Carney prepared for risk that Trump might order U.S. to invade Canada: 'That’s just risk management'

Prime Minister Mark Carney touched on a wide range of topics during an hour-long interview with the New York Times yesterday — F-35 jets, Starlink satellites, trade in potash and automobiles and more — but the biggest takeaway was that he had prepared over the past year for the “extreme tail risk” that U.S. President Donald Trump might order military action against Canada.

“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” said Carney, using a term from the financial world that was his metier as a former central banker for Britain and Canada. “That’s just risk management … it would be irresponsible not to.”

The expression refers to a scenario that is considered unlikely but not impossible — the “tail” of a probability curve where the centre represents the most likely outcomes.

Carney told the Times that, based on Trump’s threats to make Canada a 51st state, he had carefully examined the possibility of U.S.-led military action, but declined to discuss in detail what that involved.

Timothy Sayle, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, said Carney’s comments indicate a valid concern.

“It makes sense to me that it’s at the real extreme end of possibilities, but I don’t think it’s a zero per cent chance,” he told National Post.

The U.S. incursion into Venezuela this year and its threats against Greenland made its allies, including Canada and Europe, take notice, Sayle said.

“It can seem outlandish, but … the United States has made these decisions to enter Venezuela and then to attack Iran that were pretty low-probability events, and yet they did happen. So that’s why I can understand the prime minister’s point that it’s maybe very very very low risk but, as he said, can’t be totally ignored.”

As to what form a potential invasion might take, Sayle said the “wild unpredictability of the current American administration” made it difficult to predict, but he imagined several small-scale scenarios. They included “some sort of hot pursuit of a suspected criminal, or somebody that ICE was seeking, across the Canadian border.”

He added: “You could imagine an increase of U.S. forces, like the strengthening of U.S. forces in Canada in some way.” (According to the U.S. Department of Defense, as of March there were 159 active duty military personnel serving in Canada, plus 33 civilian DoD staff.)

Sayle also suggested “the presence of naval ships, the presence of or overflights by aircraft and … what could be described as something in the shared interest, but in which Canada was not consulted in the usual means. Americans could either publicly or invisibly flex their might and indicate that Canada’s sovereignty wasn’t quite as secure as we’d like to think.”