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The main hotspot for spillover violence Canada would have to worry about in a second US civil war scenario is in the far west, with eastern Oregon/Washington. This doesn’t take an enormous military.
Other than that, it’s mostly refugees to deal with- the crises which will cook off with a collapsing federal government are mostly well away from the Canadian border.
If it's gorilla war, I'd say all bets are off.
Planet of the apes reboot: Caeser is named Harambe instead, zoomers flock to his banner and cosplay as monke. Opponents retreat due to sheer cringe, the new Ape Together Stronk nation immediately descends into civil war as the Pepes of Tendietopia demand dakimakura of 9000 year old loli dragons.
This comment gave me a stroke
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My understanding is that BC is a continuation of the dynamic found along the west coast, where an urbanized coast politically dominates a mostly rural interior in broadly progressive ways, to the very great displeasure of the interior, and that the dividing line is a mountain range. So BC spinning into a crisis/drawing inter mountain west violence northwards is totally plausible.
Of course that doesn’t account for Alberta secession/prairexit or any number of Canada doomsday scenarios which seem to get more likely and not less with increasing US chaos. The Canadian prairies have inescapable economic interests in a continent dominated by oil interests and not the laurentian elite.
In terms of an actual invasion of Canada, a fragmenting US is unlikely to have a power center near that part of the border. Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas are all backwaters and the west coast states will have their hands full. In a U.S. as failed state the power centers are northeast, west coast, and Texas. While Alberta can perfectly rationally prefer one of these as continental hegemon(hint: oil), it’s just too far for this to be a near term issue.
I think the economic interests are one piece of that puzzle, but the other one is infrastructure.
A good chunk of US power centers are wholly dependent on the surrounding rural areas for power and water (especially out West) and so the strategic circumstances there disproportionately favor the rural areas for reasons that are shaped like rivers, natural gas pipelines, and electrical transmission towers.
This is a strategic nightmare for urban areas that most depend on that power for their survival, and I really don't see them solving that one. The Northeast, Southeast, Texas, Upper Canada/Ontario, Lower Canada/Quebec, and California might be self-sufficient and individually productive enough to pull that off, but I think the map of the US in case of Federal collapse would most likely end up looking more or less like this (extend Texas, or at least its sphere of influence, all the way up to the Arctic Ocean, leave Quebec as-is, truncate Ontario's territory at Thunder Bay, and add Vancouver Island and Vancouver to California).
And yes, this also means that only Texas would have custody of the former US' nuclear arsenal.
The history of this gamble is one where, in situations where the balance of political power is as lopsided as it is in the far west, that the metropole just cracks skulls in the hinterlands until the lights stay on and the water flows. California probably doesn't have the resources or sympathetic manpower to truly control the interior but it doesn't need to; failed state conditions for people who are de facto disenfranchised anyways is fine as long as you can control the truly important bits, or bribe/threaten the people who do.
Now this is different in places like Texas or modern Russia, where governments rely on extensive rural support to counteract a disadvantage in the cities. But even in places like this urban interests generally come first.
Specifically in the west, urban areas need to obtain water from rural areas, regardless of what those rural areas have to say about it, and there's not really another option, so California can't just leave the hinterlands alone but probably can't afford to control them outright(you can extend this further inland). That makes a conflict hot spot through most of the intermountain west.
Texas's geography militates for a hyperinterventionist/expansionist foreign policy, true, but the northeast's geography militates for sea power and federalism, so I think you're leaving out at least that.
I also doubt Texan expansionism crosses the Mississippi before the Rio Grande post federal government collapse; land powers tend to expand in the general direction of trouble spots, of which northern Mexico is the largest.
As an aside, when the USSR broke up most of it experienced falling fertility, but the Islamic regions saw their fertility rise fast. It's interesting to think what regions might see this if the US federal government falls- maybe certain Indian tribes, to start with, possibly parts of Appalachia.
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