Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard, takes a break from the Weekly Standard to talk about the crazy things going on in the world, including the Trudeau government's new gun control plan, and the idea of an American invasion of Canada.
00:16:32.140So whatever it is, it's still extremely hypothetical,
00:16:35.860but ever so slightly less hypothetical than it was a few years ago.
00:16:41.300So anyway, the Globe and Mail article, I'll pull it up again.
00:16:45.080I'm going to quote from just a few little pieces.
00:16:47.040The Canadian Armed Forces has modeled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and Canada's potential response, which includes tactics similar to those employed against Russia and later U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, two senior government officials say.
00:17:03.580They're not naming who they are because this is a leak.
00:17:06.980A military model is a conceptual and theoretical framework, not a military plan, which is an actual step-by-step directive for executing operations.
00:17:17.040Two senior government officials said the military planners are modeling a U.S. invasion from the
00:17:21.520South, expecting American forces to overcome Canada's strategic positions on land and sea
00:17:26.320within a week and possibly as quickly as two days. Canada does not have a number of
00:17:33.360military personnel or sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American
00:17:37.580attack, so the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular
00:17:43.560military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare, or hit-and-run
00:17:49.620tactics. That'd be tactics like those used by the Afghan Mahajidine in their hit-and-run attacks on
00:17:55.960Russian soldiers in the Soviet-Afghan war. Similar tactics employed by the Taliban in the 20-year
00:18:03.840war against the United States and the U.S. and its allies, including Canada. The aim of such
00:18:10.980tactics would be to impose mass casualties on U.S. forces. So, they said this would follow
00:18:18.640clear signs from the U.S. military, the two countries' partnership in NORAD, and NORAD
00:18:24.960was ending, and the U.S. was under orders to take Canada by force. Okay, there's a bit
00:18:31.160more, I'll get into in a bit. So, they are, it's a frank admission. You know, despite,
00:18:38.620you know the wet dreams of some people uh even if canada had a serious military it would still
00:18:48.060stand absolutely no chance against the united states other than the great lakes canada has
00:18:52.620no natural frontier you ever seen the 49th parallel trump wasn't wrong when he said it's
00:18:59.960just a line on a map that was literally uh canada and the states and when canada was part of the
00:19:05.380british empire we had disputes with the united states about the border because it was literally
00:19:08.280just a line drawn on the map and we didn't really know where exactly it ended it was just supposed
00:19:12.200to go to the pacific ocean uh but then that would have had some conflicts with vancouver island are
00:19:17.720we gonna literally victoria would be a part of the united states but if i'm getting things right so
00:19:22.040it is a line on a map for the most part with open prairie for a large extent of that utterly utterly
00:19:29.000undefensible uh nowhere to hide there's not even a tree you'd have to hide behind blades of grass
00:19:35.400and Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There's no natural barriers between Canada and the United States,
00:19:41.160other than mostly the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. So even if Canada had a significant
00:19:49.000military force and we actually took our national defense seriously, there's nothing we could do.
00:19:55.400In all likeliness, Canada would probably not actually fire a single shot. Canada would come
00:19:59.960to a similar conclusion when faced with overwhelming power that many countries have
00:20:06.700throughout history that, yes, a token resistance would seem nice, but is it worth potentially tens
00:20:15.080of thousands of deaths and destroyed infrastructure to make no discernible difference in actual
00:20:20.940defense of the territory when you have a zero percent chance? So that's likely what would
00:20:25.300happen. So the military, again, it's not a military plan, but it's kind of mapping out what
00:20:30.720would happen. They're saying our best chance then would be unconventional warfare, guerrilla
00:20:35.560warfare, hit and run tactics. And that stuff is almost always mostly reliant upon an armed
00:20:44.320civilian population. That is regular people who do not want to form power there using either their
00:20:52.140own weapons or weapons they can acquire uh to engage in unconventional warfare okay uh they
00:21:00.800also here's where maybe they're a little less realistic they say canada could count on support
00:21:05.000from european countries uh britain japan south korea and other democratic nations uh this is a
00:21:11.380general speaking about it uh you know if you come after canada you're gonna have the world coming
00:21:15.360after you even more than greenland people do care about what happens to canada unlike venezuela
00:21:20.220said Mr. Frazier. This is a guy being quoted in the story.
00:23:54.460But what was in the news the same day, the same day?
00:24:00.300Let's let's pull up the story about we published in the Western Standard.
00:24:04.000the um uh what do we call it we got the federal gun grab uh this guy the federal minister
00:24:11.940responsible whose name i cannot pronounce i won't even begin to pronounce it it's just a lot of a's
00:24:17.700and b's and e's uh whatever his name is liberal federal public safety minister guy no idea what
00:24:25.720his name is um but uh let's see liberals begin national gun grab program for individuals quebec
00:24:32.720first to participate. Are we pulling up the story here? Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this has been in the
00:24:40.320works for a long time. This began with Trudeau. They used ordering council, which is just
00:24:47.080essentially cabinet orders, randomly banning thousands of different firearms, 25,000 different
00:24:54.580firearms, almost exclusively just for their aesthetic value. Normally guns that were totally
00:25:02.580legal either single shot or semi-automatic so standard stuff uh you know if there's any uh
00:25:11.000any lefties watching a semi-automatic is used for hunting uh half the rifles used in hunting today
00:25:18.800are semi-automatic maybe even more um they're not particularly more dangerous than uh than a single
00:25:27.600action um they're standard but uh the guns they banned weren't really on any kind of technical
00:25:35.000basis it was just guns that are typically um modifiable to replace wooden stocks with uh
00:25:44.380plastic or some some kind of uh artificial compound stock um so they look scarier and
00:25:51.660So instead of your grandpa's hunting rifle with a wood stock and wood butt, it's black or it's dark gray.
00:26:02.240And, you know, it's got, you know, it's got a modifiable, you know, it's got a rail along the top of the barrel where, you know, you can put optics on and things.
00:36:26.460The chief of defense staff, this DEI her lady, she's talking about a reserved armed force of up to 400,000 made up, you know, and they're going to have a bunch of weekend warriors from the federal bureaucracy.
00:36:41.240Yeah, we're going to get a bunch of blue-haired, pampered, overpaid bureaucrats to go out on the weekend and train how to supplement a tank crew, train how to operate the sonar on a ship.
00:37:22.660I'm not going to pass myself off as a veteran.
00:37:24.720But I grew up in military culture around this.
00:37:29.360um and the kind of guy and yeah it's mostly guys it's not entirely i mean there's great
00:37:38.700women in the forces but it's mostly guys kind of person who joins the military
00:37:42.840is a disproportionately rural or small town it's a guy it's probably white he likes guns
00:37:52.340He likes blowing shit up. He likes a sense of camaraderie, community, that he's with people, with a shared common goal.
00:38:04.600You're working for something. And that means also for your country that you deeply love.
00:38:11.340And our government, to different degrees under different parties, obviously more pronounced under liberal governments than under conservative governments.
00:38:18.260Conservative governments have reversed it a bit, but never totally rebuked it. But governments for decades in Canada, my entire life, have been intent on a multicultural, sort of post-national view of Canada.
00:38:37.900As the Boy Scout of the world, we, you know, we're kind of above military conflict.
00:38:48.160You know, at best, you know, conservatives, you know, will grant them their due.
00:38:52.960You know, they would not be ashamed of Sir John and MacDonald.
00:38:55.840They would not be ashamed of the founding fathers and, you know, the men and women who came across the prairie and built civilization out of a frozen wilderness.
00:44:07.160and settler is a bad word and now we're a settler because we're here we're all we're all immigrants
00:44:12.220you know it's just a piece of land and we stole it if we stole this piece of land if we're on
00:44:19.120stolen land then we're a bunch of thieves and who are we to tell someone else to thieve it from us
00:44:23.340we've got no moral ground and who are the people who are you know are having these kind of uh
00:44:32.340fever dreams of larping as uh the you know northern vietcong or you know a canadian version
00:44:40.600of red dawn fighting the foreign invader disproportionately the people larping about
00:44:46.380this stuff are uh the elbows up crowd disproportionately but not entirely boomers
00:44:53.160and of course not all boomers i know we got boomers watching but you know it's it's the
00:44:57.560people who voted for mark carney the people you could see going like this doing the chicken dance
00:45:01.860with their elbows here you know they're the people in in the polling on this very disproportionately
00:45:09.120they're the ones saying if the americans come we should fight them with force militarily okay yeah
00:45:16.200you say that you say that i wouldn't like it but you say that oh we're gonna have tens of thousands
00:45:23.940maybe more but tens of thousands of casualties of a generation of our young men die for a zero
00:45:31.260percent chance of resisting an american invasion okay well fine maybe okay they'll concede maybe
00:45:37.980we can't stop the americans in a conventional uh battle at the border but you know we're gonna
00:45:43.920fight this insurgency we're gonna we're gonna have armed civilians fighting the american invader
00:45:49.220well who were the same fucking people who voted to take our guns away who were the same people
00:45:56.540If you had a Venn diagram of the people who want to fight a war against America and the same people who want to seize the guns, that Venn diagram looks an awful lot like a circle.
00:46:12.640The same people who are willing to send a generation of young men to die to fight for Canada are the same generation who want to take the guns away from these people.
00:46:23.600I mean, even if we were an extremely well-armed people, even if we had like a Second Amendment and we actually had some serious guns in this country, which civilians in Canada do not, even if we had serious guns, and a lot of them, we would have a hard time fighting even an insurgency.
00:48:22.080But if you wanted to give it the old college try and fight at an unconventional civilian, armed civilian guerrilla war against a hypothetical American invader, you're going to need two things.
00:48:36.220You're going to need men and you're going to need guns.
00:48:39.320and our government hates both of those things right now and and to get men you need people
00:48:46.220to believe that this is their home and that it's legitimately their home that it's not stolen it
00:48:53.080wasn't done by hook and crook that we didn't just show up here and took over this great stuff that
00:48:58.360was in alberta that was in saskatchewan that was in bc or ontario or quebec no there was nothing
00:49:03.460here there was prairie there was trees there was tundra there was rock there was snow there was
00:49:08.840grass. There was nothing here. They had to build it. People have to believe, if you want to get
00:49:15.580men to fight, they have to believe this is their home and it's worth dying for. And no one's going
00:49:21.560to die for something that they don't believe is rightfully theirs. Well, we stole it. We stole it
00:49:28.040from the Indians. So, uh, I guess, you know, who are we to stop the Americans from stealing it from
00:49:33.260us? That's going to be the reaction because we propagandize generations of people to think that.
00:50:43.200I don't think the liberals appreciate how much people like guns.
00:50:47.500I think, you know, I see, you know, you watch the CVC, you watch CTV, or you'll see it in the Globe,
00:50:54.740you'll see a you know national post you know uh cache of guns and ammunition raided by police
00:51:02.500you know it'll be a drug buster or or something you know some gangbanger uh you know gets arrested
00:51:09.140they go to his house and they go through his crap and you know they find like four or five
00:51:13.700guns and a couple hundred rounds of ammunition and they'll say like cache of weapons found
00:51:24.740okay so like the government thinks four or five guns is a cache of weapons
00:51:29.380uh or an arsenal they found an arsenal there's seven guns it's an arsenal
00:51:34.180you know what almost certainly Ottawa is significantly underestimating how many guns
00:51:43.060are out there you you don't know us so yeah I like I I don't know no one no one knows it's
00:51:54.060estimates, Ottawa's estimates, $150,000. I think they actually probably know it's a lot higher than
00:51:58.900that. I think they're estimating you get $150,000 because that'll keep the budget. This is going to
00:52:04.580be absurdly expensive to do and it won't succeed. It will not succeed. I'm quite confident that
00:52:11.620thankfully our government is too, our government's too incompetent to do most things. It's definitely
00:52:15.780too incompetent to do this, which I'm thankful for in this case. I wish they could, I wish my
00:52:20.660You know, in the city of Calgary, in which I work, I live outside the city, but I wish they were competent enough to, I don't know, fix the water feeders so we don't have to shut down the water for two weeks in this city.
00:52:33.740But they're not competent to seize the guns.
00:52:35.760I think they're intentionally lowballing it so that the budget estimates for the cost of doing this is not going to be as high.