In Trump’s Assault on Reality, Canada Can Fight Back

At first, Donald Trump's remarks about Canada becoming the 51st state seemed like a joke. Just a few weeks later, we all realize that an American attempt to annex Canada is a serious possibility requiring serious countermeasures.

A Democratic Congressman from Rhode Island has even introduced a bill to prevent the U.S. from spending money to invade or seize Panama, Greenland or Canada.

It’s a nice thought. But the bill won’t get out of the foreign affairs committee, and it’s more confirmation that the Trump regime is thinking about a hostile takeover of this country. Whoever wins the impending Canadian election, preventing that takeover will be top priority.

An outright shooting war does not — yet — seem likely.

It would be disastrous for us, worse than Ukraine, with missiles and aircraft attacking our cities and infrastructure within minutes of launch from American bases — all along our famously undefended border.

They wouldn’t be needed, but they’d make great television, which Trump always likes. Such a war would shatter whatever is left of the "rules-based international order." And it is likely to turn into yet another American quagmire.

But we are already in the first stages of a hybrid war; Trump’s tariff threats are only the opening shots. In our case, disinformation is likely to play a key role in demoralizing Canadians and damaging our institutions. We can win that war, but only if our governments take one critical step.

Disinformation is a staple of hybrid warfare, and it doesn’t have to be consistent. For example, Trump recently complained about the U.S. being "ripped off" by our dairy and lumber industries.

That was a substitute for his unpersuasive fentanyl-and-migrants argument, though a Trump underling recently revived it by claiming that we are ignoring fentanyl labs right here in Canada. (In fact, RCMP busted a "super lab" in October 2024 in Falkland, B.C.)

Rage farming against Canada

We can expect social media to explode soon with anti-Canadian rage farming, attacking everyone from new Prime Minister Mark Carney to politicians, staffers and their families, all the way down to ordinary Canadians. It’s a notably Trumpist approach: always blame the other guy for everything. It’s never that Trump has something good to offer; it’s just that the opposition is even worse.

Our legacy media, largely owned by a U.S. hedge fund, will dutifully report these bogus outrages, thereby encouraging more of them.

Over 800,000 U.S. residents are Canadian-born; as many as 60,000 of them are undocumented. Like Texas governor Greg Abbott shipping migrants to New York, Trump might round up a few hundred undocumented Canadians and dump them at some border crossing, where they could join thousands of their fellow Canadians waiting to self-deport. Again, such events would make great TV.

Kristen Hopewell, a professor and Canada Research Chair in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, recently argued that Canada should hit back not just at American goods, but at American technology, services and intellectual property.

Innovative retaliation

“Canada should explore more innovative forms of retaliation,” Hopewell wrote, “including a ban on American social-media platforms such as X and Facebook, digital streamers such as Netflix Inc. and online retailers such as Amazon. An alternative to an outright ban is to jack up digital services taxes on these companies to levels equivalent to Mr. Trump’s tariffs.”

We might go even further. In the 1930s, the Conservative government of the day started the CBC as a home-grown counterbalance to the American radio stations that were flooding Canadian airwaves. The Canadian government today could treat social media as the public utility it is, and offer taxpayer-funded Canadian versions of Facebook and X.

Operating as arm’s-length crown corporations, such services (including the CBC) would provide reliable, fact-checked information while rigorously blocking disinformation sources and bots.

While the Trump regime is trying to flood our zone with shit, we could flood theirs with accurate information about both Canada and the U.S. All our media should target Americans as well as Canadians, giving the Americans reliable news they can’t get at home.

It might even be necessary to buy back some of our legacy media from the hedge funds and provide newspapers and magazines with a kind of basic income — enabling them to publish at least in local communities that would otherwise be news deserts. And again, fact-checking would be rigorous for both news stories and opinion pieces.

Plenty of criticism to go around

This information counterattack would not be all "pro-government." It would include plenty of criticism of local, provincial and federal governments across the political spectrum. But critics should be able to present factual evidence for their opinions, not mere name-calling and abuse.

That would be the critical step our municipal, provincial and federal governments must take: to be honest with us even when they’ve made mistakes. If governments consistently offer factual information as the basis for their policies and actions, they will gradually regain public trust. Some stubborn faction will always disbelieve anything governments say, but most of us will see the stark difference between Canadian truths and Trumpist lies and abuse.

Very early in my journalism career, a friend gave me 10 words of advice: “Tell the truth, tell it often and tell it well.”

Canadian governments that follow that advice may find their lives are bumpy and embarrassing at times. But if they keep at it, they will also find Canadians solidly behind them no matter what the challenge.