Prime Minister Mark Carney has confirmed he studied the risk of a United States-led military strike on Canada, calling it an “extreme tail risk” in an interview published by the New York Times on Sept. 24, 2026, and picked up widely by CBC News, Global News and other outlets since. “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk. That’s just risk management,” Carney told the Times, according to CBC News. “It would be irresponsible not to.”
The comments follow more than a year of escalating trade friction between Ottawa and Washington. President Donald Trump imposed 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods in March 2025, then raised them to 35 per cent and eventually 50 per cent on roughly $20 billion worth of goods, according to Al Jazeera, prompting Canada to match with its own retaliatory tariffs. Trade talks between the two countries collapsed in August 2026. About 72 per cent of Canada’s $556 billion in annual goods exports go to the U.S., a dependence that has shaped Ottawa’s response to Trump’s repeated suggestion that Canada become the “51st state.” Trump ruled out using military force toward that end in January 2025 but said he would consider “economic force” instead, CBC News reported.
Carney’s remarks are not happening in a vacuum. In May 2026, the U.S. suspended the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a bilateral body that has co-ordinated Canada-U.S. military co-operation since the Second World War. A Pentagon official told the Globe and Mail the freeze followed Canada’s “lack of progress” on defence spending targets. That institutional rupture, largely overshadowed at the time by tariff headlines, is the clearest sign yet that defence ties between the two allies were already fraying well before Carney’s tail-risk comments became public this week.
It is also not the first time a Canadian government has quietly gamed out conflict with its southern neighbour. In 1921, Lt.-Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown drew up Defence Scheme No. 1, a secret plan for Canadian forces to launch pre-emptive strikes on Seattle, Great Falls, Mont., Albany, N.Y., and other U.S. cities in the event of a war between the U.S. and the British Empire, buying time for British reinforcements to arrive. Canada’s own chief of the general staff, Andrew McNaughton, scrapped the plan in 1928 and had many of its records destroyed, favouring co-operation with Washington instead. Historian Christopher M. Bell has since called the scheme “suicidal.” A century later, contingency planning between the two countries is again part of the public conversation, though this time the roles are reversed, and given how deeply the two economies are now intertwined, the stakes are arguably far higher.
Carney’s government is meanwhile working to reduce Canada’s reliance on the U.S. on several fronts, including plans to cut dependence on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network, a review of the country’s F-35 fighter jet purchase, and talks to join the United Kingdom-led Joint Expeditionary Force. Ottawa is also pursuing associate membership in the European Union, with further details expected at a Canada-EU summit in Montreal in October. A Leger poll conducted Sept. 19 to 21 found 70 per cent of Canadians support closer EU ties, with 18 per cent undecided and 13 per cent opposed, though support softens if it would require Canada to adopt European regulations, according to a summary carried by Yahoo News Canada.
Experts describe an actual military confrontation as highly unlikely, given the damage it would do to American credibility on the world stage. But for a generation of Canadians who grew up assuming the border was a formality, the fact that their prime minister is willing to say the risk was studied at all marks a real shift in how Ottawa now talks about its oldest ally, and in how seriously it is hedging against losing that relationship altogether.
This story draws on reporting via CBC News, with additional details from Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Globe and Mail and Yahoo News Canada.
