Alberta would obviously win, but how much effort would it take to crush and subjugate Saskatchewan?

Peace has returned to the Canadian prairies. After Saskatchewan suddenly banned Alberta license plates at provincial construction sites, an escalating interprovincial trade war has been averted at the 11th hour thanks to a climbdown by Regina.

Despite this welcome détente, what would happen if Saskatchewan and Alberta ever reach a future impasse so great that it led to armed conflict?

Distroscale

The notion is too horrible to consider: Brother against brother, Lloydminster divided, countless great works of Saskatchewan architecture destroyed by shellfire. Nevertheless, below is our embarrassingly thorough assessment of what The Great Prairie War might look like.

Alberta is virtually guaranteed air superiority

Let’s assume that both provinces will have to fight a war using the Canadian Armed Forces already within their respective borders. After all, that’s how civil wars usually play out: Rival jurisdictions seize established arms caches and then turn them on each other. Alberta would have CFB Cold Lake, Canada’s busiest RCAF base and the home of three CF-18 squadrons. The Saskatchewan Air Force, meanwhile, would have to be cobbled together with whatever is at CFB Moose Jaw, an air training base most famous as the home of the Snowbirds. While the squadron’s breathtaking aerobatic displays could boost the morale of an embattled Saskatchewan, a formation of unarmed CT-144 Tutors would be very little help in defence.

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Photo by Andrew Serba QMI/Cold Lake Sun 

Alberta also has way more guns, tanks and killer drones

When war planners are gauging the strength of a would-be foe, one of the first steps is to figure out how many potential soldiers they have, and what weaponry they can get their hands on. According to 2017 data, Alberta is home to 1,490,727 men and women between the ages of 18 and 40, compared to only 377,049 in Saskatchewan. Alberta also has more people able to fire guns; it has 261,635 firearms licenses to Saskatchewan’s 97,785. And here again, the existing military hardware in Alberta easily outnumbers anything in Saskatchewan: More bases, more officers, more soldiers, more equipment. Alberta even has the headquarters of Canada’s top-secret autonomous killer drone program . Of course, none of this is any guarantee that Alberta could successfully subjugate and annex the Wheat Province. History is rife with examples of armies who failed against smaller, weaker foes simply because they lack proper organization. Two points in Saskatchewan’s favour: Calgary is bafflingly terrible at installing good public art, and the Alberta health card is an outdated , fraud-prone disaster . If Alberta bureaucrats prove just as bad at drawing up invasion plans, Saskatchewan may yet remain free.

Note: The original post of this story neglected to mention that Saskatchewan is home to CFAD Dundurn, the largest ammunition depot in Canada. If Alberta forces were unable to obtain foreign supplies of ammunition, it would obviously complicate things if their enemies had all the bullets and shells.

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Photo by Master Corporal Malcolm Byers

Saskatchewan isn’t a great place to fight a modern guerrilla war

A 1983 Florida State University study identified two key ingredients behind a successful guerrilla campaign: Dense cities and broken, mountainous terrain. Saskatchewan doesn’t have much of either. There’s a popular expression that if a dog runs away in Saskatchewan, you can still see him three days later. Similarly, if a Saskatchewan rebel fighter runs away from your search-and-destroy raid, you can still shoot him three days later. Guerrilla fighters also thrive in dense urban areas. A rebel fighter operating out of, say, Baghdad, can safely hide in a crowded neighbourhood because he knows that an occupying power will be too worried about collateral damage to level the area with air strikes. Saskatchewan, by contrast, has vanishingly few places to hide among civilians. Saskatoon has 50 people per square kilometre, compared to 237 in Calgary and 123 in Edmonton. This means that it’s much easier to vaporize a Saskatchewan rebel headquarters without so much as drawing a noise complaint from their neighbours.

Photo by Elenathewise/Getty Images

Hackers matter

In the ideal invasion, a foe is plunged into electronic confusion long before the sound of gunfire is ever heard. The internet is cut, TV and radio stations go offline, cell phones all uniformly ping with a message telling enemy civilians to lay down their arms and welcome their conquerors. “Deny people information, degrade their will to fight, and if you can do this in advance of a conventional attack, it’s useful,” said Stephanie Carvin, a national security researcher at Carleton University. Doing any of this requires techies, so fortune would favour a province with a large tech sector that can be commandeered for military use. Here again, Alberta is the clear favourite. Next to Toronto, Calgary has more head offices than any other city in Canada, including a growing base of tech startups. Calgarians co-founded StumbleUpon and Uber and created Java programming language. Saskatchewan isn’t a tech desert, per se, but it’s not the best sign when the province’s own government refers to their “ hidden tech economy .”

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Photo by Peter Lozinski/Cold Lake Sun/Postmedia Network

A savvy province could win even before the shooting starts

Both provinces would be well-advised to take their war cues from another place renowned for its cold and flatness: Russia. The Russians have become experts at using low-level hacking in an attempt to harass enemy soldiers and sway foreign elections and opinions. Given Saskatchewan’s military inferiority, this would likely be their best chance to avoid defeat. Long before Alberta tanks stormed into East Lloydminster, Saskatchewan agents could use a clandestine campaign of hacking and disinformation to sow dissent, division and distrust in Wild Rose Country. And if there’s anything Alberta does well, it’s internal dissent. A skilled band of Saskatchewan provocateurs could sabotage the war effort by turning farmer against urbanite, Edmontonian against Calgarian and treehugger against pipeliner. Militarized trolls could also wreak havoc with Alberta leadership. “You get a bunch of people in Regina to pretend they’re very attractive Calgary Flames fans,” said Carvin. Then, these Regina operatives send over malicious links that allow them to hack into the social media accounts of Alberta military and political personnel. At worst, it’s a way to harass the enemy. At best, they could stumble upon critical military secrets or information to undermine faith in the government.

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Who has the best foreign friends?

Did you ever wonder why the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the United States to declare war on Germany? It was due in part to the behind-the-scenes intrigues of Prairie boy William Stephenson. A British spy often called the real-life James Bond, Stephenson was instrumental in convincing the U.S. to go to war in Europe, and even made sure to feed forged documents to Nazi Germany to ensure that an irate Adolf Hitler would declare war against the United States first. Similarly, the outcome of a Saskatchewan/Alberta war could hinge on who was best able to recruit foreign assistance to their cause. Alberta clearly has the most international clout of the two provinces. Edmonton already maintains a permanent lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and the province need only shut off its southern oil pipelines to earn front page attention all across the United States. However, Alberta is also more likely to be the aggressor. As Saskatchewan’s protectionist stance in the recent license plate dispute shows, the province would likely spend any future interprovincial war trying simply to maintain the integrity of their western border. If Alberta was seen to be inflicting war on an innocent Saskatchewan trying to mind its own business, it could expect swift sanctions from the UN security council.

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Photo by MCpl Mélanie Ferguson

The wild card: The entire British army outside Medicine Hat nobody knows about

The U.K. maintains a giant military training base in Ralston, Alberta, close to the Alberta/Saskatchewan border. With 22 battle tanks and 350 armoured vehicles, it’s the largest British Army presence outside U.K. territory. It’s also more than enough firepower to capture a Prince Albert or a Fort Saskatchewan. In addition, since it’s a training base, it’s filled with officers whose entire career has been spent learning how to invade the Canadian Prairies. Obviously, if a shooting war ever started between Saskatchewan and Alberta, the clever province would try any means necessary to get these Brits fighting for them.