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The Canadians are coming!

Courtesy Kevin Lippert

The United States has plenty of adversaries in the world, but at least we don’t have to worry about Canada. While Russia and Iran keep the president up nights, we rest easy knowing there’s nothing to fear from our sprawling northern neighbor.

That hasn’t always been the case. As a new book shows, mistrust between Canada and the United States persisted for a surprisingly long time, to the point that each country historically maintained war plans for invading the other. Kevin Lippert, the author of the book, “War Plan Red,” says that the antagonism grew soon after Canada gained independence from England on July 1, 1867.

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“There was a lot of sort of posturing and saber-rattling as Canada became more of an independent country,” Lippert says. “There was chest-beating about how manly a country they were as opposed to the [wimpy] Americans to the south with all their southern European immigrants.”

Some of the rivalry between the countries was local. In the late 19th century both countries were busy building transcontinental railroads, and each wanted its railroad to reign supreme. There was also a sense in those early years after Canadian independence, at least on the US side, that it was only a matter of time before the two countries merged.

“Canada was abjectly poor, very agricultural, and a lot of Americans thought it was part of manifest destiny that we’d end up absorbing Canada,” Lippert says.

The US-Canada border took on greater geopolitical significance in the early decades of the 20th century, as the United States vied with Britain for world hegemony and another war between the two countries started to seem inevitable. James “Buster” Brown, the head of Canadian military intelligence, thought that his country, which Britain had long promised to defend, would end up serving as the battleground. So, in the 1920s he drew up plans to preempt an American assault.

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“He developed a plan of rapid strikes by flying columns into the United States,” Lippert says. “The Canadians would retreat burning bridges behind them and give the Brits time to come over.”

Brown’s concerns were not unfounded. Around the same time US military officials put together “War Plan Red,” a detailed strategy for invading Canada. “The real plan was to defeat Britain in Canada and essentially take over the number one spot in the world,” says Lippert. Both the United States and Canada independently saw the conflict the same way, with attack lines running between Montreal and Albany, and Boston and Halifax.

Courtesy Kevin Lippert

World War II marked the turning point in Yankee-Canuck relations. Sparsely populated Canada committed 1 million soldiers to the Allied cause. This made it clear that we were on the same side, and afterward the countries began to deepen military, financial, and political ties. Today, Lippert says the two nations are for all intents and purposes one country.

Still, he’s not ready to rule out invasion completely. At the end of “War Plan Red” he puts together a list of hypothetical reasons the United States might want to seize Canada one day — to get our hands on the world’s second-largest reserves of crude oil or to take control of 20 percent of the globe’s freshwater supply. But in terms that are sure to be taken as fighting words across the border, he can’t imagine the conflict ever going the other way.

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“I had a harder time,” Lippert says, “coming up with reasons why Canada would want to take over the United States.”

Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.

Related:

Global domination? Whoa, Canada!

America’s borders, porous from the start

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