{"id":103743,"date":"2026-07-20T06:00:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=103743"},"modified":"2026-07-19T16:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:20:08","slug":"blame-canada-evergreen-invade-canada-its-been-done-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/20\/blame-canada-evergreen-invade-canada-its-been-done-before\/","title":{"rendered":"“Blame Canada”: evergreen. “Invade Canada”? It’s been done before"},"content":{"rendered":"

Upper Canadian Cavalier<\/a> points out the obvious … that the United States absolutely could<\/em> invade Canada and there’s not a lot the Canadian Armed Forces could do to stop them. But that would be the easy part:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“A mere matter of marching …”<\/p><\/div>\n

The question of “could America ever invade Canada?” is wrong before it is even asked. Picture the MAGA politicos huddled in D.C. and the anon poasters spamming maps of how America could take Canada, as if it were even a question, as if the border were a wall and the wall the point. The whole conversation is midwits who never grasped what America already occupies.<\/p>\n

Occupation is the crude instrument of the conqueror who arrives too late, who finds the ground already held by another and must break it by force, and that has never once been the American position in the north. The American position is that of the covert shareholder rather than the invader, and a shareholder does not knock down the door of a house whose deed already sits in his desk.<\/p>\n

Empire in its highest form neither occupies nor marches, because it has learned to administer instead, and it does not plant a flag on the palace, since the flag is a confession that the palace was not yet yours. The genius of the modern Global American imperium has been to take without ever confessing, to hold Canada so completely that Canadians experience the holding as their own free choice. To reach for the army now would throw all of that away, trading a profitable and invisible dominion for a visible and bloody one, and teaching the empire at ruinous cost the difference between owning a country and holding it.<\/p>\n

The republic was born reaching north with a bayonet, and it should remember how that went. In the winter of 1775 it sent Brigadier General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold (yes, that Benedict Arnold<\/em>) up through the snow to seize Quebec. The spirit of the country rose up in the snow to meet them, and Quebec killed Montgomery in a blizzard at the walls, the land itself passing sentence on the invasion before a single treaty could be signed.<\/p>\n

That was first offensive act of the American project, it was a failed invasion of Canada that froze to death in the cold for its own arrogance. There is a symmetry waiting at the end of this essay that the reader should carry from the beginning, because a republic that opened its history reaching north may yet close its history the same way. America could invade Canada, but then it would not be able to conquer it, and in that attempt it would destroy the very thing that made its northern dominion worth having, because the soft empire cannot survive being seen and that invasion is nothing other than the act of trading quiet profits for overt pain and suffering.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upper Canadian Cavalier points out the obvious … that the United States absolutely could invade Canada and there’s not a lot the Canadian Armed Forces could do to stop them. But that would be the easy part: The question of “could America ever invade Canada?” is wrong before it is even asked. Picture the MAGA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,7,5,13],"tags":[31,316,113,506],"class_list":["post-103743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-military","category-usa","tag-army","tag-borders","tag-quebec","tag-revolution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qZh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103745,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103743\/revisions\/103745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}