MAGA’s new plan to take Canada without firing a shot

0:00Jackson Hewitt has a great tax prep deal, $149 or less. Missing out is like ignoring the check engine light in your car. You regret it. Seriously, the price is only $149 or less, no matter how complicated. So don't wait. Like when you get a password expired today alert or you're shopping online and there's only one item left. It's like your taxes are in the cart, just complete the purchase. Hurry, this deal for $149 or less is like your phone at 1%. It's about to power down. Limited time offer for new clients on federal returns participating locations only terms of Jackson Hewitt.com slash $149. Hello and welcome to the bunker news without the nonsense. I'm Ross Taylor. Donald Trump has of course been busy bombing Iran in the past fortnight, but that may not keep him happy for long and he's made no secret of his ambition to take over Canada. Soon after his second inauguration he started referring to Canada as America's 51st State and in early March he described Mark Carney the Prime Minister as the future governor

1:03of Canada. To many Canadians the idea of a U.S. takeover is laughable but not all. The Premier of Alberta has a close relationship with Trump and the separatist movement there reportedly has links with the U.S. State Department. Is Trump serious about invading Canada? Could he occupy it by stealth? Or is it all just trolling? Joining me to talk about the threat is Canadian journalist John Last who recently wrote about the MAGA plot to invade Canada for the new republic. John, thanks for joining me on the bunker. Happy to be here. So Trump aside, how does the wider MAGA movement see Canada? Well, that's a funny question. I think for a lot of people in the MAGA orbit Canada kind of represents the sick version of Western civilization. They increasingly see the vastness this place that has kind of fallen to a kind of lily-libered liberalism, which endorses diversity and DEI programs and that kind of thing.

2:05Canada in a lot of ways has built its national identity on a lot of the values that America and the sort of MAGA movement are very sort of forcefully rejecting right now. Values like multiculturalism, which has been a core identity of Canada or a core aspect of Canadian identity since the 1970s. And so there's increasingly, you know, some of the experts I talk to frame this as a civilizational war, right? A lot of people in Trump's orbit in the White House are increasingly seeing their role as going anywhere in the world where there are dominant liberal progressive movements and sponsoring their internal enemies in order to bring them down. And those enemies are usually more aligned with the kind of sort of progressive identity politics that define the MAGA base. Why is the Alberta and not another Canadian state that is susceptible to Trump's over-chores? Tell us about Alberta, what it's like. Yeah. So Alberta, often in American media, they call it the Texas of the North.

3:08And that's not entirely fair. Alberta is quite similar to the rest of Canada in the sense that it values things like socialized medicine. It has left-of-center positions on a lot of hop-button-american issues like religious diversity and abortion rights, LGBTQ rights. But it is true that Alberta has a lot in common with the sort of broader Western frontier culture, which sort of prizes individualism has this bootstraps mentality and it tends to bristle at federal overreach. So Alberta is a really sort of fruitful entry point for disrupting Canadian Federation, which has been in a sort of delicate balance for a long time now based on a lot of kind of informal assumptions. Alberta's sort of basic hostility to the idea of federal government makes it a very fruitful place for opponents of Canadian Federalism to start organizing. And it's got a lot of oil, hasn't it?

4:08That's the other thing. That, of course, Alberta represents, you know, Quebec also had many separatist movements in its past. Quebec separatists probably came the closest of any sort of regional movement in Canada to actually realizing the breakup of the Canadian Federation. But Quebec is a progressive province. It's much more European and style. And though it has lots of resources like everywhere in Canada, it's not quite the same as Alberta, which is a petro state. And it has vast deposits of critical minerals as well. And so if you're an American government that is sort of thinking along the lines of 90s, 2000s era aggressive, you know, global imperialism, Alberta is a very attractive target because it presents very clear resource advantages. And is it for that reason that they've been sometimes subsidizing the rest of Canada that some of our persons feel that the rest of Canada owes them a bit? Yeah, there is this thing that is a hot button issue within Canada generally called equalization.

5:11It's kind of a bit of a misnomer. Basically, it's about how the federal government apportions taxes that it collects across the different provinces. And what that means is that certain provinces pay more in federal tax than they get back in federal spending. This is a really complicated issue because, you know, some say that Alberta gets more investment than other provinces. The federal government famously purchased a very, very expensive pipeline for Alberta not too long ago. Alberta definitely does see a lot of investment, but it also does generate a lot of revenue for the federal government. And increasingly after 15 years of liberal government at the federal level, Alberta, which is a much more conservative province, has kind of a lot of Albertans are sort of saying, why do we keep funding this government that doesn't represent us? They vote for conservatives in every election. There are very few pockets of dissent within the province. And yet time and time again, it's the liberal parties who are running federal policy.

6:16So this has been a sort of festering wound for 15 years of liberal leadership. And now it's just a very fruitful wedge issue for a lot of bad actors. And the premier of Alberta is a woman called Daniel Smith. She got involved in trying to negotiate lower tariffs on Canada last year when Trump kept escalating and de-escalating. And she was co-zing up to various MAGA figures. How did that go? Not very well. I mean, Daniel Smith, I think, is a very shrewd political operator, but in that instance, I think she fell it into the category like a lot of Canadian conservatives keep finding themselves falling into of being a bit of a useful idiot. They are more inclined to reach a deal with United States because they see less of this kind of ideological opposition with Trump. But the thing that has been proven time and time again in these negotiations is that America is not a trustworthy negotiating partner. And Trump in particular will often demand deals, agree to them, and then rip them up and

7:21say they were terrible. And Canada has been on the losing side of that many, many times. So Daniel Smith is one of just many conservative leaders. You know, Pierre Paulier, the federal conservative leader is another one. There's an MP named Jamil Javane, who's also been traveling back and forth to the United States to do these sort of trade-on-voy talks. He's a former friend of Vice President J.D. Vance. And all of these figures really believe that the solution for Canada is to remain a junior partner to the United States because that is better than all the possible alternatives. But the liberal party under Prime Minister Karni is doing is really trying to diversify with the assumption that the United States is going to eventually make it hurt for us one way or another. And if we don't build those buttresses now, the whole game could be over. So Mark Karni won last year's elections. And that was partly on a patriotic anti-Trump platform in the wake of all the tariff threats.

8:23Does that cut less ice in Alberta? Is he not so popular there as he is in other parts of Canada? Well, this sort of gets into the nitty-gritty of Albertan politics. On the provincial level, Albertan politics has long been dominated by a party that's called the United Conservative Party. That's the party of Daniel Smith. That's actually the merger of two other conservative parties. So you're getting a picture of what this province is like. It's a lot of conservatives talking to conservatives. Recently, dissatisfaction with that kind of decades-long one-party rule led to the election of the NDP. That's the Social Democratic Party in Canada, which is the polar opposite politically to these conservative movements. And a lot of people were sort of like, what's going on here? One explanation is that Albertans, they will rather vote for socialists than they will for liberals because they hate liberals that much. That is starting to shift now. You know, some say that Karni is governing as a national unity candidate or a national

9:24unity government. His party has seen defectors from the conservatives and now also the NDP. So some say he's governing as a national unity candidate or a national unity prime minister. He also is governing a lot like a center-right conservative. And what you're seeing in Alberta now is that the support for the liberals is kind of rising to a surprising extent on the federal level because dissatisfaction with the federal conservative party and with its kind of capitulation to U.S. demands is growing. And people are starting to notice. You asked about sort of whether national unity plays the same in Alberta. I think one of the sort of misnomers or misunderstandings in this whole situation is that Alberta's distinct regional culture and its kind of desire for all of this talk of independence is giving the impression that Alberta doesn't want to be part of Canada. But if you look at the survey data, the polling data on these questions, only really 10%

10:27of Albertans see themselves as really preferring independence. The majority of the rest of the support, so the total support is about 30%, that's another 20% or so. That 20% is soft support for separatism. And those separatists, quote unquote separatists, really want to use this issue as a wedge against the federal government to gain more autonomy over how money is spent in the province. And also to address these concerns that Alberta is being taken out and spent in other provinces. So it's not really about whether or not people don't want to be Canadian or don't identify with Canada. The vast majority of Albertans, I think most people would tell you, feel strongly that they're Canadian. Feel that Albertan identity is a Canadian identity. Now that said, that doesn't account for the sort of 10% that are leading this charge and who are increasingly finding themselves in control of the levers of political power.

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12:32fast, which is our absolute favorite effort. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zipper Cruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zipper Cruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip. Smith called a number of referendums, and of course none of them are outright to seed from Canada. What are they? What issues is she trying to g up? The issues she's chosen are really key wedge issues to drive the base away from voting yes on independence. If you look at what these referendum issues are, they're the things that most animate that soft support we were talking about for separation. One of those referendum questions is about provincial control over immigration.

13:33This is a bit of a sort of legal constitutional fantasy. It's probably unlikely to ever come to pass. But what it does do is it gives people who are really sort of amped up by anti-immigration rhetoric online a chance to vote yes to that, but no to separation. And similarly, other referendum questions are hot button issues in the debate over separatism. So those include things like provincial control over the appointment of judges. That is because a lot of conservatives, especially far right conservatives, see provincial judges stepping in and saying it's not constitutional to deprive medical care from trans youth. It's not constitutional to put a question on independence to a vote. And they see those judges as federal agents overreaching into the province's autonomy. So it's a lot of sort of wedge issues like that that are designed to kind of separate off that soft support and give them an excuse to vote no on independence. Like a lot of Daniel Smith's employees in the past, this is really about keeping what

14:36is quite dangerous and rabid fringe base within her conservative party happy without facing the risk of actually breaking up the country. So how much is the separatist movement just cover for getting into bed with Trump? Is that a really a part of it or is it something that are not really daring to speak about yet? I would argue that the core of the separatist movement is effectively a kind of American appeasement movement. Now appeasement can take a couple different forms, but if you look at the people who are leading the Alberta prosperity project, these are the people who are leading the efforts to put a referendum to a vote. They are people who have been radicalized online by the experience of COVID. They have a extremely far right view of government. And they are talking openly about preferring, you know, not even statehood, not even US

15:36statehood, but US territorial status. So that's turning Alberta into a territory like Puerto Rico or Guam. These are people who have openly talked about that being beneficial because they don't pay federal taxes. So the core of this movement really is treasonous. I think the difficult truth here is that while there is lots of soft support among Albertans who are frustrated and who have been immersed in a kind of grievance politics, that's very common on the right all around the world right now, the organizing impetus for this group are people who the United States is willfully using to destabilize and break up Canadian Federation. And what moves that they made towards MAGA? Have they been having meetings, MAGA keen? Yeah. Well, there have been some very high profile and extremely controversial meetings with US State Department officials in Washington.

16:37One of the leaders of this movement who is a disgraced lawyer named Jeffrey Raff, he traveled down to Washington three times, met with people he said went straight from their meetings into the White House. And the last of those meetings took place in what's called a secure compartmentalized information facility. These are sort of special rooms designed to prevent any kind of radio surveillance observation. They're usually used for sort of high level confidential meetings where you discuss sort of classified information. And what he said they were discussing was communication strategies. I mean, I hear that and I think about, you know, the US government unleashing its army of, you know, red pills, MAGA bots on Twitter in order to torque this referendum one way or the other, right? You know, this was met, asset should have been with quite a bit of outrage from a lot of Canada that these people who are not elected, not appointed have no real political authority at all are going south of the border and actively planning how the US might aid in the

17:38break up of our country. Of course, all of this has to be taken with a grain of salt because these people who are leading this movement are insane. They are people who have been radicalized over and over again by the experience of COVID, by, you know, social media, by anti-immigration rhetoric, by anti-federal government rhetoric, by the convoy, this famous sort of incident in Canada where a bunch of truck drivers descended on Ottawa and held the city hostage for weeks. These people are not thinking normally, and so they aren't also very reliable narrators. When he says he was meeting with people who went straight from his meetings to the White House, he could have been talking about people like Steve Bannon, who have openly talked about Canada as a frontier for American expansion, or he could have been talking to some junior staffer who was telling him what he wanted to hear. We have no real way of knowing, but we have to kind of treat this threat as real. And do you see evidence of their playbook? What's in their minds?

18:39How is this ideally for the Alberta Prosperity Project going to work out such that Trump has control over Alberta? Well, there's a couple different scenarios, and they're sort of each scarier than the last. The first is that this is designed to kind of just destabilize the federation, force county to spend a lot of political capital, and make future negotiations over Kuzma that the free trade agreement in North America, much more consequential, and really sort of force county's hand on a bunch of things. For that to work, that means that these Alberta Prosperity Project folks just have to run the referendum. They're already accomplishing that, right? The sort of scarier version is that the APP are going to use the tools of the American State Department of American influence operations, which we know have been used widely around the world, in order to increase their support to a point where, let's say, they get 30 percent or 40 percent of a vote in a referendum. There is plausible deniability about whether or not this is an oppressed minority that

19:44is in need of liberation and support. And that's the nightmare scenario for Canada is that the extremists within Trump's orbit who talk openly about a greater North America stretching from Mexico to Greenland. Those folks are looking at this referendum and this movement as an opportunity to kind of create a pretense to actually start forcibly annexing parts of the territory. That's a pretty extreme scenario. I'm not entirely certain that that is what's going to come to pass. But the important thing is that it creates a really, really delicate situation for the federal government who has to make the case for national unity and also, you know, prevent in any way that they can. These foreign influence operations coming from south of the border, they have to somehow stop right wing podcasters from flooding across the border and making inflammatory content. They have to stop the sort of busing of volunteers from Idaho and Montana over the border to

20:45start canvassing or even stuff ballots. They have to do all of that without creating the impression that the federal government is quashing dissent. Because if they do that, that only feeds the idea that this is a pretext, that this is a justification to liberate Albertans from Canadian overreach. How seriously is Mark Carney taking all this, do you think? It's really hard to say. I think Mark Carney is taking Canada's extreme vulnerability to the United States very seriously. And you're seeing that through these kind of multilateral agreements over trade and military assistance with lots of countries that until very recently were enemies of Canada, largely on the request of the United States and thinking of places like China and India where relations were chilled for a long time because of their sort of difficult relations with the United States as well. So Carney is definitely trying to diversify.

21:47But when I think of my conversations with security experts about this, what I heard over and over again is that if the United States military wants to march into Canada and claim territory for itself, nothing is going to stop it. We don't have the capacity. We don't have a military that can adequately defend our territory. So what Carney is probably thinking is, how do I make this as costly for the United States as possible? I imagine that there are people in his office who are watching this extreme closely. You've already seen that Carney has made a lot of pretty substantial concessions to Alberta. It struck this grand bargain over fossil fuel production that effectively sold environmentalist down the river under decades of environmental legislation. And it seems like he's really trying to use prosperity in Alberta to defuse this situation. So I think he's taking it very seriously. The difficult aspect of that is that Canada does not really have tools to treat the foreign

22:49influence aspect of this seriously. It can't do criminal investigations against people like RAF and other leaders of the APP because the sort of intelligence to evidence pipeline they call it, the process for actually prosecuting those cases is far too slow. And you're seeing this elsewhere where foreign influence operations have been successful. If you look at Britain, after Brexit, Britain is still figuring out who's responsible for what there. This is likely going to be a similar situation. And as far as the more under the table tactics for countering foreign influence operations in Canada, Canada doesn't really have a lot of capacity as far as that's concerned. Our internal intelligence services are not that deft when it comes to tackling influence operations. One can hope that within his office there's lots of secret conversations going on about how to turn this referendum towards national unity and break away that soft support. I do think he's taking it seriously, but it's hard to say how successful he'll be.

23:52It's about hearts and minds then because you describe Canada in your piece as famously unpatriotic. And yet, you know, from a British perspective anyway, the threat of tariff seemed to unite Canada. Yeah, the difficult thing I think for a lot of countries around the world, not just Canada right now, is that liberal and sort of left of center politicians, political leaders, activists, they need to find a way to articulate patriotism and national identity that does not seed ground to the right. And you know, the right wing has owned, and especially the far right wing has owned the issue of nationalism and patriotism for a very long time. You had this whole debate over Kierstheimer putting, you know, union jacks on everything for a while, it was the same kind of conversations in the office that led to that, right? How do we reclaim national identity? Canada has a problem in that, you know, it has long been sort of identified as a kind of sort of post-national state, right? People don't identify with Canada the same way that, you know, a Brit feels British or

24:54an American feels American. That said, Canadians really do identify as Canadians over one issue in particular, and that is our difference from the United States. And so the more that these guys go down to the States and talk openly about the benefits of American statehood, the more that kind of this thing becomes clearly an American sort of influence operation, the more Canadians tend to pull away and recoil. And that's because we are massively different than America, and most Americans don't know it. How much Canadians be, do you think at the moment? I think Canadians have lots of different reasons to be extremely worried right now. I think that the stakes are very high, and the ice is very thin. If things break poorly for us, Canada could disappear extremely quickly, or we could become a kind of, you know, vassal states where we have ice operating within 200 kilometers of the border, and that's more or less throughout the entire country, right?

25:58So things could go very badly for us. That said, it's very important right now not to think only in terms of worst case scenarios, and I think Canadians need to be aware that these things are possibilities, that without action on the part of moderate, comfortable middle-class Canadians to sort of defend what they have, it could all come tumbling down, but this is still an extremely fringe minority, and it's still a highly unlikely scenario. And as long as it remains both of those things, we don't have too much to fear, and actually, we're doing a hell of a lot better than a lot of other countries around the world. So we should be grateful for what we have and really try and protect it. That means defending, you know, the idea of Canadian unity and Canadian multiculturalism in the face of these sort of more rabid fringes. John, I hope you're right. It's me too. John, last. Thank you for joining me on the bunker.

26:59Where can people hear from all from you? Yeah, you can find all of my work on my website, www.johnwlast.com. Brilliant. Here at the bunker, we want to keep giving you information that keeps you in the loop and well informed. So if you like what we do and want us to keep going, why not back us on Patreon? For as little as £3 a month, you'll get all our episodes first and add free, as well as access to all of our exclusive merchandise. Thank you very much for listening. I'm Ros Taylor, reporting from the bunker. The bunker was written and presented by Ros Taylor and produced by Liam Tate, with audio production by Robin Liebern, art by Jim Parrot and music by Kenny Dickinson. Managing editor is Jacob Jarvis, group editor Andrew Harrison and the bunker is a podmasters production. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.

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