Is Canada Helping Identify Boats the US Is Blowing Up?

What is Canada's position of killing suspected drug smugglers in international waters without disclosing corroborating evidence and ensuring due process? What is Canada's position on arbitrarily designating so-called drug gangs as narco-terrorists and then claiming, again without evidence, that they are controlled by a sovereign government, making that country a legitimate target of United States military action?

These are not hypothetical questions.

Let's start with extrajudicial killings. Canada is already in this game.

Since 2006, Canadian warships and patrol aircraft have taken part in them. Operation Caribbea US-led but multinational “enhanced counter-narcotics” operation in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Pacific. Our aircraft and ships identify and track “vessels of interest,” which are then boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard, searched, and, if drugs are found, confiscated. Their crews may even be brought to the US to face charges.

Over the past seventeen years, the Canadian Armed Forces claims to have contributed to the “destruction or seizure of more than 123 metric tons of cocaine,” with an estimated street value of more than $4.41 billion.

Our Department of National Defense (DND), in response to questions from the media, is quick to point out that Operation Caribbe, which is being conducted “in coordination” with the US Coast Guard, “isseparate and distinct» from the unilateral decision of the Donald Trump administration, we're-just-going-to-kill-the-people-who-smuggle-drugs-into-our-country approach carried out by the US military. From September 2, US Air Force aircraft blown up twenty-one ships in the same waters, resulting in the deaths of at least eighty people. Without providing evidence, US President Trump said the boats were smuggling drugs into the US.

However, the DND did not stop our participation in Operation Caribbe. We know that in at least one case, the US military provided location information about survivors of Coast Guard strikes, showing that information is spreading quickly and horizontally across U.S. agencies. What assurances does Canada have that the Coast Guard will not share our detection data with the US Air Force, which it can then use to bomb suspicious vessels? The United Kingdom has reportedly began to hold some information from the US to prevent exactly this outcome. Canada has given no indication it will do the same. “The United States has made clear that it uses its own intelligence,” Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand. reassured journalists at the recent G7 summit.

Worse, the Canadian government has yet to criticize what UN experts have condemned as “…extrajudicial executionor challenge what's most legal analysts consider the Trump administration's justifications for various extraterritorial threats and actions, especially in Central and South America, as “flimsy”. Anand again: “I would say it is within competence of the US authorities make such a decision” as to whether it is in accordance with international law.

Why should this matter to Canadians?

Well, consider Trump. And then look at the people around him: Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, a triumvirate of “America First” warmongers. Latin America has already become a testing ground for the expansionist policies of the 21st century. Monroe Doctrine.

First outlined in 1823 by former US President James Monroe, the doctrine warned European powers against interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, which Monroe declared to be a sphere of US interest. At the turn of the twentieth century, this doctrine began to be regularly used to legitimize American military and political intervention in neighboring states. Since then it has largely been used, conveniently of course, to justify US intervention in southern half hemisphere too much. Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada: the list is long, the pattern is obvious.

In a sense, Trump 2.0 began with the same Monroe scenario. One of Trump's first actions after taking office was to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the American Gulf. He later threatened to station American troops on Mexican soil. Another was his threat to take control of the Panama Canal. He recently revoked Colombian President Gustavo Petro's visa and, ironically, stripped Colombia of its status as a “reliable partner” in the war on drugs for the first time in thirty years. The move came after Petro called Trump's extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers “assassinations” and called for criminal investigations into Trump and others involved in the strikes.

But Trump 2.0 goes even further. Earlier this year he refused rule out the use of military force to take control of Greenland and, in particular, thought about making Canada the fifty-first state of the United States. “Will he use military force against us?” he was asked. “It's extremely unlikely,” he said.

He didn't say no.

For now, Trump is focused on Venezuela, where he has sent a flotilla of warships. In a threat to demonstrate the power of regime change, the White House has asked for “legal opinion from the Department of Justice” to launch “strikes on ground targets” in Venezuela, CNN reported. As of October 23The BBC reported ten US warships sent to the region, including the USS Gerald R. Fordthe world's largest aircraft carrier, guided missile destroyers, landing ships and oil tankers to refuel ships at sea.

The Trump administration justifies this in part by arguing that Venezuela is a major source of illegal drugs such as fentanyl entering the United States. This is wrong. According to International Crisis Group“Nearly all fentanyl entering the United States is produced in Mexico: 94 percent of the drug seized in the United States is intercepted at the southern border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

Hold that last thought.

So why then is Trump actually threatening Venezuela? What about the fact that Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves? According to New York TimesVenezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has proposed “opening up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, giving preferential contracts to American businesses, reversing the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and cutting his country's energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms” just to appease Trump and save his government, but even that doesn't seem to prevent regime change there.

If the fight against fentanyl is a flimsy cover for regime change in Venezuela (and it is), then what about Canada? Trump's first bogus excuse for imposing punitive tariffs on Canada was, of course, that we weren't doing enough to stop the diversion of fentanyl into the US.

And then consider our own home of oil and gas, and the rare earth minerals needed for the current and future global economy. In October Trump administration acquired shares in two Canadian mining companies in transactions Globe and mail Business columnist Rita Trichur described it as “a stealth annexation… a blatant manipulation of economic power to show Canada who's boss.”

Will hidden annexation become a reality?

It's easy to console yourself with the thought that consolidating US hegemony in Latin America will take up most of Trump's current term. And, of course, the US Constitution does not allow the president to run for a third term. But we already know that Trump aide and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon I'm thinking of ways to get around this. Even if he fails, there is a real possibility that Trump will be replaced by the equally imperialistic ambitions of the US Secretary of State. Marco Rubio or US Vice President J.D. Vance.

So why isn't Canada joining the chorus of opposition to Trump's violation of international law? Is it because we've been so busy trying to negotiate a trade deal with a Trump administration that doesn't really want one—which changes the rules of political engagement at the president's whim, which uses its own alternative facts to create new realities—that we've lost sight of the bigger picture?

By the time we realize there is a real threat to our sovereignty, it may already be too late.

John Kirk is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University and the author and co-editor of twenty-one books on Latin America.

Stephen Kimber is Professor of English in the School of Journalism, Writing and Publishing at King's College and the award-winning author of fourteen books, including What lies beyond the water: the real story of the Cuban Five.