About 'If You Need Nonviolent Defence'

Isaiah Ritzmann and Richard Sandbrook are co-chairing a new project: to prepare Canadians to resist nonviolently if (improbably but possibly) Trump uses military to turn Canada into a U.S. state.

A quiet conversation among Canadian peace activists reveals a radical, urgent, and surprisingly practical plan for national survival in an age of rising authoritarianism.

The Project Save the World forum begins with a question that feels both absurd and chillingly plausible. “What would you do,” asks Metta Spencer, a Canadian peace activist and host, “if you had a neighbor country that was about 10 times your size… and the leader of that country announced that he would like to take over your country…. What would you do about that?”

The neighbor, of course, is the United States. The leader, specifically, is Donald Trump, who has on multiple occasions mused about making Canada the “51st State.” For most, this is dismissed as political bluster. But for a growing coalition of thinkers in Canada, it is a contingency that must be taken seriously—not with panic, but with a radical, meticulously planned strategy of national defence that involves no soldiers, no tanks, and no bullets.

This is the premise of a profound and urgent discussion between Spencer and her two guests, Richard Sandbrook and Isaiah Ritzmann, both advocates of nonviolent resistance and founders of the newly formed Canadian Coalition for Nonviolent Defense. Their conversation is not a paranoid fantasy but a clear-eyed examination of vulnerability, history, and a forgotten path to security.

A Contingency, Not a Prophecy

The first task for Sandbrook, a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Toronto, is to establish the stakes without hyperbole. He acknowledges that a U.S. invasion is not probable, but its probability is “not zero.” He outlines a frighteningly credible scenario: a contested referendum on independence in Alberta provides a pretext for a U.S. intervention to “safeguard” the right of Albertans to secede.

Richard Sandbrook

Isaiah Ritzmann

The real vulnerability, however, lies in Canada’s deep military integration with its southern neighbor. “Canada’s armed forces are heavily integrated into… NORAD,” Sandbrook explains, “with a common command structure, many common training exercises…. We are dependent on… US weapons and ammunition and know-how.” This integration makes it psychologically and logistically “very hard for the Canadian Armed Forces to even regard the United States as a security threat.”