I resent the implication that us being separate countries is a "historical quirk." It's condescending at best and exemplifies why we feel increasingly distant from the US.

It's like saying that Belgium and the Netherlands, or Spain and Portugal, or Germany and Switzerland are one historical quirk away from being the same countries.

Perhaps another sign of the times: commenters are responding with animosity to your suggestion that Americans and Canadians are incredibly close.

It's a historic quirk that the US is a single country. It hardly feels like one most days.

Yeah, it's not a historical quirk, really. In talking to many Americans it seems like they don't really cover loyalists at all, or what happened after the Revolutionary War. Much of what became Canada was settled by former colonists from the what became the United States who remained loyal to the crown. My hometown was founded by loyalists from New York -- including the mayor of New York City -- after the Revolutionary War.

Essentially we are even closer than many people think in terms of history, but Canadian identity was seeded from the beginning with the idea of rejecting being "American". We are indeed your closest brothers and sisters because of history, but it's no quirk at all that we're separate -- it's the entire reason we stayed separate at all.

You can also see the reverse play out -- what would become Alberta was settled by large numbers of American colonists moving to Canada, and to this day you can see the cultural impact of that in the politics and world view from the region.

I don't think this is true. It's just much easier to bring in people when you have access to them to ask directly, basically.

In my short experience in public service, I met a great number of people who were not in lockstep with the so-called "values they try to force" (i.e. the political plans of the current government), so it seems they're not doing a great job of "forcing" those values if that's the plan.

HN seems to hate this but you're right. The type of people the military relies on are not in power in Canada and haven't been for some time.

Why is the US our greatest ally?

36 stratagems says "Befriend a distant state and strike a neighbouring one"

>The problem is that the USA our greatest ally isn't letting us use them as a shield.

I personally think that Canada can be our (US) greatest ally, but this is only true in the hard-power sense of the word if Canada does actually meet its defense obligations.

Canada has a huge coastline, directly adjacent to our most significant threats (China & Russia), yet doesn't have a navy to speak of.

We need Canada to step up to its own defense so we can keep being equal allies, otherwise Canada is a de facto protectorate and should pay for that privilege.

> The fear about Russia or China is unfounded.

That dismisses the greatest security threats of the era with a word. Most people in that field think those threats are very well-founded. Should Canada take the risk that everything will be fine?

I don't know much about Canada's current plans and how effective they would be.

Why don't they offer to all PRs and citizens? I'd like to learn those skills...

The only reason you can claim russia is not threat to you is their utter corrupted incompetence which had them losing cold war. In their mindset, every single one of you here living in free democratic country, doing and thinking whatever you like are a direct threat to their dictatorship and way of existence. Canada has no reason to not be another russian gubernia, they can come up with some made up claim like they would need one.

One would laugh at all this and ignore them if they didn't have enough functional nukes to cover entire civilization few times over.

Now I am not claiming the above about every russian person, nor attacking their culture or history. Actually history yes, a bit, its pretty sad and explains why they are as they are. They consistently end up with ruling elite who thinks above, maybe apart from Gorbachev (who is despised back home). Don't ever make a mistake of underestimating how fucked up russia as a country is. I keep repeating the same for past 2 decades (as someone coming from country practically enslaved for 4 decades by them) with people mostly laughing it off, apart from last 3 years.

Most people haven't noticed until recently but many countries around the world have been dramatically increasing their defense spending for several years now, pre-dating and somewhat independent of the Ukraine situation. Most of it is targeted for operational capability by the end of this decade. Interpret that how you will.

As an eye-popping number that illustrates this, just the backlog of new foreign weapon sales awaiting approvals in the US is almost $1T on its own. Countries are spending tremendous amounts of money on advanced weapons right now.

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.

The US has been consistently signalling that it is considering annexing us since Donald Trump was re-elected in November of last year... the politicians are unlikely to say it outright but I think this is pretty clearly aimed at the US and making it too costly to do so.

>For a nation with basically zero chance of invasion of its home soil and an extremely low risk of internal conflict

Clearly the Canadian government doesn't feel the same way. If they tried to conscript they'd quickly find themselves in a civil war (for the same reasons the US would), and one the Canadian capital clearly doesn't believe it'd win given how well it fared defending itself in 2022.

Of course, bureaucrats aren't exactly known for their fighting prowess either. This is mostly a statement that "Toronto/Ottawa doesn't need the rest of the country, it can see to its own defense", and to try and retain/engage the Elbows Up crowd (which, being the only reason the sitting government is in power, is completely understandable).

The difference here is presumably for the last hundred years, ending last November, there was simply no chance of a invasion of Canada. Nukes might fly overhead and end the world as they struck targets on either side, but other than that we were safe and any significant military action we took part in would be overseas and thus not justify calling up a huge number of reservists.

Meanwhile Norway was occupied in WWII, and after that spent the next decades next to the Soviet Union, and then Russia. There's clearly been a long standing risk of actual invasion.