"A US news outlet here noticing that a Canadian government policy think-tank frets about a US civil war," as one Canadian reporter put it.

The clip above is from the movie "Civil War," a dystopian future America where rebel factions attack the White House.

Source: Politico

When Justin Trudeau meets Joe Biden at the G7 summit in Italy this week, Trudeau will probably not ask whether the United States is at risk of erupting in civil war in the next few years.

A think tank housed within Trudeau’s government is already pondering that question.

In a spring report titled “Disruptions on the Horizon,” a quiet office known as Policy Horizons Canada proposed American civil war as a scenario that Ottawa should consider preparing for.

This hypothetical was tucked into the middle of the 37-page document, which sketched the possibility in 15 spare words: “U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.”

It’s an unsettling thing to find out your immediate neighbor is getting nervous about the possibility of gruesome violence in your home.

Especially when the tone of the paper is more academic, and less histrionic than one would imagine. American civil war was just listed in other unlikely, but devastating events, like homemade biological weapons, further diseases like COVID that are resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, and a third world war.

The Policy Horizons report surveyed hundreds of experts and government officials about disruptive events that Canada might do well to prepare for. Then, the authors classed those scenarios based on the likelihood they will occur, how soon they might happen and how much chaos they might create.

American civil war ranked as an improbable but ultra-high-impact event.

Not so sure about the civil war bit, but agree about the billionaires running the world. Also, "People cannot tell what is true and what is not" seems to be where a lot of Americans are at right now.

A tweet from the writer at Politico.