The Current - Is Canada ready for an unstable America?

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

The PSYOPS that the US has been carrying out in Greenland could easily come to Canada and we are woefully unprepared. That's according to author Stephen Marche. He says that trade negotiations and boycotts and national pride are not enough.  He says everything from manipulating US elections, to sending spies overseas to mandatory military service - should be on the table. Stephen Marche's books include The Next Civil War, and The Last Election and he's also host of a new podcast called Gloves Off . 

We're in the midst of the dog days of summer. And it's called that because during this period, Sirius, the dog star, rises with the sun in the morning. Not because it feels like several dogs are breathing their humid breath on you all the time. Can you tell he's a cat person? Hello, I'm Neil Kerkstel. And I'm Chris Houghton. We're the co-hosts of As It Happens.

But throughout the summer, some of our wonderful colleagues will be hosting in our place. We will still be bringing you conversations with people at the center of the day's major news stories here in Canada and throughout the world. You can listen to As It Happens wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. So, how was your summer? Were you buying Canadian things?

Did you skip that trip south of the border, hang a flag on Canada Day, maybe sew one onto your backpack? After Donald Trump's annexation threats and his sweeping tariffs, we have seen a huge uptick in nationalist sentiment in this country. Over the coming season here on The Current, we're going to be talking a lot about what it means to be Canadian today and what it will take to navigate this new geopolitical reality. And so to begin the conversation, we are joined by somebody who's been thinking deeply about this. Stephen Marsh is the author of many books, including The Next Civil War. He's also the host of the podcast, Gloves Off, and he's with me in studio.

Stephen, good morning. Hey, Matt. How you doing? Nice to see you. When Donald Trump started making these threats, I remember going to the grocery store. and you would see people who would be looking at the can of beans or looking at the vegetables in front of them, trying to figure out where they came from.

And if they came from the United States, I mean, they put the can back there and they went and got something else or they didn't get anything at all. Yeah. I had to switch from lettuce. You had to switch from lettuce. I could not find American non-U.S. lettuce,

so I had to switch to sprouts. I'm sorry about that. Nine months in. Where are we at, do you think? Are people still thinking the same way? I think so. I mean, every evidence points to that. Like, when you look at polling and you, like,

the nationalist sentiment has not declined. In fact, it's probably grown. And the reason for that is that the decline of the United States has been so apparent. Right. Like right now, we're talking about American soldiers going into Chicago. So the decline of the United States and the threat to the United States to democratic countries around the world, including its neighbor, is more and more apparent every day. And I think Canadians totally understand that. And I don't think, you know, when you look at like travel boycotts or product boycotts, they have not declined.

Right. It was not a one-off thing. When you went into the grocery store and everyone turned, I remember them turning it upside down. That hasn't really changed. On the podcast, you said the Canadian people have awoken. Well, they've realized that America's, you know, falling apart. And then our usual relationship with America, really our relationship with America for, you know, at least since 1965, is over. And that we need to make new decisions about where we're going.

And I do think that is across the political spectrum, even though there's debates on how to do that, I think there is absolutely. movement to understand how do we get out of the clutches of this country. Could I ask you just about the politics? I mean, again, I said this in the introduction. There are these accusations that the prime minister has put his elbows down. He's being accused by, you know, Pierre Polio, for example, where are your elbows? They used to be up and now, what do you make of them? Well, you know, it's funny because like, is that prudent or is that?

Well, I think it's, you know, I tend to be not that kind of analyst. Like, what I tend to look at in the next civil war, and certainly in gloves off the podcast is, like, deeper trends. So, like, the cut and thrust of negotiations are not something. that I feel like I understand. Like, he could be doing a terrible job at it. He could be doing a great job at it. I actually have no idea.

I just wonder how it speaks to your insistence that we're still in this fight. Well, the questions are the long-term changes. Like, whether we should have conscription, whether we need a whole society defense like Finland has. These are massive questions. They should be what really concern us. It's like, how do we prepare for a world

in which America is destabilizing? You said that you launched this podcast, gloves off, in part because you wanted Canadians to get over their naivete. Yeah. Where have you seen that? What does that look like? Well, it's not necessarily naivete so much as like there's certain basic questions about our national lives that we have never had to ask before, right? Naivete sounds like it's like I'm insulting people. That's not really what I mean.

It's like we've never had to think about what an invasion from the United States has ever looked like. In part, that's part of our identity. Yeah, we don't think about it. We don't think about it. We don't think about what it's like to have a military. Like, we think of our military as a specialized group that it belongs to international organizations. We're much more comfortable belonging to Francophonie and the Commonwealth and World Trade Organization and NATO being part of larger institutions. We're on our own now, and we have to think about questions of national strength, which is really foreign to us.

And we have to start thinking about those things rapidly. And we have to start coming up with answers for them very quickly. How do you think we should understand? the scope and the scale of the threat from the United States. Because if you go out and talk to people, I mean, the 51st state thing gets a lot of attention, but I don't know that a lot of people believe that we are going to be absorbed by the United States. They're going to invade Canada. Two percent of Americans believe that America should conquer Canada by force.

I mean, I think when you looked at the Pew Research poll recently, which showed that 59% of Canadians saw America as their number one threat, and 53% of Canadians saw America as our number one. ally. This is the contradictory moment that we are currently in. The other thing to remember is that states that are sliding into authoritarianism, which is what we're seeing in the United States, very clearly, and which will not incidentally be, like when Donald Trump is gone, that process will still be underway. That this is not a four-year project. This is not a four-year project. This is like something that is going to be continuous for the foreseeable future. Those countries are very

random. Like no one in Ukraine, up to the day that the Russians invaded, believed that Russia would invade. But the relationship between Ukraine or Russia is very different than the one between Canada. Well, that's true. But you don't really believe that the United States. I think that authoritarian governments do crazy things. I mean, they are right now engaged in siops in Greenland. I didn't make that up. That's not a projection. Like, they are involved in a informational warfare state with Denmark. That part could easily come from us. So soldiers walking across the border, that's a less likely scenario. Information war, economic warfare, these things are already coming towards us, right? So we need to prepare, we need to prepare for America that is

aggressive, but actually what we really need to prepare for is an American collapse. Because the key thing is that it's not just that America is a threat to us. It's that we've kind of hived off all these national security questions to being under the America umbrella. And when that's gone, we're totally vulnerable to China, to Iran, to Russia, to all of them. Because we don't know what's going on around the world, because we've relied on the United States to in part tell us. The first episode, we talked to a CIS agent, and the CIS agent tells me we don't have foreign agents in other countries.

I was like, excuse me? He was like, we don't do that. Like the CIA does that. We don't do that. That's not acceptable if we're going to survive as a country in this world. And that, of course, involves being very ugly and very morally impure. We've always been morally pure. or tried to be and wanted to be good global citizens.

And that's not on the cards anymore. The podcast is there to answer these, the real polity questions. It's not necessarily naivete. It's a question of like, what are these practical questions that we have to answer as a country about our national security,

about cyber warfare, about, you know, what it means to live beside an authoritarian country? All of those questions are very, very difficult and very, very new to us. A lot of that, those answers perhaps will be drawn from from the idea of identity. How do you think what's happened in the United States

has changed who we think we are in this country? Now, that's a very interesting question. On some level, the identity question seems like the whole thing. You have this explosion of nationalism. You have this explosive, you know, 90% of people saying they don't want to be part of America. You have, you know, I've never seen as many Canadian flags

on the street of Toronto as I've seen right now. I mean, it's really extraordinary. But the thing is, you know, the 1960s nationalism was an identity question where we wanted our own culture, we wanted our own broadcasters, we wanted all this stuff. Meanwhile, we were integrating economically and militarily with the United States more every year. The questions that we face now are practical. They're not necessarily questions of identity. They are questions of how do we survive as a nation? How do we preserve what we have against this new reality? How do we position ourselves in a world

that has fundamentally changed, right? We've only ever been part of large international structures, you know, the global liberal order, post-war order, if you will, and then before that, the British Empire. They're both gone. So we're on our own in a very different way. And I think, I mean, one thing I think we understand is that no one is coming to help us anymore.

If you want to make some, like, you can't go to America to make it anymore. America is not going to give the answer to any of the important questions in the world, right? like environmentally, politically, economically, socially, they are, they are where we used to look for those answers. We don't, we can't look there anymore. We have to look to ourselves. Who are we in that? I mean, the last episode, you have conversations with Ann Applebaum, but also Margaret Atwood, who comes to your house, which is another story entirely.

But you mentioned the 60s. You talked to her about how you, you say you'd never really experienced nationalism on the level that it exists right now. And she's able to talk a little bit about what she has seen in past. What did you learn from how? Well, she said a very surprising thing to me. I mean, she said a lot of very surprising things, actually. But the most surprising thing is she said, do not become anti-American, which is... Hating all Americans is stupid is what she said. Right. Yeah, that's...

She gets to say those things. Like, you know... Do you agree with her? Oh, yes. Because, I mean, you know, I think, well, the next civil war, like, this is a country tearing itself in half. And half of it is on the side of democracy. And it's on the side of the liberal democratic order that we want to...

to belong to. And half of it is not. I think also seeing America decline very rapidly into an explicitly racist and an explicitly white supremacist state. Did you know Canadian news is still banned on Instagram and Facebook? And this August will mark two years since that ban began. So if you can't trust the algorithm to keep you updated, trust world report instead. I'm John Northcott. I'm Marcia Young, and we want to unblock you from the news that matters most. Give us 10 minutes every morning, and we'll give you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the world. You can find and follow World Report wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you believe that that's what America's becoming? I think it's very, I mean, I don't know if you can just see any other pattern here, really. I mean, like it's, like there's secret police and there's, you know, that actually puts what our values are in a little, in a different light, right? Like it puts, like, we're not going to be part of that, right? And resistance to America, resistance to that American authoritarianism is also a resistance to what that, how that authoritarianism works. Go back to Atwood and what you learn from her in that, because one of the things that she talks about, and this hints at this, we, many Canadians have often defined themselves as not being American. That's one of the ways that we kind of,

and it's, whether it's health care or whether it's how we treat each other, multiculturalism, would have you. Yeah. If that's how we've defined ourselves in past, if we're not going to do that now, who are we? Well, I think, like, first of all, we're always going to be under the shadow of the United States, right? Like, that's just a reality. We're 40 million people in there 400, their 320 or whatever. But I think what we are is we're on a node in a line of democratic values that stretches from Korea to Ukraine. There's this struggle between populism and I don't know, I guess democracy, liberal democracy. They are in tension. And we are a front in that in that struggle that is all over the globe, right? America is also in that struggle. Poland does also win that struggle, right? And it's not

going to go one way or the other, right? Like no one is going to win. It is going to be back and forth for a long time. And Canada actually is more important in this particular struggle than we've been in any global struggle ever for sure. We have a huge amount of natural. resources and we have a massively educated population. That's actually our superpower, right? I mean, by some measures, like 76% of Canadian women have a tertiary education. That's a crazy number when you look anywhere else in the world. But the question is really, I think the Canadian people understand that. The question is, do the institutions understand it? Which institutions? Well, all bureaucracies, the military, you know, the diplomatic service, the CBC. Cultural institutions,

Cultural institutions too. They're facing a new reality and large bureaucratic institutions. Again, this sounds like a criticism, but it's just part of the nature of the beast. The most natural thing in the world is to think this is all going to go away when Trump has gone away and I'm going to wait it out, right? Because the elites of these institutions, diplomatic, military, and so on, they become elites by integrating with the United States, right? Like that is how you rise in diplomatic circles, in economic circles, in political circles, in military circles, right? When that changes, it's very, very hard to adapt. And the most natural thing in the world is just to let inertia take over and just proceed as if everything is the same as it was or it's going to go back.

What would you want to see instead? You mentioned, and again, in that Atwood conversation, her talking about the 60s and the cultural explosion. She was part of that, right? And us thinking about who we are as, I mean, you saw it at Expo, 67. Right. Is that what's going to happen again? Do you think is that what we need? Well, I mean, one thing that's already happened is like the so-called Canada crowd.

Like the cultural expression of the left that was just seeing us as a post-national nation and wanted to annihilate any kind of Canadian pride of any kind. That's already dead, right? Like, and not only is it dead, like, it's only going to continue to die. And Goodridden's. That's something that's going to happen culturally. But I think, you know, the anti-Americanism of the 1960s was a question of like, well, how do we not get swallowed up by this global behemoth that is going to dominate global culture? The question we face now is how do we escape the exploding star that is the United States, right? Those are very, very different questions.

I mean, to me, cultural questions are always the echo of economic and political questions. And as we actually begin to separate, as we actually have markets in Europe and Asia, and we stop just being like totally dominated by what can you sell in America, that's going to change our relationship to the globe and thus to ourselves, right? And our understanding of our position less as like Robin to some Batman, but like as our own force in the world, right, capable of moving throughout the world, capable of being the Canadian cosmopolitan. that I think were an ideal of the 60s, but I think are coming back now as just a total necessity. The demographics in this country have changed a lot in 50 years.

So how do you think that will help influence the country's identity? Well, we're like we are a multicultural country now. We are defined by our multiculturalism. That is, I mean, we're in downtown Toronto, right? Like this is and... But you can see it, I mean, across the country. I was just in the Hollowate.

And you can, you see it. You sure see it in Alberta. There's several different ways that people think about this, but it is the only country in the world where the more patriotic you are, the more you believe in multiculturalism, right? The struggles in Europe over immigration, they have largely not happened here. And because of that connection, that understanding that we are fundamentally a multicultural country, right, and that that is our nationalism. There are several choices that are going to emerge in the near future about how this country is actually going to function. And my hope is that we understand that our nationalism and multiculturalism are intimately intertwined and that they actually are what we are as a country.

What do you worry? Let me just end with this. What do you worry about? You and I both have younger kids. They're going to inherit, if you're right, they're going to inherit a very different country than the one that we grew up in. I worry about being overwhelmed by informational warfare. I think we have absolutely no plan to deal with it whatsoever.

I think we have like, it's an. It's anathema to democracy to even talk about it, to even talk about control of information flows. But we are just being preyed on by terrible actors. The other thing I worry about really deeply is that the people in institutions will not make the very ugly, hard decisions like how do we manipulate American elections, which is absolutely a real polity question that we need to start asking ourselves right now. That we should think about that? I mean, every other country in the world is doing it. it is that the American political system is for sale. Like, I mean, I wrote a book with Andrew Yang called The Last Election.

I mean, I was let into the background of how all of this works. It is simply financial transactions of dark money. Like, if we do not interfere, if we do not do those things, other people will and we will lose, right? And I think thinking, like, you're shock at that. No, no, I just think it's really interesting to that. I mean, I think a lot of people will be shocked to hear that. I think I, but that's the problem, right? Like, that's not a shock to.

any other country in a world. Like, that's, that's what real politic is. That goes back to what you said earlier, which is that, I mean, we have for a long time had this image within ourselves of being the nice people. Exactly. Or the nice folks on the block. That time's over. That time is over.

Like, if you want to be the nice kid on the block, just get ready to get punched in the face a lot. Because that's, that's the world we're living in. Now, hopefully some new order appears in which we can be good global citizens again. But I don't know. I mean, I've been worried about, like, you know, the magazine article that I wrote that turned into the next civil war, you know, I wrote that in 2016, right? This has been underway for a long time, like, almost a decade, and all I see is continued decline, and we need to be ready for it. Like, how do we control informational flows in this country?

I mean, I'm not sure anyone's even really talking about it, but people in Taiwan are, right? And that was the point of the podcast. Like if you if you go to countries that actually face these threats like Taiwan and Estonia and Finland, like they have solutions, right? They're they're complicated and they're ugly, but like they're real and that's what we need to start thinking about. See, to me, that's much more important than some concession about a tariff like on Monday, right? Like these large scale plans need to be enacted rapidly and and really thoroughly and with a great deal of thought. It's an enormous project. Stephen Marsh, it's good to see you.

Thank you very much. Always a pleasure. Stephen Marsh's books include The Next Civil War and the last election. He's also the host of the podcast, Gloves Off. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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