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I’m not buying it simply because I don’t see anything to make me believe that he’s ramping up to start a war. No reporting of troop movements even on the Canadian side, no announcement of anything of that sort. It’s not something you can just do on a whim. Canada isn’t just going to roll over and become part of the USA. You need tanks and planes mobilized on the border.
Something that a lot of people tend to forget is that there is no land border between Canada and the United States. Tanks aren't going to do the US much good here, and that's even if the average Canadian tank wasn't broken down.
Now sure, you can say "but the Western border", and it's true that isn't defensible in the slightest, but it also isn't really Canada, it's just a territorial possession. The people who live there will all say that too, by the way- they vote like it, those who opposed Canada violently in the past are venerated, etc. Just like Quebec, for that matter.
In truth, Canada is (as it was originally, back when it was called Upper Canada) defined as "the peoples who live in the area constrained by 2000km of vast, relatively impassable Ontario wilderness to the West (there is one road, and a lot of bridges along that road), the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the South and East, and the French to the North (and they are similarly surrounded by water and wilderness)".
As far as the peoples unprotected by the natural barrier of the St. Lawrence go (where you can just drive across), the fact of the matter is there's nothing out there worth taking that the US doesn't already have. Halifax is strategically significant because there's a warm-water port there, and the Great Lakes ports are not (or at least, they aren't yet). Everywhere else is about as populated as the Territories are: PEI has less than 200,000 residents, and NS only has a million.
Thus, Canada is literally an ocean away from the US (in the absence of those bridges, which for all the faults of the Canadian military they will still have the capacity to destroy in open warfare with the US). And sure, while their tactical situation is completely untenable for other reasons- modern artillery has range sufficient to just sit on the US side of the border and dismantle Canadian industry completely unchallenged, something that wasn't possible in 1812- it's going to take the US long enough to actually get their military pieces into position for foreign military aid to arrive.
While it's likely that Canada would still lose extremely quickly due to a complete lack of will to prosecute a war against an ally offering better terms to its soldiers than the Canadian government ever would, the destruction of Canadian industry in that area would nullify Canada's value as an ally. This isn't a war that can be realistically won by the US primarily with a traditional exercise of military power.
Were I to attempt this I'd exploit the fact that the West is unwilling to fight a war the East gets itself into. Thus, I would target industry most commonly found in the East with a competitive advantage against American industry due to its dirt-cheap power, that being steel and aluminum production, and wait for counter-tariffs and a political split to get the West to the table. And I'd offer the most powerful Western province special treatment- a comparative exemption on tariffs to its strategic resource- to suggest that provinces willing to deal independently of the federal government may have other payoffs (and to further drive a wedge between the West and the East, for the East hates petrochemical development).
Which is probably why those things are happening.
Certainly trying to take Toronto by invading from the West along the North Shore would be silly. But forcing crossings of St. Lawrence River and the Niagara River is far easier than crossing an ocean (or even the Great Lakes). If the US for some reason decided to invade Canada, certainly it could head north and west from Maine and New York, and cross the St. Lawrence. The Niagara is a bottleneck and so harder, but I expect it would still be done, probably combined with true amphibious crossings over the lakes. And the St Clair, though that's also a bottleneck -- it might be a race to see who can get heavy units there faster.
Again, calling these "rivers" is a bit of misnomer. This isn't the Rio Grande where you can more or less just walk across- it's at least half a mile across (miles in some areas), and it's not fordable. It doesn't freeze in the winter any more either, so that's out too.
If you want to invade you need a green-water navy (to get your transports from the Eastern seaboard through the open water, down the mouth of the Seaway), and only then can you start ferrying gear across. This is not a trivial problem- in fact, I argue that the relative difficulty of crossing this body of water until the mid-20th century is the main reason the Canadian identity exists distinct from the American one in the first place.
(This is, of course, ignoring the fact that this would probably all be done by air; the US can drop more tanks out of C-5s in a day than the Canadians have in their history ever fielded.)
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All the major objectives would be seized within a week of an American attack, even with no preparation. For example Fort Drum holds the 10th Mountain Division, which alone is more combat capable than all of the Canadian Armed Forces combined even if they weren't spread out. It takes Ottawa on day 2.
The biggest defence of Canada is that a large proportion of Americans likes us quite a bit, and an attempt to actually violently seize us would more likely result in an American Civil War then a straight-forward invasion.
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