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Notes -
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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