Conrad Black: Carney’s invasion musings - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Manage Account Sign Out Loading subscription options Subscribefor $0.50/week Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during a Liberal caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, September 18, 2026. (Blair Gable/Postmedia) By Conrad Black October 3, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. Last Updated: October 3, 2026 at 2:17 p.m. The green shoots of rational thought may finally be surging out of the ground in the current imbroglio between Canada and the United States. In his recent interview with the New York Times, Prime Minister Carney made a good many appropriate conciliatory noises, without backing down an inch on the legitimate points of Canadian sovereignty that he has been making. It was perhaps foreordained that before this exchange reverted to reasonable civility between apparently responsible people, it was necessary that reference be made to the possibility of armed conflict between Canada and the United States.

I’ve described this elsewhere as equivalent in likelihood to an invasion of Martians or of angry elves commanded by Santa Claus. In the early 1920s Canadian Lt.-Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown, in charge of strategic planning, conceived of a conflict with United States in which Canada would take the initiative by storming across the border, seizing cities east and west. He was regarded at the time as possibly deranged and transferred to other tasks, but was revived decades later by militant anti-Americans in Canada as a clairvoyant folk hero.

Of course, there have been moments in the distant past when armed conflict on the Canada-U.S. border was a legitimate consideration. The admirers of the founders of the U.S. Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, commended themselves for doubling its size of America by the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, while shrinking the defense budget. They failed to notice that in disbanding the army of 20,000 trained soldiers that the first president, General George Washington, and his chosen successor John Adams had maintained, they lost all deterrence against abusive conduct by the Royal Navy. The British imposed a naval blockade on the United States and overwhelmed the commerce of New England with smuggling from Canada, and Jefferson invoked the insurrection act in border areas.

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I counted new measures worth $137 billion over the next five years. We can argue their merits, but they are being paid for with borrowed money

Find a news archive service — your local public library will help — and search something like ‘home invasions Toronto.’ You'll find they didn’t used to happen