When Canada and the U.S. went to war (in books, movies and comics) | Canada Voices

When president-elect Donald Trump was asked if his new administration would take over Canada, his reply sounded like he had been thinking about this for some time: He mused on using “economic force” to “get rid of that artificially drawn line” between the two countries.

At the moment, annexation of Canada by the U.S. seems incredibly unlikely – though people once said the same about a Trump presidency. However, the idea of the two uneasy allies going to war, or Canada being swallowed by its neighbour, haunted the imaginations of fiction creators long before Trump was interested. And oddly, even though the U.S. has nuclear weapons and Canada doesn’t, a look at fictional U.S./Canada conflicts would suggest that Americans fear hostility a lot more than we do.

Canadian Bacon (1995): In writer-director Michael Moore’s first and so far last fiction film, the U.S. president needs a new Cold War to boost his popularity, and, instead of just waiting for Russia to become an enemy again, declares Canada a threat to the U.S. Due to plot complications that may suggest why Moore stuck to documentaries after this, Canada accidentally ends up with the ability to nuke America from a weather station installed on the top of the CN Tower.

Infinite Jest (1996): David Foster Wallace’s enormous novel takes place in a corporatist future where Canada and Mexico have merged with the United States in a super-nation known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), with the Americans seemingly calling the shots. The deal wasn’t exactly great for Canada, evidenced by the fact that we were gifted control of a toxic waste dump known as the Great Concavity. The U.S. President, Johnny Gentle, is an unqualified ex-entertainer, back when that meant Ronald Reagan rather than Trump.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999): Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave their theatrical spinoff a similar premise to Canadian Bacon, with much better box-office results. In the Oscar-winning song Blame Canada, Americans are whipped into a moral panic over the scatological Canadian cartoon Terrance & Phillip: Asses of Fire. This American overreaction leads to a war that nearly wipes out humanity.

We Stand On Guard (2015): In this six-issue comic book limited series, Brian K. Vaughan, a writer who specializes in dystopian stories, imagined a 22nd century occupation of Canada by the U.S. in retaliation for our allegedly blowing up the White House. Told from the point of view of resistance fighters, it’s basically Red Dawn except that the Russians are Americans, and their victims watch a TV series called The Littlest Robo.

Quantum Night (2016): Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian author with dual American citizenship, set himself the task of imagining a worse U.S. president than Wallace’s, and easily managed it with Quenton Carroway, an anti-immigrant extremist who seizes on a spate of Canadian hockey riots as an excuse to invade us.

The Handmaid’s Tale (2017): A surprising thing about these stories is that while most of them were created by Americans, they portray their own country as less intelligent, more militaristic and generally worse than Canada. The same holds true for this television series, where the U.S. has become a fundamentalist dystopia Canada does not recognize. In the original novel, beloved Canadian author Margaret Atwood includes some references to Canada as a place to escape to. The adaptation, produced by Americans, adds scenes in Canada that show how much better things are for women and minorities before American influence starts to seep in.

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