Matt Gurney: We should probably stop disarming our future armed resistance

We cannot confiscate civilian firearms and plan a guerilla campaign at the same time. Pick a lane.

By: Matt Gurney

Like my colleague Jen Gerson, I too am somewhat numb to the news. I won’t bother repeating what she said so elegantly in her column; suffice it to say that it’s no longer unusual for me to see a headline scroll past on a news channel’s ticker — a headline that would have blown my mind clear into orbit just 10 years ago — and just keep right on eating my yogurt.

A lot has happened, is the thing. A lot is still happening. And it all seems to be happening faster.

But it’s still worth slowing things down just a little bit when the news stories arrive in particularly baffling sequences. Consider just two you may have seen this week: Canada is thinking about fighting an insurgency in case the Americans invade us, and Canada is also working hard to disarm its civilian population. Can I just interject here a moment and suggest that these goals are at odds? That this might be a stupid way of doing things? That the Canadian federal right hand would be shocked and appalled to discover what the left hand was doing?

Let’s take a minute and set up the insurgency thing. It comes from an article published this week in The Globe and Mail. Canadian soldiers are not frantically digging trenches quite yet. The overall consensus is that a U.S. invasion of Canada is unlikely. But clearly, the current trajectory of U.S. geopolitics has shifted the prospect from “batshit crazy” to “it would be weird but we should probably think about it.” So the military is thinking about it — it’s now a contingency being considered, just like the military plans for natural disasters or less bizarre military scenarios, like a war requiring a mobilization or an attack by a terror group or hostile nation on Canadian soil.

And what is the military thinking? Allow me to quote from the Globe:

The two senior government officials said military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.

Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.

One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

Mmm. This yogurt is tasty.

Let me say three things here: first, I can confirm some of the Globe‘s reporting via my own sources. I know for a fact that members of the Canadian Armed Forces are talking, in a very conceptual, high-level way, about what an insurgency against an invader could and would look like in Canada. I do not know of any serious plans or preparations. But discussions? Absolutely. Second, the plan above, in very vague terms, is probably about correct, in terms of how the Canadian population could resist an invader. The actual shooting war would be over almost immediately — the U.S.’s military advantage would be overwhelming. I think two days is optimistic, frankly. I’m not sure it would take much more than two hours to smash any meaningful military resistance.

So, longer term insurgency against a larger and more advanced force would be the only real option, and in that kind of fight, we’d have some real advantages. We’d be a tougher nut to crack, in many ways, than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

But only if we don’t hobble ourselves first. And this brings us to the third point I’d like to make: did you notice the part about “armed civilians”? Because I sure did.

Civilians, sometimes augmented by experienced military personnel in technical and leadership roles, are always the backbone of an insurgency. They have to be. Insurgencies are hit-and-run affairs, and you can’t do that if you’re driving a tank back to a base. In order to be effective, the population must be armed, or somehow have the means to arm itself. Not to be cute, but the resistance being armed is a necessary precondition for a successful armed resistance.

And we are disarming ourselves.

Just this week, the federal government announced it was proceeding with the final implementation of the Trudeau-era gun confiscation. I’ve written a lot about this issue before. It’s an incredibly dumb idea. It won’t solve the problem it claims it seeks to solve. It won’t work on a practical level given the lack of cooperation by provinces and municipalities. And even the minister in charge has admitted it’s terrible plan that he’s stuck with because factions within the Liberal party were promised it by Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney doesn’t need the fight on his left flank. If you ask me, any or all of those points would be a pretty good reason to not go ahead and try this, but I’ve made that argument, and have, much to my own shock, failed to convince the Carney government of my wisdom.

But now there’s a new argument to make: we shouldn’t be planning an insurgency and confiscating all the guns at the same time. We can be serious about only one of these notions at the same time, and we’ll have to pick. Else we’ll have one government initiative actively sabotaging another.

Come to think of it, we don’t have to choose which one to take seriously. The gun confiscation plan is a joke. Carney is clearly just going through the motions so he can declare that he’s lived up to the promise. This is a Potemkin program that no one thinks will work and no one will try very hard to actually execute. So, by default, if there’s any conflict between these programs, we should probably favour the one that isn’t self-evidently a fraud.

And the one worth keeping, weird as this is to say, is the plan to defeat a U.S. invasion by killing a lot of Americans in a violent insurgency.

*rubs temples*

There’s a delightful political oddity here. The faction of the Canadian electorate that is most in favour of the gun ban is going to be urban progressives and older Canadians, many of them who voted Liberal last time. At the same time — although I haven’t seen polling that asks this specific question — I have a pretty good hunch that if you did ask Canadians if they felt this country should actively be planning an insurgency to deter or defeat an American invasion, those most in favour would be ... a lot of those same people. I truly do believe that there would be a pretty shocking degree of overlap between Canadians who have supported the idiotic gun ban who also think that we should be preparing to fight the Americans guerilla style, presumably with confiscated guns.

And that’s hilarious. I have never thought the proponents of the ban were the leading lights of the Canadian intellectual milieu, and this is why. But we also live, as the PM recently noted in Davos, in an era when it’s time to stop telling the easy comfortable lies and start making choices based on reality, even unpleasant realities.

Canada cannot disarm its civilian population and lay the groundwork for an insurgency at the same time. It just can’t. It really needs to pick a lane on this one. It’ll cause some domestic political problems for the Liberals, it’s true, but we’re either serious about defending the country or we’re not.

The choice before us is simple: we can proceed with a moronic policy proposal that the government clearly doesn’t believe in, or we can do things that will actually make this country stronger and more resilient in a world that is, as the PM has noted, rapidly changing in ways that threaten our security and survival. We cannot do both of these things at the same time, as they are in direct opposition to each other. We cannot disarm our armed resistance.

Seems like an easy call to me. I hope Carney sees it that way, too.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today. Please note: a donation is not a subscription, and will not grant access to paywalled content. It’s just a way of thanking us for what we do. If you’re looking to subscribe and get full access, it’s that other blue button!

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter.Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com