Stand on guard for thee?

Canada has rarely faced the threat of invasion. But what would happen if the Americans attacked? Would we surrender immediately, or put up a fight?

Having lived in Canada most of my life, I’ve formed certain ideas about what it means to be Canadian. Sure, most people are more or less the same no matter where you go, but right or wrong I’ve always felt there are some qualities that are especially ours.

It’s clear we’re a relatively happy, well-educated and affluent people that lean towards kindness. There are plenty of international surveys to bear this out. Every year, the UN says we’re one of the best places to live. Recently, a study of people in the service industry said they prefer Canadian tourists second to only the Japanese. We’ve heard it time and time again: Canadians are good people.

It was with this understanding that I moved to Amsterdam last June. Living on the banks of the Amstel afforded many riverside conversations with local strangers interested in learning more about my home country.

Of course, I was equally compelled to educate myself about my new home, its history, and in particular, its role in World War Two. I heard endless heroic tales of resistance and bravery against the forces of evil. Everyone knows someone that helped the Dutch Jews (of which over 100,000 were killed). How powerful to be living in a place that had seen such tragedy. Each building … the things they’ve seen.

Conversations like these would typically find their way back to me being from so far away and how strange it is that such nice people like Canadians are neighbours with the USA. It’s true, I’d think: Canadians really must be good people.

I’m typically quick to defend America. I consider their reputation as overbearing and imperialistic a natural side effect of their size and power and find it hard to imagine a nation with equal clout performing more admirably on the global stage. They may be far from perfect, but compared to empires past it’s hard to dispute they could be a heck of a lot worse. As you can see, I’m more of a realist than an activist, and typically float to the middle of an argument, finding excuses for all manner of behaviour, both politically and socially (I’m an excellent drinking buddy).

After six months in Amsterdam, my fiancée landed a job in Copenhagen, so it was off to Denmark. The experience of moving to a new European city was relived all over again. New neighbourhoods, new restaurants, new friends with new names to memorize.

Living in a city with visible bomb shelters and the accoutrements of war resulted in similar conversations as in Amsterdam, with a similarly disproportionate number of people claiming their direct relatives were heroes of the resistance.

All this talk of resistance fighters had the opposite of its intended effect. I started to doubt if anyone really gave the Nazi occupiers a hard time. If all the stories I heard are true, the war would have been over by 1940.

In World War Two, twenty million soldiers and forty million civilians died, including fifty thousand Canadians. The Dutch surrendered in four days and the Danes didn’t put up a fight at all.

What would Canada have done if they were in the shoes of the Dutch or the Danes. Is it arrogant to suggest we would have lasted longer than four days? Would Canadians have laid down their weapons and let soldiers from other countries taste the full brunt of German steel? It certainly doesn’t seem like a very Canadian thing to do.

As I met people in Europe as likable and warm as my close friends back home, I began to fall into the trap I’m traditionally a sucker for – namely, rationalizing inexcusable behaviour. I started to consider the impact of neighbouring Germany in the 1930s and visualizing the concept of total annihilation without surrender. No, I told myself, Canadians would have fought with everything we had, obliteration or no. It seems an impossible question to answer, but then it dawned on me – maybe it isn’t.

Imagine Canada’s resources of water and oil becoming infinitely more valuable. Imagine the USA’s debt continuing to spiral out of control. Imagine an increasingly right wing U.S. population. Imagine a time, maybe decades from now, when things might be less copasetic between our two nations. Not pleasant to think about, but stranger things have happened. In fact, those strange things have happened right where I’m sitting today.

What if The United States attacked Canada? Would we fight back? Would we risk total devastation to maintain what we have so rarely been called on to protect – our nation, our freedoms, our way of life? Would we fight against our friends and possibly our relatives to the south? If so, how long would we last? More than four days? What kind of war would it be? A guerilla style affair in our city streets or would the fighting take place in our forests and mountains? The possibilities seem endless and unrealistic.

It seems too far-fetched to imagine, a virtual impossibility. We’re too good friends. We work together, not against each other. We get along and sing each other’s anthems and have the world’s longest unprotected border. It could never happen. Or could it?