Canada not okay with Trump sending ~1,000 troops to Canada border

Canada is not super cool with plans by impeached U.S. president Donald Trump to send a thousand (maybe fewer) U.S. troops to the U.S.-Canada border. Trump says militarizing the border is good because he’s worried things will become so desperate in the U.S. with the pandemic, Americans will flee north to escape the oncoming coronavirus hellscape.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Trump’s plan is unnecessary because it makes no sense as a response to the coronavirus outbreak, and that it would damage relations between the two countries.

From Reuters:

Trump is expected to send fewer than 1,000 troops to the Canadian border, two U.S. government officials told Reuters. They would help enforce the ban on non-essential crossings due to the coronavirus pandemic, one of the officials said.

It would be “an entirely unnecessary step that we would view as damaging to our relationship,” Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters at a news conference. She said she had first heard about plans to deploy troops “a couple of days ago”, and said Canada had made its position clear to various members of the U.S. administration.

Earlier, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also discouraged militarizing the border. “Canada and the United States have the longest unmilitarized border in the world and it is very much in both of our interests for it to remain that way,” Trudeau said. “We have been in discussions with the United States on this,” he told a news conference, without giving details.

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Canada calls Trump plan to deploy troops at border unnecessary and damaging