Former senior Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s escalating 51st state threats.
And they told CBC News that the most potent weapon wielded by the Trump administration to advance the cause of annexation would likely not be the intelligence agencies directed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“I would regard Mr. Musk as a problem,” said Ward Elcock, who headed CSIS for a decade including during the 9/11 attacks and also served as national security adviser. “I think that’s on a number of fronts.”
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has worked to destabilize many governments and nations in the past, using methods as mundane as corruption and as drastic as assassination, but the former spy chiefs say a campaign aimed at Canada would likely rely less on cloak-and-dagger tactics and more on social media — such as the Elon Musk-owned X platform.
“Is [Trump] trying to change political views in this country? If so, that’s foreign interference,” said Dick Fadden, who also headed CSIS and served as national security adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
“It’s no more acceptable from the United States than it is from China or Russia or anybody else.”
Economic distress: Canada’s weak spot
Neil Bisson is a former CSIS intelligence officer who is now director of the Global Intelligence Knowledge Network and teaches at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute.
He says that in spite of visible signs of Canadian unity in the face of annexation threats, there are those who are vulnerable to the siren call, particularly among the young who feel economically disadvantaged.
“That would be one of the linchpins, one of the cracks in the armour that another country would be looking at trying to exploit,” he told CBC News. “If you have individuals who are concerned about where their next meal is coming from or if they’re going to get a roof over their head, that supersedes sovereignty.”
U.S. President Donald Trump is pausing tariffs — again — on some goods from Canada and Mexico. Andrew Chang breaks down two schools of thought: whether Trump’s chaotic approach stems from lack of planning, or a much more intentional strategy.
He said those Canadians could be targeted by propaganda campaigns that sell American citizenship as the answer to their economic woes.
“And there will be individuals within Canada who could potentially be co-opted to push that narrative forward,” said Bisson.
Trump administration officials have given numerous rationales for the tariffs against Canada, but Trump himself has said that he wants to use economic force to join Canada to the U.S. On Tuesday morning, he again said Canada could only avoid economic ruin through annexation.
“He intends clearly to try and destabilize our economy,” said Elcock. “The reality is that if Canada is really impoverished, people may start to think about it. That’s always the possibility — that not all Canadians are are going to be willing to endure economic deprivation. And so some may start to think about it as time goes along.”
‘People start believing it’
Fadden says governments and intelligence agencies have learned the hard way of the power of disinformation and propaganda channelled through social media.
“You keep repeating things often enough, people start believing it,” he said. “If it continues down this path for years, virtually anybody can be worn down.”
In addition to sending politicians to negotiate with counterparts in Washington, says Fadden, “we need to find a way to play back on the information front.”
He says that means finding ways “to use social media more effectively than I believe we have been doing.”
Bisson says government assistance for those affected by tariffs could blunt the impact of such propaganda.
“This is the Canadian government trying to shore up that political opinion within their own citizenship to say, ‘OK we’ve got this covered, we’re going to take care of you no matter what,'” he said.
“Because if that wasn’t done and things were starting to destabilize economically, that would give people even more reason to fall back on thinking, well, maybe it’s a better idea if we’ve just succumbed to this.”
‘Tripwires’ for spies
The intelligence professionals say it’s possible that the U.S. government would use more intrusive tactics, such as fomenting or financing pro-annexationist groups within Canada to create the impression of a groundswell of support for the idea.
“They have an extraordinary capacity to do this,” said Fadden. “The real issue to me is whether in respect of Canada, they will actually make use of those capabilities and resources.”
He says Canada should be on the lookout. “We need to start at the basics. We need to start monitoring money flows. We need to start talking about whether they’re trying to interfere with our elections at all levels.”
But he says covert operations on Canadian soil would likely offer the U.S. little return in exchange for a great deal of risk. And Trump is typically his own messenger, preferring the megaphone to the coded message.
“I would argue that the current president’s approach is likely to be as effective as using the relatively secret resources of the CIA or the U.S. intelligence community,” Fadden said.
The former spy chiefs say U.S. intelligence agencies have rarely operated in Canada in the past, and would need time to develop networks. It would be difficult for them to get very far without alerting the Canadians to their presence, said Elcock.
“Intelligence organizations are out looking for possible threats all the time,” he said, and have intelligence “tripwires” set up to help monitor the threat environment.
“The likelihood that the Americans would run afoul of something, like of a tripwire at some point or talk to somebody who then would report it — those things are highly probable,” he said.
Purges at agencies
Intelligence professionals who spoke to CBC News all said that they put some faith in the professionalism of their U.S. counterparts, and their historic attachments to alliances such as Five Eyes and NATO.
Elcock said U.S. agencies would have to worry about their own people talking.
“There is a long relationship between Canada and the United States and there will still be people around who would not necessarily approve. So I don’t think they could with any certainty carry out something like that — that wasn’t a very, very closely held operation,” he said.
But those calculations could change if the Trump administration continues to remove and replace personnel in the agencies down to the managerial and operational level.
“The more you get people who buy into the current U.S. president’s philosophy of life,” said Fadden, “the more he shifts professionals out of the intelligence community and puts his own people in, the more worrisome it becomes.”
As for those Canadians who want to see their country annexed, and have loudly made that case, Elcock says not all should necessarily be seen as a security threat.
“It would depend on what their activities were. There are lots of people who have weird ideas in Canada who don’t qualify as a threat to the security of Canada,” he said. “Many of those organizations would already be on the radar. So the reality is, if they start to become active, it’s not going to be something nobody’s aware of.”
The experts all said that Canada is a much more resilient target than other countries where the U.S. is known to have conducted destabilization operations, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to pressure.
“We need to worry more and talk more about the medium and long term, rather than just worrying about the critically important tariffs that are there now,” said Fadden.
He warned if Canada is subjected to a prolonged campaign of economic warfare, then “at some point somebody’s going to have to cry uncle.”
While Fadden doesn’t see a military invasion on the horizon, he said “economic and cultural control of the country can be just as effective.”
