Hull crossed the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. There were other attempts to invade Canada during that war all of which came to naught. Of course, the war was nominally with the British Empire but Canadians fought the US and eventually prevented them from annexing Canada. I have read that annexing Canada was a secondary aim of those promoting the war, much like annexing Mexico was an goal of Southern slave owners.
@#2 inexpensive Canadian whisky regularly wins scads of awards! And we have sortilege, which is maple and rye whisky. When added to a double shot of espresso it is the perfect antidote to a Canadian winter.
SteveoR. As a wine lover in the UK I’ve long admired the Icewines of the Niagara Peninsula though my diabetes means that I can’t drink them now. Jim Murray in his Whiskey Bible has chosen Canadian Whiskeys at least twice as his World Whiskey of the year.
BTW All of the accounts of the war of 1812 that I can find are from an American point of a view but a Canadian acquaintance insisted that it started with an attempted ‘liberation’ of Ontario to end in the final expulsion of the British from North America. Any information on this would be welcome.
@ ^ sincarne :Cheers!
I wonder how it would work for the Aussie Summer.. & if I could get my hands on it here to see. Would like to try it.
As a ‘murican, I’ll be damned if beavers will appear on any of my currency!
I don’t know about that. Crown Royal is some pretty good Canadian Whiskey. I am not a big bourbon fan, but that Crown Royal is pretty tasty.
Never has the phrase “in this hypothetical war” been more superfluous.
@ ^ Larry: Meanwhile :
Source : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bald-eagles-are-dying-from-bird-flu-180979940/
Symbolic and absolutely horrible for a species that got no say in what we made (make) of it.
If there were gods, could they have devised a clearer message to Americans?
Ha! so, you haven’t caught on to the clever planting of superagent Harry Windsor, supposedly as a result of a rift within the royal family! Years in preparation, requiring Harry to pretend for all that time to be as thick as two short planks.
Canadian whisky is superior to our redneck crap.
I wonder what Ike (the South Park character not former president) would do in case of invasion.
submoron@7,
It only has a few pages directly on the “War of 1812”, but I recommend Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, which places that war in the context of a wider and successful American push to dominate the frontier, lasting between 1810 and 1819, and including multiple invasions of Florida and attacks on Indians:
Taylor says the American government had no clear idea what it would do with Canada if the invasion succeeded; and that the invasion was motivated by partisan considerations (President Madison was a Republican, who used their opposition to the war to discredit his Federalist opponents), and was also opposed by southern slaveowners, who feared a loss of influence if Canada was conquered and retained.
i wrote a similarly themed article in 2017.
nomaduk @1:
“And, honestly, I think HM would sign off on giving the Royal Navy something fun to do.”
Like a preemptive SAS strike by submarine on Mar-a-Lego.
different conclusion tho, heh
AstroLad @18: More likely the Navy’s special forces, the SBS.
While there would likely be military resistance to a Canadian invasion of the Northwest, There’s also a non-zero chance that Washington and Oregon might agree to be annexed, just to get us away from Trumplethinskin’s America.
<tongue-in-cheek>
Another problem with the “invasion plan” for prong 1 is that any force moving south that strayed more than 3km east of I-5/405 would be running into superior firepower deployed by the locals. And east of the Cascades (or, slightly farther south, more than 3km west of I-5) — don’t even think about it; in the 2024 election, the state Republican Party wouldn’t even officially endorse the Republican candidate for Governor because he wasn’t MAGA enough.
Also, McChord (the USAF element of JBML) is a logistics/airlift center with very little in the way of “cocky fighter pilots who are well-practiced in the art of strafing”; the tactical aircraft are largely trained and equipped for air-to-air defense/interception. The closest possibility would be if one of the carriers was at home in Everett, but, well, Navy pilots… (A little interservice rivalry never hurt anyone more than they probably deserved.) Sadly, unjustified fear of the non-present aerial threat is precisely what would cause an invading column to disperse into those heavily-armed locals.
So I’m afraid Prong 1 is out. And would have been since the late 1920s…
.Well, ‘Three dead Trolls in a Baggie’ had some comments on the war.
https://genius.com/Three-dead-trolls-in-a-baggie-the-white-house-burned-the-war-of-1812-lyrics
I don’t think there are any ICBM’s anymore, just the missile silos. I’ve already got the long O of Minnesota so it won’t be hard to lengthen it a bit more to sound Canadian. Look oouut!
Canada still has a King. Get rid of that and then we can talk.
@24 Tethys — An oldie but a goodie:
American: “Have y’all seen Titanic?”
Canadian: “What’s that about?”
American: “Yes. A very big one.”
larpar @25: The US still has a Trump. Get rid of that, guarantee there’ll be no more of them, and then…no, not even then.
@submoron, @KG:
The usual joke (I think originally from Pierre Berton) goes as follows:
– If you ask Canadians about the War of 1812, they’ll say that the Americans tried to invade, but we fought them back.
– If you ask Americans about the War of 1812, they’ll say the British tried to take away our freedom, but we fought them back.
– If you ask English about the War of 1812, they’ll say “What war? (We were a little busy with this fellow named Napoleon at the time.)”
All of these are correct to an extent.
The War, as I understand it, started as a mess of unresolved grievances in the U.S.A. along with early Manifest Destiny, which finally boiled over because of the way the British kept harassing American shipping (partly due to the slave trade which was already illegal at that point, and partly because so many ‘AWOL’ British sailors were serving on American ships).
As KG notes above, the original invasion was not well-planned, kind of relying on being an unexpected sneak attack (and assumptions that much of the local population would be on their side), and the initial big push into Ontario was thwarted at least in part because one of the officers leading it was an idiot: he took over a local farmhouse, insisted they cook for and serve him and the rest of his officers, and discussed the plans out loud before the lady of the house (one Laura Secord) managed to sneak out the back and run cross-country to warn the local garrison.
At the time, also, the British Colonial forces were on much better terms with the local First Nations populations than the Americans were, meaning they had people with much better knowledge of the land in question and much better guerrilla fighting tactics. There weren’t a lot of ‘regular army’ there at first (again, Napoleon was a thing, most of the main British ground forces were over in Europe), mostly a number of militia, irregulars, and locals. The British Navy certainly showed up after the fighting started, and the assault on Washington D.C. with the associated burning of the White House was mostly hit-and-run tactics from the increasing number of British ground forces while getting good fire support from the Navy. (I find most Americans don’t know that the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner were based on this battle in the War of 1812, and nothing to do with the Revolution.)
The main part of the War of 1812 that most Americans talk about was the Battle of New Orleans, which was long ago immortalized in song (In 1814 we took a little trip, Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip!) … it was one of the few battles in the War that the Americans definitively won, it was the last battle in the War, and it was actually fought after the treaty ending the War was signed but before news of that had made its way back across the Atlantic. The treaty mostly restored the status quo, so nobody really gained or lost anything aside from a number of nation-building stories on this side of the Atlantic, and the British mostly went back to what they considered more important and immediate things.
jenorafeuer @ # 28: … the assault on Washington D.C. with the associated burning of the White House was mostly hit-and-run tactics …
Also the burning of the Capitol building and numerous other government buildings – a few of which were saved by local residents persuading the Brit officers that torching them would cause fire to spread to civilian homes. Can you imagine such forbearance in the 21st century?
… the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner were based on this battle in the War of 1812…
Not quite: FS Key wrote his poem about the attack on Ft McHenry in Baltimore Harbor around a month before Admiral Cockburn torched DC. A while later, somebody set the words to a popular drinking song at the time (“To Anacreon in Heaven”) – a rather difficult tune which probably required generous doses of alcohol to sound good when rendered by untrained voices.
… nobody really gained or lost anything …
As one historian of the time put it, neither the US nor England won the War of 1812, but the Indians definitely lost. When the British forces withdrew to Canada, Jamaica, etc, the Native tribes lost their primary European trading partners and source of weapons, followed shortly by nearly all their remaining lands east of the Mississippi.
I took a quick poll of the locals yesterday, and based on my (oh so scientific study of 14 people), Minnesota would like to start with a 4 year lease, please. That way, if the rest of the country comes to their senses by 2029, we can easily get back to feeling quietly superior to the rest of the country.
Pierce R. Butler beat me to it – the real losers of the War of 1812 were the American Indians/Native Americans/First Nations. Unlike the British and Canadian allies, they were decisively defeated by US forces, and lost their last chance to at least slow the tide of Anglo-American settlement east of the Mississippi River. It was a really tragic war for them.
One quibble- I believe the successful defense of Fort McHenry and Baltimore was after the British capture of Washington DC, not before. The British force that had captured Washington went on to try and capture Baltimore, which was a more economically significant target, being one of the major US ports.
springa73 @ # 31: … I believe the successful defense of Fort McHenry and Baltimore was after the British capture of Washington DC, not before.
Oops – damn straight. Washington went up in smoke August 24, 1814; Ft McHenry didn’t, Sept 13-14 of the same year. Thanks for the correction!
I’m curious. Both Canada and Denmark (for Greenland) are members of NATO. If Trump orders military force to annex the countries, then couldn’t Canada and Denmark invoke Article 5 (An attack against one is an attack against all) of the NATO treaty and call for the other NATO members to come to their defense? This would put the NATO members in a real damned if you do damned if you don’t situation. They either honor their treaty obligations and come to Canada/Denmark(Greenland) defense, or choose not to. In either case, it would be the effective end of NATO, which is perhaps the point all along.
As their national anthem begins: “Oh, Canada!” They are not perfect (sadly, they are emulating the failed united states empire more and more). But, they are still much more civilized than the failed united states empire (even if they have problems with prairie fires and cold weather).
I hope they come as far south as Chicago. If for no other reason than that we’re an original six hockey city.
Aside from tim-bits and poutine, Canada actually has much to offer in cuisine.
Team Canada won gold in the Restaurant of Nations category at the World Culinary Olympics in 2024. Teams prepared a three-course meal for 110 guests. They also took silver in the Chef’s Table category, preparing a seven-course menu for 14 people.
The Canuck-inspired menu included pine ice cream, Quebec First Nations spices, Newfoundland salt, sturgeon bacon, maple syrup, sea buckthorn berries, morel mushrooms, and bison.
Overall, Canada ranked sixth in the world out of 24 teams – the only North American team to make the Top 10.
You are correct. The War of 1812 was a disaster for the Ohio Country Indians. They’d managed to keep most Whites east and south of the Ohio River for almost 50 years and then their allies, the Brits, threw in the towel and ceded their old Northwest territories to the Americans. Not that it was ever legally theirs to dispose of, but hundreds of thousands of poor, landless Whites demanded to take it.
Now, imagine what might happen if Trump invaded Greenland. Before long, it would be overrun with Americans looking to make their fortunes. The poor Inuits would soon become second class citizens in their own land. It might be like what happened in Texas when the Whites refused to recognize long-standing Mexican property deeds and simply carved up the land as they saw fit, relegating the Tejanos to eke out an existence on poorer lands or as workers on White farms and ranches.
Big Boppa @34: I’d be fine with us (Canada) taking Chicago, Boston, Detroit and NYC, but we’d probably need to build walls around them. If Trump pays for them, great!
Pierce R. Butler@29, springa73@31,
Yes, Alan Taylor who I quoted @16 notes that the British effectively abandoned their Indian allies at the peace treaty – in true “perfidious Albion” tradition (my comment, not his). Taylor’s main thesis is that the “manifest destiny” of the USA to dominate the continent was not in any way preordained. In particular, disintegration into smaller countries [I’d normally say “states” but that risks confusion in this context] allied with different European powers and their Indian allies was a real possibility at least until the Louisiana purchase – and of course after that, the issue of slavery and its spread westward became a serious danger to unity. Matthew Karp, in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy documents how southerners dominated American foreign policy for decades, and believed that history was on their side, and that slavery, butressed by the “scientific racism” that was increasingly influential in Europe as well as the Americas, would spread and defeat the “illusions” of the anti-slavery movement.
the original invasion was not well-planned, kind of relying on being an unexpected sneak attack (and assumptions that much of the local population would be on their side)
So, something like the later Bay of Pigs fiasco?
KG @37: Which empires haven’t been perfidious?
I suspect that most Canadians wouldn’t really want the more liberal parts of the US to join them, unless we are talking only 1 or 2 states. If, say, New York, the New England states, and the liberal parts of the west coast states joined Canada, the “new” Canadians would outnumber the “old” Canadians and completely change the character of the country in ways that the original Canadians probably wouldn’t like, regardless of politics.
No, the current arrangement is really the one most satisfactory to all parties.
KG @ # 37: … southerners dominated American foreign policy for decades…
They (southern elites) dominated US federal policy, foreign and domestic, for decades. Much of what passed for an anti-slavery movement was not abolitionism per se, but focused on the “Slave Power” which had the advantage in Congress and the Electoral College because the Constitution’s 3/5ths Clause gave slaveholding states an advantage well beyond the weight of their voting population (e.g., 30 more seats in the House of Reps by 1860).
Which stat I just gleaned from a very worthwhile new book, Jon Grinspan’s Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War, which quite readably documents the rise of an amazing grassroots movement that galvanized the Republicans and scared the Southerners in 1860, escalating both sides of the “polarization” (as we call it today) of that year only to be forgotten in the ensuing donnybrook. Though predominantly men in their 20s, the “Wide Awakes” owed much of their vision to European exiles from the multiple failed revolutions of 1848.
Ironically, the “2%” (of USAnians who owned other USAnians) dominated much of the discourse back then by accusing their critics of disrupting and endangering “the union” of North and South. Even the younger A. Lincoln found that inhibiting.
Larry@9–
On the other hand, there are a lot more loons on US currency.
@15 speak for yourself, but I’d personally prefer a Kentucky Bourbon to most Canadian Whiskeys. Then again, I am not to fond of rye whiskeys which make up most of their whiskey styles.
Crown Royal is not and cannot be a bourbon, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it is Canadian.
@ 38
So, something like the later Bay of Pigs fiasco?
Yes, particularly the “assumptions that much of the local population would be on their side”.
A large proportion of the Ontario population would have been United Empire Loyalists. The older generations would have fled the 13 colonies to the safety of British territory and the younger generations would have been raised on the harrowing tales of persecutions in the 13 colonies, later called the USA.
The invaders expected a warm welcome?
Pierce R. Butler@29, springa@31, John Watts@35, KG@37:
You are indeed all correct on this, the real losers were the native populations. Up until that point the English had decent relations with the First Nations (the French had far better relations when they were the ones in charge) but after the War the English mostly abandoned them, even the ones on British North American soil. You can make the argument that Canada treated its native population better than the U.S., but that is a damn low bar to clear, and we didn’t really clear it by much; there was a lot less active killing but at least as much cultural destruction.
Some of that would come to a head another sixty years later with the Cypress Hills Massacre and the resulting creation of the NorthWest Mounted Police (later merged into the modern Royal Canadian Mounted Police) which were pretty much formed to prevent another such case of Americans massacring First Nations on Canadian soil and possibly triggering a larger war and American intervention and takeover attempts.
Pierce R. Butler@41:
Regarding southern elites dominating policy, well, yes. They were the ones bankrolling much of the American Revolution (frankly because a lot of them felt they should be treated as barons, i.e. nobility, but the King wasn’t playing ball, and they figured that this democracy thing people were so enamoured with would obviously fail within a generation and they’d be the ones in charge after that as the rightful rulers).
And I mentioned above about the slave trade already being illegal by the time of the War of 1812. On the American side that was less the result of the abolitionist movement and more the result of the Southern elites wanting to protect their ‘investment’ by not diluting it with more slaves being brought in. After all, they already had ‘breeding stock’, so banning the import of new slaves served to make the richest Southern plantation owners even richer.
One suspects that the Resistance to any ‘murikan occupation of Canada would only be reinforced by the inevitable imposition of three malign American influences:
• College athletics
• Baseball
• Outdoor sports routinely staged with more than 15cm of snow on the ground
On the other hand, Canada engaged in a preemptive strike with Nickelback and Celine Dion, so…
Why do the septics think that Canada would join the USoA as a single … thing?
There are at least 13 separate political units right now, and many more if you are really paying attention.
Jaws@46:
The Grey Cup (the final game for the Canadian Football League) has a few times had snow fall on the field during the game, in an uncovered (at least at the moment) stadium.
@48: Yes, the Grey Cup has occasionally had that happen… but it’s never planned that way, even when it happens that’s the last significant outdoor stadium sporting event of the year, and with global warming (not to mention the hot air from DC making its way north) it’ll be even less likely.
I would have mentioned Budweiser, but that incidence of war crimes has already taken place.
@ 26 Dennis K
X-D
Even I got that and I’m Australian. We make similar fun of the New Zealand accent. By which I mean the New Zillend eccint.
What would annexing Canada and Mexico do to the electoral college and congress?
No republican majority would ever happen again and there would never be another republican president.
Plus, we’d have Québec and that horrible French they talk.
Not that we could take Canada ‘cuz Canada’s Really Big. And if Russia keeps on shrinking… ;)
Who said they’d be getting representation? That’s not how this sort of naked imperialism generally works… Just ask Puerto Rico.
[historical]
France invaded Spain back at the beginning of C19.
Didn’t stick.
When I was in school, this was taught.
Quite nationalistic, but then, Franco’s Spain was kinda fascistic.
(Also, the suspicion and dislike remains to this day. Historical memory is a thing)
(Nations and States)
jenorafeuer and many others; my thanks for your clarification.
Certainly 1812 provided the ‘rocket’s red glare’ thanks to Sir William Congreve.
If Trump seizes Canada and Putin ‘recovers’ Alaska…what then?
Re Baseball: Who has read Gould’s The Creation Myths of Cooperstown?
chigau@47 I think part of idea of an annexed Canada being only one state is that Trump is the living embodiment of the old cliche of the American who asks you if you know John in Toronto. Because he doesn’t realise there’s any other city in Canada, and thinks it’s small enough that everyone knows everyone else.
re killyosaur @43: My sentence was unclear. I was not trying to say that Crown Royal is a bourbon. I was trying to say that I do not care much for bourbon, but I do like Crown Royal, and I would not mind some barrels of it coming into the US.
Pierce R. Butler@41,
Thanks – that looks an interesting reference.
#49: They haven’t been paying attention.
Marcus Ranum@54:
We’re the second largest country on this planet Earth!
Then soon we’ll be first!
(For those who don’t get the reference, the song is ‘Canada’s Really Big’ by the Arrogant Worms.)
I would very much like to know if Lt Col Brown got as far as stockpiling sufficient whiskey to fuel an invasion, and whether anyone knows the location of any of these century-old aged whiskey stashes.
jenorafeuer @ # 47: … southern elites … were the ones bankrolling much of the American Revolution …
I regret to keep carping, but what I’ve read contradicts that too.
Most of the Revolutionary impetus came from Massachusetts, followed by Virginia (which did not really identify with “the South” until generations later). Much of the (non-French) financing came from English-born, Maryland-resident, merchant and shipbuilder Robert Morris (also the name of a modern MAGA megachurch pastor of multiple sex-abuse scandals); his efforts to claim repayment shaped much of US politics in the 1780s & ’90s (notably, Alexander Hamilton’s push for a strong central government and the Whiskey Rebellion). (King Louis didn’t get full payback either.)
“The South” 250 years ago meant basically the Carolinas and Georgia. Per my current history reading, H. W. Brands’s Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times:
This concurs with the rest I’ve read on the time. During the two years between Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution, fighting ceased almost everywhere except Georgia and the Carolinas, where a de facto civil war continued between rebels and loyalists. (Kevin Phillips makes a strong case for considering the English Civil War, the Revolution, and the US Civil War as a sort of continuum in his The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-Americanism, if you really want to get into the weeds on all this.)
Your point about “a lot of them felt they should be treated as barons, i.e. nobility…” I can’t deny, but I think much of the rebellion arose from greed for land and frustration at King and Parliament’s unreasonable demand that wannabe settlers respect the treaties with various Native nations (themselves derived from building alliances against French and Spanish machinations). North-of-New York motivations had more to do with restrictions on trade and industrialization (the colonies weren’t supposed to even smelt the iron they mined), plus that taxation stuff (colonial leaders expected “defense” against aforesaid Indians, French, and Spanish, but did not want to pay for same).
Fortunately, to return to the topic at hand, US-Canada frictions during what some Southerners still call “the War of Northern Aggression” did not reach the point of major Aggression across the St Lawrence-Great Lakes-49th Parallel line, much to the chagrin of those southern elites (and certain Yankees). However, should Ottawa decide to come to the defense (or the “defence”) of those impudent Greenlanders …
I think it apropos to mention here that a feature film named “Canadian Bacon” exists and is, perhaps, relevant.
@59 That is fair. Crown Royal is ok, I still prefer bourbon.