What Russia demonstrated in Crimea was not an invasion in the old sense but a rehearsal for a new kind of power: hybrid war. Identity manipulation, economic dependency, media saturation, legal ambiguity, and the steady erosion of legitimacy. By the time the world realized what was happening, the territory had already changed hands in every way that mattered.
Something structurally similar is unfolding on the Canadian Prairies. Not through hard annexation, but through absorption. Not by force, but by incentives, narratives, markets, and media. Alberta and Saskatchewan are not being conquered. They are being made legible, dependent, and emotionally aligned with a foreign centre of authority. The United States does not need to take the Prairies out right. It only needs to make Ottawa irrelevant there.
Hybrid war works by targeting the gap between sovereignty and lived authority. States imagine power as borders, constitutions, and elections. Hybrid operations target something else entirely: who people listen to, who they trust, who they blame, and who they imagine as “us.” Crimea fell because Moscow captured the narrative and culture before it captured institutions. The Prairies are being pulled along the same vector.
Start with media. Prairie political identity is overwhelmingly shaped by American information systems. Cable news, talk radio formats, YouTube personalities, Facebook outrage cycles, X based pundits, and algorithmic amplification all flow south to north. The emotional grammar of Prairie politics is no longer Canadian. It is American culture war language, American grievance hierarchies, American myths of freedom and extraction, American fantasies of frontier individualism. This is not incidental. Information dominance is the first phase of any hybrid operation. Control the narrative environment and the rest follows naturally.
Then economics. Prairie energy, agriculture, logistics, and capital markets are deeply entangled with the US system. Oil pricing, pipeline politics, grain markets, equipment financing, seed IP, and insurance are already governed more by American firms and regulators than by Canadian ones. Dependency creates leverage, and leverage reshapes loyalty. When your livelihood depends on US markets and US rules, Ottawa becomes a distant abstraction while Washington feels concrete and consequential. Hybrid power feeds on this asymmetry.
Next comes legal and institutional erosion. The steady delegitimization of federal authority in the Prairies has been successful. Environmental regulation is framed as punishment. Equalization is cast as theft. Courts are portrayed as captured. Elections are described as rigged. None of this requires proof; it requires repetition. Hybrid war does not need to win arguments. It needs to exhaust confidence. Crimea was softened through endless claims that Kyiv was corrupt, foreign, and hostile. The same script now plays across Western Canada, with Ottawa in the starring role.
Identity follows infrastructure. The more Prairie identity is articulated as “resource-producing, freedom-loving, anti-elite, anti-regulation,” the more it aligns seamlessly with American right-wing political mythology. That alignment is not accidental. It produces psychological annexation. People begin to imagine their political future as part of an American civilizational struggle rather than a Canadian one. At that point, sovereignty becomes symbolic rather than functional.
The genius of hybrid operations is that resistance looks like overreaction. There is no single moment to oppose, no invasion to repel, no treaty to contest. Each step is deniable, incremental, framed as organic, grassroots, or market-driven. Russia insisted Crimea “chose” annexation. The US does not need such a referendum. It only needs Prairie provinces to behave as if they already belong to its political and economic orbit.
What would success look like? Not secession. That would be messy and unnecessary. Success looks like provinces that routinely defy federal policy, align rhetorically and economically with US positions, import American political conflicts wholesale, and treat Canadian institutions as illegitimate obstacles rather than shared instruments. Success looks like a region that is functionally governed by external authority while remaining formally and dysfunctionally Canadian.
This is a structural outcome of asymmetrical power in a media-saturated, market-driven, identity-fragmented world. Hybrid war is how empires expand when they no longer believe in borders but still believe in dominance.
Canada mistakes sovereignty for stability. Authority today is exercised through attention systems, economic dependency, and narrative control, not flags and armies. Crimea was a warning. The Prairies are a test case.
The uncomfortable question is whether Canada has any strategy for resisting a form of power that is hybrid, never crosses a border, and never fires a shot.
