Comment by observationist
12 hours ago
Any rational assessment of Canada's military capabilities, its funding capabilities, and population will lead to a determination that they're not in any sort of position to have any sort of meaningful defense or offense without the US running point.
For that to change would require generational shifts in culture and revenue generation and so on. If the US chooses not to defend them, they're exposing themselves to unacceptable risk. If the US chooses to defend, Canada isn't contributing within the same order of magnitude. If the US chose to attack, then more has gone wrong in the world than you could possibly cope with, having a few thousand more tanks, ships, and helicopters isn't going to save the day. It'd take decades to build up population, R&D infrastructure, resources, and so on, and there'd likely be a lot of pressure to not do those things and use the US military industrial complex instead.
Not saying this is good for Canada, btw, just that the reality is they've kinda coasted on US coattails for decades now, and for better or worse, they're stuck. Which should in turn beg the question - if there's no practical or pragmatic point in spending a bunch of money on military preparedness and expansion, then why's that money being spent, and who's getting paid? Why are bureaucrats being militarized, instead of a discrete, well regulated military being created to meet whatever the need was?
Strange politics.
If they arm and empower a significant local population, they do have a credible defense, because the vast majority of leaders in the world knows fighting a decently armed insurgency is extremely costly. They watched the US itself, a military that dwarfs the entire rest of the world's militaries, do it multiple times, along with Russia and a few other countries. The "cheapest" way to win against an insurgency is to literally blow the entire country up until nothing is standing à la North Korea, but that also destroys 95% of the value of taking a country which defeats the entire point of taking it.
The bureaucrats are being militarized out of desperation.
The political faction all bureaucrats in the nation belong to can't find enough soldiers. This is because they treat those soldiers with contempt- no young man wants to die for Ottawa. Plus, the volunteer soldiers that come back from Ukraine are not going to be on Ottawa's side if domestic instability ramped up, but will be familiar with the tools of modern warfare.
Ottawa is currently (and perhaps rightfully) paranoid of a domestic uprising just as much as it is of the US invading. The US is strategically wrecking the economy of Canadian citizens only a few hours away and if those citizens violently insist on suing for peace Ottawa might lose its power forever.
So, you do the next best thing- you take the faction with the political power in Canada (in this case, Ottawa bureaucrats) and tell them that if they want to keep their privileges, they must join the reserve.
The fact that if any nation decided to actually attack they'd instantly flee (bureaucrats are not known for their courage under fire; that's why they're bureaucrats!) is a problem for future them. What matters is that, to fuel the jingoism fire long enough to keep the bureaucrat faction in power, they need to be seen to be doing something, and this is that something.
So it looks like they think they can keep the peasants in line by going full police state with drones and ultra surveillance? Good lord.
I respect regular Canadians quite a lot, but damn, Canadian government officials seem like a social experiment in how far you can push people before they blow up in your face.
Degens from up north indeed.
I wish I had written this. I think the exact same thing but you articulated it much better than I have been able to.