Trump edition: The Canadians fighting back against annexation
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It's Mark Maron here, host of WTF with Mark Maron on ACAST. When I started this podcast, I didn't have a lot of expectations, but somewhere along the line, podcasting became a serious business. And if you're serious about making money doing a podcast, there's only one place to do it. ACAST.

ACAST generates more revenue more reliably than any other platform. Join ACAST, the number one podcast platform for monetization by visiting go.acast.com slash WTF. What are my sentiments about Trump's expressed desire to annex Canada? First and foremost, a combination of unbridled fury and white hot anger and very real fear. America is not Canada.

And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. At this point, I spent a lot of time with the president. And not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel. We're not going to be defeated. We're not going to be humiliated. We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win.

I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines Trump Edition. It's Friday the 21st of March 2025. The big news this week is of Donald Trump's call with Vladimir Putin to settle the war in Ukraine. It's also cast a light on his relationship with his closest neighbour. When Fox News asked him after the phone call why he appears to be going easier on an adversary like Russia than on allies like, say, Canada, he had this to say:

"Only because it's meant to be our 51st straight. Look, I deal with every country, indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada. The people that, now this was Trudeau, the people that, good old Justin, I call him Governor Trudeau, he was, his people were nasty." And that remark comes a week after Mr Trump said in front of native Secretary General Mark Rutter that Canada only works as a state and not an independent state.

Last week, we spoke to our foreign correspondent Memphis Barker about his time speaking to a small minority of Canadian separatists who say they would actually welcome an American annexation. It was a fascinating story and we'll be linking to that edition of the podcast and Memphis's Dispatch in the show notes. But it did cause quite a stir among our Canadian listeners. In fact, I'm going to be talking to a Canadian separatist

I think it's fair to say we received more feedback on that episode than any other edition of this podcast. Many of you felt that Canada was not being entirely understood. This is from Robert in Ottawa. I'll give you a bit of background before I respond to your question. I'm 67, and for half of my career I worked for a US company, Cisco Systems of San Jose, California.

up here in Silicon Valley North, Canada. I have cousins who are American, so I know many Americans well. My roots in Canada and the continent are very deep. I'm a great-grandson of a man who was a cabinet minister in Newfoundland during World War I, and the great-grandson of the manager of the Calgary Stampede from its inception just after the turn of the century. And I served in the Naval Reserve in my youth. So you could say I'm an unabashed patriot.

So what are my sentiments about Trump's expressed desire to annex Canada? First and foremost, a combination of unbridled fury and white-hot anger and very real fear. I can't express it loudly enough. Why? Because I believe his threats are real.

Why do I believe that? Let's start with Ukraine. I provided temporary support for three Ukrainian families in my home, so I'm all in on supporting that country's fight for its survival. The US betrayal of Ukraine is absolutely egregious and it is a real analogy for our current Canadian situation in terms of size, differential geography and cultural political differences.

I feel like I'm in Ukraine in 2014. Yes, it's not a kinetic war, but there is a brutal attack beginning on two fronts: economic and cultural. For 30 years our economy through free trade agreements became very intertwined. Trump gets elected, threatens us, and after inauguration almost immediately applies crippling tariffs on everything.

Treaty, meaningless. Hostility, obvious in every comment. You asked me about public sentiment at large. I was in school for the celebrations of Canada's centennial in 1967. I went to Expo 67 in Montreal and I remember all the songs on the radio. I won't hurt your listeners' ears by singing them.

The sentiment in Canada is amped up ten times more, in my opinion. And yet, Americans are amongst the most warm and gracious people I've ever worked with and dealt with. And I have tremendous fear and pain around what I see is possible and could be tragic, and that is our ability to create hate.

We'll never trust the United States again, not for decades. There will be always an underlying fear of betrayal again. But I don't want our two countries to hate each other because that's a recipe for the destruction of my country. Thank you. And Pierre from New Brunswick had this to say. In your program last week about the U.S. annexing Canada…

you interviewed some people in Alberta who were swearing allegiance to the United States. They represent a specific instance of conservative populist grievance politics that we see all over the world, and which is fed by MAGA and by Russian rage farmers. Many of their grievances have no basis in fact. For example, they complain about insufficient political representation. Their province, Alberta, is currently represented by 34 members of parliament and six senators.

As the 51st state, Canada as a whole would only have 42 representatives and two senators in the U.S. Congress. No more than 10% of Canadians want to join the U.S. The overwhelming majority of Canadians don't want to be part of the U.S. I've never seen my fellow citizens so angry. At the base of that anger is a mix of outrage and a deep sense of betrayal.

My sense is that all of Trump's pronouncements about us ripping off the U.S. for hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, of artificial borders, of being the source of their fentanyl crisis and illegal immigration, are really a way of preparing his base to think about Canada as an enemy, an enemy that is ungratefully refusing a wonderful offer to unite with the United States.

an enemy that should be annexed to protect American interests. Trump's talk about Canada is eerily like Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine. Unthinkable, you say? Not so sure. So a lot of Canadians are feeling worried, but we're also defiant.

Before we go any further, thank you everyone who wrote in. We do read every email, even if you disagree with us, so please do keep them coming. But in response to this feedback, we've decided to go big on Canada this week. In this episode of Battlelines, we'll be trying to get under the skin of that country, to understand those things that even fellow Commonwealth citizens often get wrong about the place, and how the current crisis is unfolding there, and of course how Trumpian expansionism compares to other territorial disputes and conflicts around the world.

With me in the studio listening to those messages is Mark McKinnon, Senior International Correspondent at The Globe and Mail, one of Canada's most read newspapers. Thank you for joining me. I mean, as I said to you when I rang you up about this, we got a huge amount of feedback from that interview. It turns out we have a huge number of listeners in Canada, which we're extremely, extremely grateful for. And it seemed to me, listening to the feedback, that we'd kind of fallen into a slight trap I, as a British journalist, should have been...

more familiar with because of course nothing annoys Brits as much as reading American newspapers writing about Britain because they always get something wrong. Something really basic and it drives people up the wall. You have obviously spent a career explaining the world to Canada and Canadians. I've basically asked you here to flip it around a bit. Could you help us out? What do you think we, the rest of the world, just don't get about Canada? I think both the listeners who left the voice notes

with what I've seen and heard from my family, my friends in Canada when I was there over Christmas, that we're a very quiet country. We aren't one that goes around waving the flag like our neighbors to the south, but we're extremely offended. We're furious. And it is for the first time you do see a real surge of patriotism. You do really see Canadian nationalism on display everywhere.

And so I think the complaint about the podcast was that it picked at not just the 10% who are willing to consider union with the United States, but elevated an obscure personality to someone of relevance in the Canadian political scene. At a time when actually the opposite is happening. People are unifying around the idea that we're not Americans. Right.

Could you explain that a little bit more about how you would explain that part of Alberta? I mean, we did. I thought we tried. I thought Memphis tried as best as make clear this is definitely a minority. You know, 90% of Canadians are called Nepal's are very opposed to annexation and so on. But here is this interesting little minority. And I suppose part of the reason I found it quite legitimate to talk to and about these people is because in situations like this, you and I have both covered in other countries,

you know that they can have, well, if not prominence, a certain utility to outside powers. They could become a really big part of this story. How would you have explained this phenomenon? Alberta is a reasonable area to focus on right now because it is the outlier in terms of the United Front. I just spoke about the premier of Alberta, a woman named Danielle Smith.

stood outside the first Premier's joint statement in response to Trump's tariffs. The other nine Premiers and Prime Minister, former Prime Minister Trudeau, signed on to the statement and Danielle Smith withheld her signature. And she has, you know, subsequently, I think when she saw the national mood, jumped in and signed the second statement. And so that tells you a little bit about where Alberta is right now. But, you know, Alberta is where you find the most alienation from the capital, from the most alienation from mainstream Canadian politics, the most America-like country.

scene. Danielle Smith is the leader of what's now called the United Conservative Party, but she comes from a movement called the Wild Rose Party that was

you know, it wouldn't be completely unfair to compare it to the Tea Party movement in the United States. Maybe she's a Nigel Farage character. And so, yes, she could have an outsized impact as this proceeds as Mr. Farage, who I've interviewed and been pilloried for platforming this, what was once a fringe figure in British politics. So I think that would have been a more reasonable place to focus because it isn't just, I can't even remember the name of the gentleman that was sort of the star of the show last time because he's not a player in this game.

Danielle Smith is a player and Alberta is an important area. And I think this morning or a couple of days ago, Danielle Smith has followed the other premiers and sort of barring the sale of American alcohol in Alberta. So that's a big step and she's on Team Canada there. But when it comes to Alberta's oil patch and putting tariffs on the oil sales in the United States, she's not doing that yet. And that's sort of where Alberta lives and where the relationship between this province and the United States is strongest. Can we talk a little bit about...

how all of this is going down in Canada, the knock-on political effects and stuff. I want to come back to the question of how one could go about annexing Canada. But just to set a little bit of the scene, so on Thursday last week, you had this extraordinary scene in the White House where Donald Trump was sitting down with Mark Ritter, the Secretary General of NATO, who had to kind of nod along to this stuff, which was pretty awkward, but where Donald Trump said... It's so perfect as a great and cherished state...

Keeping O Canada the national anthem. I love it. I think it's great. Keep it. But it'll be for the state, one of our greatest states. Maybe our greatest state. I mean, he made absolutely clear his intention is to subsume Canada into the United States.

Talk us through, just speaking as a Canadian, just how that is going down. I mean, watching Mark Rota say nothing, watching Keir Starmer go to, you know, we are members of the Commonwealth, we share a head of state, having him go to Washington and nod along and say there's no gap between him and Mr. Trump, and then invite him to Buckingham Palace to meet the Canadian head of state to invite Trump here. There's a lot of anger in Canada, as the first listener expressed, because we have, we are a member of NATO, we should be not subject to territorial threats in front of the

Secretary General of NATO, we should not be seeing our closest, you know, we look at England and France as mom and dad, as the new Prime Minister Mark Carney made clear this week by flying to Paris and London before he went anywhere else, to see the British Prime Minister, you know, extending that invitation and presumably King Charles accepting it. There's a betrayal on a lot of sides here right now and I think that Britain and the Commonwealth and NATO are going to have to figure out what they're for. That's really interesting. Do you think

I suppose we don't think about the Commonwealth as much, but it... Nor did we until recently. No, no, but that's really interesting. One of the things that came out in some of the emails was, you know, a lot of Canadians died in the First and Second World Wars fighting alongside Brits. We didn't declare war on the first time. We just went to war because you told us to.

And that's really coming out. There is a sense of that we should be together in the Commonwealth. Absolutely. People still remember the First World War. People lived through the Second World War. The Americans stayed out. Canada, the second time we declared war, we had our own debate after the invasion of Poland in 1939. But we, one day later, joined the war and we fought. There were five beaches in Normandy. One of them was Canadian.

So there is a sense that we thought we were all in this together. And then as soon as our southern neighbor turns into a bully, all of our other friends are scattering and taking cover. That's, you know, a second. We're angry at the states, but, you know, Keir Starmer and King Charles are also rising on the list. That sounds like a pretty good message to get across to British listeners, actually. You talked about Canadian nationalism there. You said you didn't think about the Commonwealth until recently. Is Canadian nationalism not something Canadians really thought about until recently?

I mean, when you asked a Canadian, as I have been in my travels around the world, "What is a Canadian?" Our easy answer was always, "We're not American." But we meant it. It was a choice by our ancestors not to join the American Revolution, to stand with the British crown. And we've developed in a different direction. The biggest difference between the two countries stems from the Constitution. Everybody knows the sort of American promise of peace, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Canada's Constitution only promises peace, order, and good government.

which leads us to gun control and free healthcare. We're very proud of those differences. We're very proud of what we've established as a different country. And to have that suddenly under threat from our neighbors and then not seeing our friends back us up, yeah, that's made us angry. We're slow to rise, but I think at this point there's a hashtag going around the Canadian social media called elbows up, which is just a reference to how we play hockey. Get your elbow up and the ref doesn't notice, but we'll put it right in your chin. And we had that reference to White Hot Fury in that message conversation.

from Robert. Can you tell us about the political impact? So I've just been looking at a recent poll which shows that the Liberal Party, the incumbent party, the party of Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney,

who seem to be heading for kind of electoral obliteration as parties that have often been in power for several years, often are in our kind of parliamentary democracies. They've jumped 20 percentage points in the polls. They've overtaken the conservatives in the space of about two weeks. What's going on? It shouldn't have happened. I mean, those in the Liberal Party were getting quite angry at Justin Trudeau the longer he lingered in power because...

It was seen as just making it more and more impossible for his successor to have a chance of retaining official opposition status. I mean, being in power seemed impossible. Being the second party was now emerging as a reasonable goal. What happened was the election of Donald Trump and his policies towards Canada

All of a sudden, Pierre Polyavra, through no particular fault of his own, but his politics spring from the same place. This is the leader of the Conservative Party. Yeah, he's the leader of the Conservative Party. Do you call them Tories as well? Yeah, they do get called Tories quite regularly. I think the word Tory in Canada has tended to mean something more centrist than I think Mr. Polyavra and the Conservatives now are.

So they've kind of gone in a more rightward direction, a more populist direction that was resounding with a lot of people. It's making an election about cost of living, about the carbon tax that was quite unpopular. Palliavra was, you know, effectively measuring the curtains for the prime minister's residence. And suddenly he looks a lot like

and that's a direction that no Canadian wants to be heading into. And all of a sudden, Mark Carney, who doesn't speak French very well, is not a terribly gifted politician, but looks like a safe pair of hands and someone who steered both Canada and Britain, arguably through some tough economic times, looks like the man of the moment. Of course, the campaign hasn't even started yet. This may all turn on its head, but it's been a remarkable reversal and just, I think, is all about that national mood where Canadians are appalled by what's going on in the United States and they're afraid of

That voting for Polly Avila is almost a nod in the direction of we like how Trump looks. That's really interesting. How would you characterize the state of the Canadian body politic? I mean, in terms of that kind of polarization in America, of course, it's been absolutely supercharged. The

the culture war, the war on woke, all of that. We see elements of it in Britain with the reform, the right of the Conservative Party, clearly enamored of that kind of thing. What was the state of play in Canada? Well, you mentioned the reform there. I mean, when I interviewed Mr. Farage, as I pointed out, he modeled his party on the Canadian Reform Party, which the reverse takeover of what is now the Canadian Conservative Party, something that's being contemplated here in Britain as well.

And the Canadian Reform Party, that's really where Mr. Pallieva springs from. He's from that sort of anti-wokeism. He nodded in the general direction, as other politicians did, of this trucker's convoy a few years ago that made headlines around the world.

plays with the same sort of media. One of the big things that he was attached to was defunding the CBC, the Canadian equivalent of the BBC. He was in that sort of culture war pocket. And I think a lot of Canadians were. Justin Trudeau, who swept power 10 years ago, was very popular there.

He was seen as sort of having virtue signaled a little bit too much and having made Canadians feel guilty for things that they weren't sure they should feel guilty about. And Mr. Pollyavita looked like a breath of fresh air until Mr. Trump came along and made that sort of wind look dangerous. But the people Memphis was speaking to in Alberta...

Lots of them were saying things like these wokies back in, you know, in Ottawa or Toronto or Vancouver or wherever, you know, they don't listen to us and all of that. I mean, it sounds like they would be the kind of people who would be voting for. They probably would vote for Mr. Polly Avra if they thought he had a chance. But there's actually another party to sort of further right that would also gather up some of those particular votes. I think it's called the People's Power Party. Mr. Polly Avra voted.

Yeah, that's exactly where he was. And the podcast was bang on and talking about the alienation that Westerners feel about the politics that really gets decided in that belt between Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and the fact that elections often get decided before Alberta's votes are finished counting. Absolutely, all of that is correct. What's going to be interesting, and the slogan from the Canadian Reform Party originally was the West wants in 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And

What's going to be interesting is going to be trying to pin that label of sort of being a Laurentian elite, as we call them, on Mark Carney, who's actually born in the Northwest Territories and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, when Mr. Pallievra actually comes from my home riding, which is just outside of Ottawa.

And he is of the Laurentians, despite all he's spent a career in politics. Again, maybe a little like Mr. Farage, very good at channeling other people's grievances, but hasn't worked a whole lot outside of being a parliamentary assistant and then an MP. And Mr. Carney, who actually comes from the West and has this very successful career in business.

And yeah, what people would call the globalist elite establishment. They won't have a hard time begging with that one. Yeah, he's definitely sort of the poster boy for that sort of elitism. But, you know, it doesn't really fit the other narrative, the East-West narrative very easily. Can we get a little bit into the mechanics of this stuff and what Trump's trying to do? Can we start first with the tariffs and the tariff war? So I'm actually quite confused and lost at this point. I mean, I think last week we saw that Donald Trump marched

10,000 tariffs up to the top of the hill and much down again. Where are we? How bad is the tariff war? And how bad is it for Canada? Really? How worrying is this stuff? I mean, you'd have to sort of have the tickers up to see which tariffs are in place, which ones aren't right now, because some 25% tariffs are in place and other ones have been paused for yet another month.

It is bad. You're starting to see Canadian companies talking about layoffs already. It would be devastating for the auto industry in Ontario if this goes ahead much longer. It will also be devastating for the production and price of American cars. I think Mr. Trump is just starting to learn some of these things. I think we had a really telling moment about a week ago when Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, threatened to apply 25% tariffs on the electricity that Ontario sells to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan, I think it was.

And, you know, when Mr. Trump has come to office, one of his main promises has been to take down inflation, the cost of food. When he saw that the electricity bills might shoot up in a hurry, we saw this sort of backing down on several fronts of the tariff war. So there's been a lot of feints. I think at this point, even Daniel Smith, the aforementioned premier of Alberta, was saying this week that she might just have to leave the

tariffs that she's imposed in place because she can't be raising and lowering tariffs with every gust of wind, which of course may give Mr. Trump an incentive to sort of slap more retaliatory tariffs on if Canada doesn't follow his up and down policies. It's very difficult right now to keep track of where the tariffs are, where they aren't. And I think that's, you know, making it very difficult for Canada to design an economic policy at the moment. After the break, if Donald Trump really does try to annex Canada, how might he go about it?

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Welcome back. I'm still in the studio with Mark McKinnon. I want to get to the real nub of this, which is how does one go about annexing Canada if one wanted to? I think the first question on top of that is, do you think this is serious? It sounds like Donald Trump means it.

Both yourself and the listeners mentioned the Ukraine example, and both of us were in Kyiv at the start of the war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Both of us were there in 2014 when all this broke out.

I think anyone who spent time covering that part of the world saw the way over decades Vladimir Putin undermined the idea, at least within Russia, of Ukraine being a separate state, undermined the idea that Ukraine should be able to make its own decisions, undermined the idea that Russians and Ukrainians were any different. And I think what Mr. Trump's doing has very clear echoes of that. And I can't think of what he's trying to do unless it

It's to set the ground for trying to take some part of Canada. You know, he's talked about the border between Canada and the U.S. being an artificially drawn line. And I think that's why people are getting upset because it's starting to seem very, very real. The mechanics of it, though, seem impossible. I mean, this is Canada is the world's second largest country by landmass. It is a member of all these organizations that are supposed to protect us, the G7, NATO, etc.,

And the population doesn't want it. 90% says the last two polls have had exactly 90% of Canadians don't want this. The other 10% say they're open to the idea. So I don't know how you'd go about doing it. Mr. Trump seems intent on at least talking about it a lot. I agree that the parallels with Russia and Ukraine are really striking. I mean, this talk about Putin saying Ukraine is not a real country, famously making that remark to George Bush, I think back in 2007 or something. And Lenin invented it and drew it on a map. All of this, it's a very strong echo.

I suppose the reason I think that Memphis, our senior foreign correspondent, was completely right to go to Alberta and talk to these people who seem like fringe and strange figures is because those were exactly the kind of fringe and strange figures in Ukraine who no one really listened to or took notice of until 2014, when suddenly they formed the kernel or the nucleus of, yes, an astroturf rebellion, but nonetheless one that ended up in an annexation war.

Do you think that might be what the American game plan is? I think it depends on what remains of resistance within the American state. I think Putin took 20 years

to create and KGB penetration of Ukraine obviously goes back through the entire Soviet era. But it took 20 years of undermining. And I think after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the next decade was basically spent preparing counter moves the next time the West, as he saw it, meddled in Ukraine. I don't know that American and Canadian troops trained together where we were until recently. I think Mr. Trump's trying to cut this off. The members of the Five Eyes Intelligence, we're integrated. Our defense services are integrated.

The Ukrainian and Russian militaries. Yeah, well, until... Especially in Crimea. Right up to 2014, exactly. I suppose I have hope that the entire American state and security establishment are not so corrupted as they go along with a bananas idea that is outside of international law and puts them at odds with all of their allies, hopefully. So I think you're not going to see Canadians starting to build a defensive wall or anything like that or doing anything to provoke Mr. Trump. I think we hope that...

American democracy or its institutions such as they are will be what protects us here. That Mr. Trump can say he wants to do these things and he may have the constitutional power to order his troops across into Canada. But if they're not welcome and American troops and generals have the experience of going places where they weren't welcome, the Iraq war is very fresh in the minds. Hopefully this will get stopped is what it is. It's an outlandish idea. And maybe this is all just...

a crazy bargaining tool to get us to agree to yet another renegotiation of the free trade agreement or something. But, you know, I share your concern. I do think this is where Trump wants to go. I'm hoping that it proves to be impossible for reasons within the United States. I know I don't want to seem like a kind of YouTube war fantasist or something, but I'm just wondering what that would look like. I mean, I'm assuming your assumption would be if

I don't know, if American troops suddenly crossed the border and

those little green men or little khaki men walking around the streets of Ottawa or something that Canadians would fight. Yeah, even three days, right? I imagine you would face similar response. We have a small but very, very well-trained army. We also, again, I don't think this is clean for the Americans. I think that the average Californian would find themselves feeling more in tune with the Canadian side of affairs than they do with Trump's Washington, Massachusetts, New York.

these states that didn't vote for what's happening, are they going to let the American military roll through to start an unprovoked war with a neighbor that doesn't deserve it or one of their friends and relatives? Again, I think the block will actually be on the American side. It's not yet an authoritarian state where Trump can just do what Putin can do. A lot of what is valuable economically, a lot of the population in Canada is very close to the American border. That's a problem. But, you know, there's a lot of North to back up to. Even three days is my answer.

It's not the first time. I mean, the Americans have... I think there was an American historian who wrote in The Atlantic listed the number of times America has tried to invade Canada. They tried in the Revolutionary War. They tried in 1812. But there's also been...

Over the years and especially during the 19th century, I think there were attempts to impose tariffs, debates about maybe we should annex it. It doesn't come out of nowhere. What can you tell us about the history of that and how that affects memories and attitudes between the two countries? Yeah, I think the Athenian raids and all these sort of historical examples of when America tried to impose itself on not just Canada but North America,

Actually, I was in Kiev when I was watching Mr. Trump's inauguration speech on January the 20th. And as soon as he said the words manifest destiny, I think that really got my attention. I felt like that, you know, everybody else in the room is waiting to hear what he was going to say about Ukraine and Russia. But I was like, why? Those were words that every Canadian was raised to see as, you know, not quite a declaration of war, but a declaration of intent.

Manifest Destiny means the sort of American belief that has the right to govern and control all of what happens in North America. So yeah, he's drawing on old, old strings there. Every Canadian will point out how the War of 1812 went and how the White House ended up in flames. I mean, with some help from the British, if we're allowed to conscript you again. But what was amazing about the sort of last 100, 150 years that we weren't dealing with this threat from the South, we were

protected by this big sort of benevolent brother to the south. And I think, I saw this online the other day and it really sort of struck a chord for me. It's like, you know, for the longest time Canadians have

looked at the United States as sort of their cool big brother. The guy who had all the cool clothes, knew all the cool music, bigger, taller, stronger than us. And now we kind of look like our big brothers had like a car accident or something. And they're not quite the way they used to be. We don't want them around on weekends because they're super awkward. Still love them and all that, but something's gone wrong there. And we hope they get through this.

Do you think that Greenland, the whole Goliath-Sanak Greenland thing is a part of that? And also, I suppose, why not let's throw in the talk about taking back control of Panama or the massing of troops on the Mexican border? Is this all part of one piece, do you think? I think so. I think the manifest destiny does apply to Greenland, to the Panama Canal, to bombing Mexico. As worried as Canadians are right now, I think I would watch for these crises to happen in an order. I think it's much easier...

for Trump to get his military behind retaking the Panama Canal or some sort of defensive takeover of, you can't see my air quotes out there listeners, but they're there, defensive takeover of Greenland than it is to get the American population behind Canada. But once you sort of, you can see a war mentality building through an action in Panama, an action in Greenland. If those

And I think Canadian leaders should be very alert to this, that these should be steps that we see as threats to us, whatever happens to Canada, whatever happens to Greenland, to Denmark, to the EU, to NATO. We're a tough one to swallow, frankly, both geographically and in terms of convincing the Americans that this is necessary. But if Manifest Destiny is something he's pursuing, that canal is probably the first thing and the easiest one to sell American people on. Then Greenland, I think Canada would be the third one on that list. So being thought.

Mark McKinnon, thank you very much for joining us on Battlelands. You can of course listen to Memphis Barker's account of his time with Alberta separatists wherever you get your podcasts, and I heartily recommend his written dispatch on our website. That's all for today. My co-host Venetia Rainey will be back in the chair on Monday for the latest in-depth reporting on this era of global ferment. Until then, that was Battlelands. Goodbye.

Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

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