Lots of things can happen after November: Biden wins, we go back to normal; Trump wins, things don't change much... or Trump wins, things go bad - or, it's not clear who wins, things go bad.

Thread on elections scenarios. Bottom line, Canada needs to SERIOUSLY plan ahead. https://twitter.com/thomasjuneau/status/1299489174656090112

1. The best-case scenario is a Biden win and a return to pre-2016, that is, Canada obsesses constantly about the US, we always feel ignored, but really, the reationship works for Canada. Our security and prosperity are largely the product of our blessed geography; that continues.

2. Unfortunately, that is unlikely. I am not trying to predict if Biden will win, but if he does a return to pre-2016 is unlikely:
-The world has changed (rise of China, so US power not what it used to be)
-More important, the US has changed. If Biden wins, the Republican party..

... will be at war with itself, between the adults (the traditional conservatives) and the insurgents (the college dipshits, as @RadioFreeTom calls them). There will be violence (armed militias unhappy with the results); there will be instability; the US will be inward-focused.

3. Trump wins, but things don't go really bad, as some predict. The US remains a democracy, albeit an imperfect one. There is violence, but it is contained. The US remains unpredictable, dismissive of alies, unilateral, but, basically, it is not the end of the world:

... a tough 4 years, but we all survive. It will be difficult for Canada to manage bilateral ties, often frustrating, but Canada has actually done a fairly good job at managing Trump since 2016. The least bad of the non-Biden scenarios.

4. This is where it gets hard for Canada: Trump wins, and the US democratic experience comes under severe stress. No one says the US becomes North Korea by 2022, but large-scale gerrymandering, vote tampering, the weakening and politicization of the bureaucracy...

... and other dirty tricks by the Republicans mean that the US becomes an illiberal democracy (à la Erdogan, Orban, etc).

This has massive implications for Canada. We've hitched our foreign policy since 1945 to the US, usually for the better, though quite often not so much.

How close can Canada stay to an increasingly bigotted, xenophobic, protectionist, unilateralist Trumpist US?

What choice would we have anyways? Geography binds us to the US. But Canada needs to seriously think, NOW, how a Trump victory, and a deterioration of democracy and...

...stability would affect us. Does the Canada Border Services Agency continue working closely with its US counterpart as it continues ramping up large scale human rights violations? CBSA would also need massive new resources to protect the border *against the US*.

I assume we continue with NORAD (there would be a clear security rationale here), but what about other forms of cooperation, of which there are ten million? Canada is, often, a net recipient in our exchanges with the US, as the smaller player. A decrease in collaboration...

...in any field - either because we decide to stop, or they do - also possible - would lead to potentially major losses for Canada, and the need to readjust, and sometimes completely overhaul, pretty much every field of government activitiy.

5. Scenario 5 is also a scary one, but an option we simply cannot dismiss anymore: the Canadian government needs to seriously think about this - the possibility of large scale violence in the US after November as a result of a contested election.

This raises infinite painful questions.
-If the vote is tight, who does Canada recognize? If we think Biden should have won, but Trump claims he won, and threatens us if we don't recognize him?
-You can think of other dilemmas: border security, refugees, intelligence sharing...

Of course this is all speculative, and of course the worst case scenarios have a low probability of emerging.

But the point is, Canada's extreme comfort - the luxury of a cost free foriegn policy - is under threat. Canada is not ready for this, and it is not in our culture...

- in the bureaucracy, among politicians, in the media - to think of the US as a problem/threat to this extent. Hopefully all goes relatively well; that's still possible. But we need to do some serious planning for scary contingencies. https://twitter.com/thomasjuneau/status/1269784425048522752

Also: the Canadian intelligence community needs to start looking at the US as a threat - now. This would face massive resistance and require a galactic cultural shift. But most threats analysts currently look at are puny in comparison to unrest in the US or longterm Trumpism

This does not imply collection (collecting human or other forms of intelligence in the US) but SHOULD imply analysis (ie, analysts sitting at their desks and, using open source information, diplomatic reporting, etc., analyzing threats to Canada emanating from the US).

56% of Republicans think QAnon is partly or fully true - ie, they literally believe that a Satanistic cult of child-trafficking sex predators runs a shadow government.

When I say that even if Biden wins in November, Trumpism will survive, that's why https://twitter.com/DrewLinzer/status/1301242419514494976

Another strong example of what I mean when I say that 4 more years of Trump will force Canada to radically rethink the foundational assumptions behind its foreign policy: https://twitter.com/MDParadis/status/1301160865094340611?s=19