A task force of intelligence experts have concluded that instability and backsliding democracy to the nation’s south will become a major challenge to domestic security in the coming years, the CBC reports because – haha! – the intel experts are Canadian and the backsliding democracy is the United States. We’re so clever with our little bait and switch headlines and ledes, right?

“The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability,” says the report from the panel, whose members include former national security advisers, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service directors, ex-deputy ministers, former ambassadors, and academics. The report pointed specifically to the support the Ottawa Clustertruck drew from Fox News and other MAGA propaganda channels in the United States, saying “This may not have represented foreign interference in the conventional sense, since it was not the result of actions of a foreign government. But it did represent, arguably, a greater threat to Canadian democracy than the actions of any state other than the United States. It will be a significant challenge for our national security and intelligence agencies to monitor this threat, since it emanates from the same country that is by far our greatest source of intelligence.”

We’ve touched on the six-part 2020 HBO miniseries The Plot Against America here before, but for those unfamiliar, it’s an adaptation (and expansion) of Philip Roth’s alternate history “memoir” of his family’s experiences when real-life Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh runs as a Republican and defeats FDR in the 1940 election, keeping the US out of World War II and allowing a campaign of terror against Jews. The allegories to the then-Trump Administration were about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face as producer David Simon (famous for The Wire) expanded greatly from Roth’s source material. It does meander a little bit and is definitely more of a thinkpiece than a thriller, but it’s a very hard recommend from us for National Zero readers.

And for the Canadian intel community. Because, much as we hate spoilers here, we think there’s a subplot (not present in the novel) that they should look at. The fictional Canadians and Brits in the series staged a little covert pro-Democratic intervention in the United States in the final episode. Almost like the kind of shit the American CIA would do during the Cold War to knock off this or that Third World leader who was flirting with the Soviets, regardless of whether or not that leader had been democratically elected or was a net positive for his country’s people. Maybe, just maybe, the Canadians – along with the French, Brits, Aussies, Koreans, Germans, etc – might want to explore taking a few chess pieces off the table one way or another. Doesn’t necessarily mean any rough stuff, just maybe finding one way or another to clear a path for say Dem governors in certain states to appoint a Dem replacement for a Republican Senator. And then like four or five more.

And maybe some “technical difficulties” at Fox News or Breitbart. An unexpected Supreme Court vacancy. And then a totally coincidental one, maybe even two more after it. Nothing wrong with spitballing this sort of thing. Sometimes democracies need a little nudge from concerned friends. And who knows, maybe those sneaky Mapleheads recognize this are passing around another, much longer, version of the report, running it by the others in NATO. That’d be a real hoot, right?