“If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada, which wants to enter the Union; and…we shall no longer have any difficulties with our neighbors; and it is the only way of preventing them.” – US President Thomas Jefferson, 1807
War with Canada? A speculative fiction? The plot of Michael Moore’s 1995 under-cooked satire Canadian Bacon? Ever since President Trump’s demand to annex the Great White North as the 51st State, the possibility has been broached in conversations with friends, Canadian and American, even if the White House promises to use only “economic force”, not military action.
It would not be the first time conflict occurred between the two peoples. Battles in the American War of Independence were fought in Canadian territory. During the War of 1812, the Ontario city of York was burned to the ground. In retaliation, the British burned the city of Washington (and the White House).
Even in times of peace, annexationist rhetoric continued. Speaker of the House Champ Clark (1911-19) declared that he looked “forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole. The people of Canada are of our blood and language.”
During the interim between the World Wars, the US concocted War Plan Red—declassified only in the 1970s—for a possible war with the British Empire. Parts of the plan involved poison gas attacks and strategic bombing of Halifax to eliminate it as a port for enemy shipping. Any territories seized would not be repatriated back to the Canadians but seized by the US.
In the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Senator D. Worth Clark declared that the US should set up “puppet governments” in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, to better defend its national interests. During the early Cold War, Life magazine argued for annexation to better prosecute the crusade against Communism.
If opinion polls today are to be believed, annexation seems unlikely. One poll puts support for the idea in Canada at 13%; another puts it at 6%. A poll of Americans showed only 1% support for the annexation of Canada by military force.
Fiction, however, is not bound by the likelihoods expressed by opinion polls. In Canadian Bacon, a hapless president beats the war drums against Canadians to juice his popularity. In Barry Levinson’s 1997 satire Wag the Dog, the President’s spin doctors warn citizens to “guard our Canadian border” against Albanian terrorists. In Orson Scott Card’s 1979 novella, A Sleep and a Forgetting, Quebec is used as a staging ground for Soviet troops to attack the US. Manitoba punks Propagandhi sang of “a new Iron Curtain drawn across the 49th parallel.”
In 2015, Brian K. Vaughan and Steve Skroce showed their version of a potential American war with Canadian war in the science-fiction comic We Stand On Guard. Recently, the comic surged to the bestseller list on Amazon Canada. It’s at the top spot in the categories of Science Fiction Graphic Novels and Dystopian Graphic Novels and holds second place in Canadian Military History. Sales have also increased on the US side of the border, but not by as much.
We Stand On Guard‘s story begins in 2112. The White House is bombed, allegedly by Canadian terrorists. The US responds with massive missile strikes that obliterate Ottawa, followed by an invasion. American troops occupy all of the provinces, with the territories unoccupied but monitored via drone.
Our protagonist, Amber, is eking out an existence in the far north when she falls in with a group of freedom fighters: The Two-Four. Over We Stand On Guard‘s six double-sized issues, the guerillas battle against long odds to drive the occupiers out of their country.
We Stand On Guard‘s portrayal of the US is uniformly negative. The infantry wears faceless helmets akin to Star Wars Stormtroopers, effectively dehumanizing them. They casually refer to Canadians as “nucks”, a slur similar to racial epithets used during similar counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Vietnam. The military operates detention camps for uncooperative civilians.
This is not a fictional invention; during the Filipino-American War, the U.S. Army operated concentration camps in which thousands died. A camp commander called them “some suburb of Hell.”
The obvious parallel to We Stand on Guard‘s story is the invasion of Iraq, hammered home by references to the slogan “No Blood for Water”, a play on the slogan “No Blood for Oil” in wide use before the 2003 invasion. That’s not the only source of inspiration. The American military of the comic makes widespread use of drones, something associated not just with Iraq but the broader war on terror in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Vaughan was also inspired by the anti-colonial classic Battle of Algiers, depicting the national liberation struggle against the French. The ragtag heroes of the Two-Four are reminiscent of the Wolverines from Red Dawn; John Milius’ 1984 nightmare turned on its head.
In looking at contemporary reviews of the series, a few are striking by their inability to grasp its central theme. One from AIPT Comics wrote that he was “not sure what [Vaughan] was trying to say.” Another at Sciencefiction.com stated that readers will find “it difficult to truly sympathize or rage against either side conclusively.”
Despite assessments like these, beneath all its pulp trappings, We Stand On Guard‘s story has a very clear anti-occupation message with a very clear villain in the United States. They routinely employ torture throughout a war that is eventually revealed to be conducted to steal Canada’s water resources after the US has mismanaged its own due to climate change.
Artist Steve Skroce returned to comics for this project after working as a storyboard artist for the Matrix films. He lavishes attention on the science-fiction mechanics of the invading army, crafting numerous large-scale action set pieces. As an action-focused series, any world-building in We Stand On Guard is handled briefly. We see an image of riots in Salt Lake City over water rations. At this, the Secretary of Defense explains that the “American public needs to understand that our fight isn’t with each other, it’s with extremist elements to the north.” The war is not just a way to steal resources but also to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.
Historically, resistance movements have crossed ideological boundaries. The French and Italian resistances against Nazism combined nationalists, radicals, liberals, socialists, and communists. In We Stand On Guard, Canadians from different backgrounds make up the group. One is First Nations; another is Black and speaks French. Yet, the wider visions motivating the Two-Fours are not delved into.
They are united by a certain broad Canadianness embodied by touchstones like the CBC, Tim Hortons restaurants, and the Canadian national anthem, hence the title of the comic. Given the history of Quebecois nationalism (including the urban guerrillas of FLQ) and the oppression of the First Nations and corresponding pro-Native activism, this seems inauthentic.
Remarkably, there was not much outcry over the series when it was released. Although the CBC and USA Today published articles about We Stand on Guard, neither elaborated on the radical politics expounded by the series. No right-wing backlash materialized against a comic with such an obvious anti-imperialist message.
Conversely, on the left, there was no appreciation on either side of the border. Doubtlessly, this is due to comics having a lower cultural profile than film or television. Conversely, a film or show about this subject would water down the political messaging to avoid offending potential ticket buyers and viewers.
In a 2016 interview with Comics Beat, Vancouverite Skroce described the series as having an “uncomfortable feeling of plausibility.” He continued, “We’re dealing with climate change and dwindling resources now, who knows where it’ll all lead in one hundred years.” In a 2015 National Post interview, Vaughn said he “always joked about what hilariously unlikely scenarios would have to arise” for a war between Canada and the United States.
Perhaps in pushing their future conflict to 2112, Vaughn and Skroce were overly optimistic. In a statement after the surge of interest in the series, Vaughn said he was “grateful that readers have been revisiting our nightmarish war story, which we hope remains fiction.” For the good of the people of both nations, let’s hope so.