The Current - Elbows up, gloves off: Can Canada disentangle from the U.S?

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

“We’re in a lot of trouble,” says Stephen Marche, the host of the new podcast Gloves Off, and the author of the book The Next Civil War, as Canada puts in the work to separate itself from the U.S. after a decades-long integrated relationship. We discuss the role U.S. President Donald Trump plays in this, and whether Canada has what it takes to go it alone.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. And this is the current podcast. Since US President Donald Trump was reelected, it has been hard to keep up with his threats to our country. He suggested taking over Canada. He's promised to destroy the Canadian auto industry. He's imposed tariffs of varying amounts on an ever changing list of goods.

There was supposed to be yet another trade deadline today, but Trump has now bumped that to August 1st and today, premiers begin a meeting on what to do next. Prime Minister Mark Carney will be joining that meeting tomorrow. Canadians have responded with counter tariffs, boycotts, concessions, and a search for other markets. So do we as a country really have what it takes to go it alone? Can we survive as a country when the superpower to the south is working against us? A new podcast called Gloves Off sets out to answer some of those questions. The host is Stephen Marsh, author of the book The Next Civil War, which looks at scenarios that could lead to a civil war in the US.

Hey, Stephen, nice to have you here. Hi, Pia. How are you? I'm great. Let me start with sort of a blunt question. Just set the stakes. How much trouble is Canada actually in? Well, we're in a lot of trouble.

I mean, I think everyone knows that. We've been integrating with the United States basically since 1965, since the Auto Pact, and now we have to try and separate from them as quickly as possible. It's a huge, it's a huge Herculean labor, really. And also, I mean, the problem is not necessarily doing it so much as that we haven't thought about it at all, right? We've spent our entire existence as a country, you know, fitting more comfortably into international systems and trying to be really good global citizens. And now suddenly we're faced with a lot of ugly questions that are political realism is what is required and we're really not prepared for that.

Okay, so when people hear you say we're in a lot of trouble, they might say that trouble is caused by one person, a certain someone in the White House called the US President. You have argued that Canada's problems with the US are not just about Donald Trump. What convinces you that he is a symptom of a problem, not the cause? Well, I mean, that was the subject of the next Civil War. The next Civil War was about the structural crises in the United States. Those are the extreme inequality, horizontal and vertical inequality, the hyper-partisanship, the decline of trust in the legal system, the decline of trust in all institutions, including the media, the church, everything, as well as the fact that it's going to be a minority majority country by 2040, which is often a harbinger of

civil war, those aren't going away when Donald Trump goes out of power. He really is a symptom of those crises. And so what we really have to face as Canadians is not necessarily the threat from Donald Trump, but the fact that the United States is in decline and very rapid, sudden decline, and we just simply can't attach our fortunes to that country. You set out to look at a future with less United States for our country. We've heard it from the Prime Minister all the way through business leaders, through other politicians, to everyday people that we need to disentangle ourselves from the United States. Given what you've sort of said,

how entangled we are, how big of a challenge is it to disentangle? Pete Well, I mean, I think the most important thing that we know that we have to do it, we've gotten to that point. The problem is that all of our institutions, including the military, including our security apparatus, including our economy and our culture too, they've been built for 80 years. If you're an elite in an institution, you're rewarded for integrating with the United States, right? Like that's being able to navigate that from a diplomatic point of view, from a military

point of view, from an economic point of view, that's been what you've been rewarded for. Suddenly the terms have very much changed. And when you combine that with the sort of natural inertia of bureaucracies and the natural inertia of people in power, turning becomes very difficult. The podcast, we created this podcast basically to ask questions that nobody else had ever asked, like how do we defend ourselves as a country? Like, that's a very basic question that we have really not spent much time thinking about ever. Like, not in 18, not since 1812. Yeah.

Right. I guess the Prime Minister might say to you, Stephen, well, I've been thinking about, in fact, we're increasing our defense spending, that that's sort of the step along the way to get to disentanglement. Well, yeah, I mean, no, steps have been taken been taken like already our trade is moving away from the United States like Movement has been made But drastic changes at the last minute are also required and some of those are really profound I think you know Carney was elected on the premise of we are disentangling from the United States. I can make it happen

That's very different from like the military elite. That's very different from The people at senior levels in diplomatic corps. It's different people at the CBC, right? Like there's like there's changes that have to be made at the institutional level that are going to be a lot harder than just Electing somebody I think probably the most symbolic thing of how we are so You know knotted together with the United States is the auto pact, right? We keep hearing it, it's just impossible to separate the Canadian and American industries. The auto pact's been in place since 1960.

So if we use that as an example, how do you again sort of like start tying that knot? Well, the problem is that, you know, all of this destruction of the North American auto sector that these tariffs are going to imply is happening at a moment when China is about ready to take over anyway. And the United States is making themselves and us non-competitive in this sector. And that's really the thing we have to realize they are this path that the United States is on is a path to destruction, right? And we need to get out of the way of this and, and move away from that. And it's, you know, it is like in that case, you know, we need to be

start preparing for a world where that's a very negligible force in our, in our, in our economy. And because that's, it's, it's underway from a lot of sides. So you're looking at the questions like people are asking questions like how do we do it and the answers are kind of like we need to separate more from the United States economically you're looking at can we actually do that and how does that look? So what is it what are the actual questions like what does it mean to actually defend Canada? Yeah. Right like as a territorial unit that's I mean even getting people who have answers to that question is tricky, right?

And the people who are doing it are often, like the guy we have on the show, he was the commander at NORAD, right? He was stationed in Colorado for, you know, the biggest part of his, not the biggest, not the longest part, but you know, the height of his career, that's where he was. And so that's a very, like,

that's what he's been rewarded for, for actually integrating. And now he has to think, okay, well, how do we defend ourselves? He's thinking through it, but it's a new question. Yeah, it's a lot to ask people, hey, figure out how we row in this direction for a long time and now, oh, paddle outwards, turn it around, go a different direction. Well, literally, I think, you know, since the end of the Second World War, we've always felt more comfortable being part of international systems.

We've always been eager, eager beavers to do the, you know, to be part of the World Trade Organization, to be part of peacekeeping missions, to be part of Francophonie, the Commonwealth. We're part of these systems and these systems are in breakdown and they're not going to sustain us. And so we need to ask what an independent Canada would look like, right? If we look at economically, the US is our biggest customer, it's right next door, that in itself makes it a lot easier to trade with them. As we look to other markets, as businesses and politicians are both doing, can Canadian companies truly compete on a global level? You mentioned China, can we actually compete?

100%. Okay. Why, I actually am very confused, having looked at these geopolitical questions, like we are not a powerless country, not by any stretch of the imagination. We have, 76% of Canadian women are educated. Do you know how crazy a statistic that is?

Like that's really, that's globally, that's the highest in the world by orders of magnitude, right? Like we, and we have natural resources and we have, I literally don't understand where this idea that we can't compete is. We compete very effectively. We are a, we remain a highly functional society,

whatever you read in the news, right? And the idea that we can't compete just to me is absurd. S1- Do you think that is partially cultural? In other words, that we have this Canadian humility, we're humble, and we just don't sort of want to own that, like we can, yeah, let's compete, let's go for it. 2.5 BD Well, I think we've always been part of these systems, right? We've always been part

of these international systems. We've always looked to, you know, if it wasn't New York or NLA, it was London before, you know, and I think that's coming to an end and not because of anything we've done, right? Or any sudden, you know, arrival of national pride or something like that. It's just that why you can't envy LA when there are Apache helicopters landing on the ground and the Marines are in cahoots with the, with ice.

That's not an admiral place, right? That's not an aspirational place. And we're going to have to be aspirational in ourselves. Today is the worst day of Abby's life. The 17 year old cradles her newborn son in her arms. They all saw how much I loved him. They didn't have to take him from me. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, families ship their pregnant teenage daughters to maternity homes and force them to secretly place their babies for adoption. In hidden corners across

America, it's still happening. Follow Liberty Lost on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. So as you do on your podcast, you talk to a lot of people. I'm going to play a little bit from your podcast. So for a long time, Canada has made money selling its unprocessed natural resources to the empire of the day. And this is something you talk to Zeta Cobb about. Zeta is the tech entrepreneur behind the revitalization of Fogo Island. There's a luxury hotel there as well. Let's take a listen to her. I remember listening to Paul Lavois many years ago, the fellow who founded Taxi.

He started his talk by saying, why is it that Canada has trees and Sweden has Ikea? And I think we've had a nice life You know, but as the great line from the Leopard if you want things to stay the same things have to change Okay, Stephen, so you say look Canada can compete on the world stage But in talking to Zito, what insight did you get about why Canada doesn't have a big internationally successful company like an IKEA? Well, we have we've had many many internationally successful companies like in IKEA? Well, we've had many, many internationally successful companies. We invented artificial intelligence in Toronto off of an insert grant. The idea that we're not contributing, we had Blackburn, we've had lots of international

companies, right? And we've created things that have gone all over the world, like, absolutely above our weight. Like, I think that's really a kind of fantasy that we don't. But, you know, I think what Zeta would say, I mean, I don't want to speak for her, but is that, you know, what Canada needs is a more, is focused more on industrial capacity and also on bridges and infrastructure rather than investment, right? Like rather than financial instruments determining what gets built,

actual investment in the structures that allow economies to flourish, right? And also I think the other thing is like, trade with people who we share values with. This is a matter of just frank sanity. Like you should not be trading, you should be fully aware that you need to support the economies

and you're only gonna be economically stable with powers that share your values. We talked a little bit about the military, but I wanna talk more because you do an episode on that. We are so deeply integrated militarily with the US, NORAD, NATO, we talked a little bit about the military, but I want to talk more because you, you do an episode on that. We are so deeply integrated militarily with the US, NORAD, NATO, and with other countries, our weapons systems are interoperable. Yeah, we're built for interoperability.

So we, and we rely on them for intelligence. Like, again, I'm just trying to put out there, like how deeply intertwined we are. Um, should, how do you rethink that? Like I, I take your point that everyone at the elite level has been told to go this direction now, it's like how, how should we as Canadians be thinking about this? Because it's a little bit scary when I list all the ways we're tied to the United States in a defensive way.

We need to have, like we don't have, I mean as I was told by a retired CSUS agent, CSUS only handles internal security. We don't have external security in other countries, right? And we like it that way because it's a lot nicer. We get to feel better about ourselves. We don't, we aren't, you know, out there being mean somewhere in the world. This leaves us frankly, unacceptably vulnerable. And I mean, the information war that we are in that we don't seem to realize we're in, we have no counter. Like India, Iran, Russia, China, they manipulate our information that works at will because we have absolutely no response to it whatsoever because we have this idea who would want to hurt us, right?

And that spirit who would want to hurt us needs to end and we need to actually start thinking through what? What it means to be strong which is a ugly question Those are good the questions that you get asked when you're pursuing. What does it mean to survive or ugly? They're not what does it mean to be the best possible global citizen? You I thought this is really provocative you looked at whether there are things Canada should learn from Ukraine in terms of its war with Russia, its experience there, given Trump's threats of annexation to our country. You talked to Tim Mack about it. Tim is a war reporter who has worked in Ukraine.

Well, the obvious one is to enhance Canada's military capabilities, right? To enforce its sovereignty and its ability to defend itself. And this is not just a matter of some sort of grand invasion type scenario, but this is a matter of making sure that there are theoretical hypothetical costs for bullying a smaller vulnerable neighbor. That's pretty provocative. I think most Canadians aren't going to think like we need to think of ourselves like Ukraine, because it just seems so distant in so many ways. The fact that that question would be considered provocative at this moment is a sign of how

far we have to go and why this podcast is so necessary. I mean, countries that slide into authoritarianism use war against their neighbors as an excuse to overthrow their own laws. That is the traditional play. That's not something Putin thought up. That's something that happens everywhere in the world where countries backslide out of democracy as the United States is doing. Yeah, I mean I would say that every single expert that we spoke to who was a military expert including the counterterrorism experts and the insurgency war experts, they would say that right now we are a snack.

And if you talk to the Finnish people, there are 5.5 million Finns, they can put a million people in the field in 72 hours. And the reason they do that is because, not because they think they can win against Russia, but they think they want to make it very clear to Russia that conquering them will be extraordinarily painful the difference between Austin so many other countries with big neighbors is just Practicalities that huge long undefended border is it

Practically possible to try and harden it is that what we need to do in this mode Well, I don't think we would harden it. I don't think that's in our interest at all. Like, I think the number one interest for us is for there to be a democratic United States. The moment it tips over out of democracy, I mean, then we are in real trouble. And the question is, what are the odds of that happening? And the odds are very much not zero, right? Already the legal system is approaching levels that are really not, like cannot really be

qualified as fully democratic. I mean, that's already happening. It's not a question of hardening the border. We're never going to be able to resist American force. What we just have to do is make it clear to everyone that there are massive costs with trying to overthrow us and to take away our sovereignty and that our sovereignty is backed up by more than good feelings. Right.

Right? And that, I mean, particularly the obvious one is the North, right? Like, I mean, the government has taken steps to do that, but we need a much more militarized North. Yeah. And with a huge amount of more infrastructure. I was at a gathering of military types not so long ago, and I was talking to them about the North, and they said, do you understand how big the North is? And to actually militarize it and defend it at every corner and crook, it is an impossibility.

Well, we should start with a few crooks. Yeah. Right, like we should start with a few places, because right now I think there are two bases. Yeah. Right, like I don't quote me on that, I'm not sure that, but like there's a, like it's not adequately defended, and there's not, you know, appropriate Wi-Fi and like,

and internet connections and all of that stuff, all that infrastructure that absolutely goes with that. Right, so that needs to be taken with maximum seriousness immediately. So today the premiers are meeting talking about the US threats, tomorrow the prime minister is gonna join them. We have heard over the last several months

from all kinds of leaders, political, business, economic, arts leaders about the threat. But for regular Canadians, they're just trying to, I don't know, have a summer holiday, go to work, try and get some money for housing, which is a problem in this country. They're doing what they would say is the right things, you know, trying to buy Canadian, elbows up for some people. Others are just like, yes, we love this country, showing national pride. What's your message to them? Oh, I mean, regular Canadians get it. Like, regular... But regular Canadians might be a little bit helpless too, right? The problems we have are not regular Canadians.

Well, I don't think they feel helpless at all. I think they're... I mean, the travel bans, the bi-Canadian spirit, like, the regular Canadian people absolutely get this and absolutely understand that threats to sovereignty cannot be laughed off and cannot be... And also, you can't just be like, oh, well, I just wanna do what I wanna do. I mean, not that there aren't those people, but the vast majority. The problem is not regular Canadians. The problem is our institutions and whether they are going to be able to catch up with the spirit that regular

Canadians absolutely embody when so much inertia and so much interest is built into integrating with the United States, right? And so much like the incentives remain. It's so much simpler to think, well, in four years, this will all go away and I can go back to being friends with my buddies at NORAD. That's not what's going to happen. That's what I'm here to say. That's not going to happen. Okay. Like, the structural problems in the United States are endemic. I see no effort there to overcome them. And Canada needs to prepare for a world of a very dangerous United States. Gloves off as your podcast is called. Gloves off. That's right. Thanks, Stephen. Always good to hear from you.

Always a pleasure. Stephen Marsh is the host of the new podcast, Gloves Off. You can search for it wherever you get your podcasts. Stephen's also the author of the next Civil War Dispatches from the American Future. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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