[beloch]

Any war between the U.S. and Canada would play out in strange, unpredictable ways just due to how closely intertwined pretty much every critical capacity of our two nations are.

Both the West and East coasts would immediately have their power grids upended by the loss of Canadian hydro. Fuel supplies (and practically everything else in both countries) would be disrupted as Canadian suppliers turn off the taps and American refineries go dark. Pipelines would, in all likelihood, be sabotaged so that they can't be started up quickly even once controlled. Large parts of Canada would go on a sudden bread and meat diet, since they rely almost entirely on imported fruit and vegetables.

Neither side would likely have the element of surprise, since both sides would be compromised by a large number of people in their command structures who are either from the other nation or sympathetic to it. A significant portion of U.S. forces would likely refuse to follow orders unless there was a damned good reason to invade Canada. Civil unrest in the U.S. itself would be a huge problem for the same reason. U.S. rivals such as China would pounce on the opportunity to take advantage of things while all this is going on. If the U.S. rolls into Canada then nobody is going to give a fig about Taiwan.

Occupation would be another matter entirely. The territory is massive and the enemy indistinguishable from yourself. Canada would present many of the same difficulties with terrain as Afghanistan, but with a populace that can tell which end of a toaster to plug in.

[fingerlocks]

Since when does the US west coast depend on Canadian hydro electric generation? WA state has so much hydro the price goes negative every spring when the snow melts. There’s a half dozen LNG generators state wide for supply stabilization, several wind farms and solar arrays.

And the line loss would be too great to economically ship canadian electricity to California

[beloch]

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

[fingerlocks]

Imports and exports are nearly balanced when you consider that is 1% of the total TWh produced on the west coast.

[beloch]

Being able to import a few percent when you need it and export a few when you don't without having to spin something down is pretty important to having a stable power grid.

The reality is that there is no dividing line between Canada and U.S. when it comes to electricity. Power grids cross the 49th at will. In California, you're on the same interconnection as Vancouver and Calgary.

Conflict would disrupt power in both countries, and much further from the border than you may suspect.

[fingerlocks]

When I worked in energy, trading was entirely on a futures market. Real time load balancing was a mechanical process.

I don’t buy it. Massive generators larger than the Canadian market go down from time to time. There’s dozens of contingencies in place.

[mandevil]

I mean, this is all true for a war today. But the economies were not intertwined as tightly in 1925, which is when these war plans were being drawn up. The US and Canada had had a pretty nasty border dispute (at least from the losing Canadian side) just twenty years earlier, well within the memory of most politicians running Canada. (I suspect that most Americans had forgotten about the Hays-Herbert Treaty of 1903 by 1925, but it would have been far more prominent in Canadian minds.) With the passage of another century I would be honestly shocked if such plans existed today on either side.