Canada

The dude freed Andrew Tate. I don’t need to know anything else. Donald trump is a fucking scumbag and I hope he dies sooner rather than later. Hopefully it happens in a plane together with musk and Vance.

There can be peaceful annexation. East Germany, Newfoundland, Hawaii (debatable), Hong Kong, Alaska and more...

In those cases, both sides (mostly) agreed to the annexation. None were conquered (again, Hawaii is debatable).

Victories in the Middle East

I'm honestly not sure what this refers to in recent memory unless you're talking about the initial battlefield victories, executing Hussein, killing Bin Laden, or dropping MOAB to make ourselves feel better. We fled Afghanistan with our tails between our leg, left a power vacuum in our wake and the people to be ruled by their theocrats. It was godawful and we lost stupendously more than we gained at least in the public sector. Nice agitprop though I guess.

And yet the CBC is explicitly reporting on Smith as threatening a National Unity crisis.

Look, it took a while for people to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump "meant it" when he said crap, because what he was saying sounded so far out there. There's no reason to think differently of any politician, if they're saying really dangerous shit. A national unity crisis is basically saying she wants out of Canada if her demands aren't met And she has the support of 'most' Albertans, apparently, cause they voted her in, and her party still supports her and her actions. Like even if there's no 'recall' option for her as an MLA, if her party didn't want to follow the crap she's saying they could all just stop voting for her crap. Albertans aren't openly calling for her to get dethroned / booted. To think that they would not, potentially, vote to leave -- and/or not stoop to the level of dirty tricks like what we see in the states (Elon's reportedly paying people again in some election to skew the vote, and gettin away with it) -- is naive in my view.

If someone had said 10 years ago that the USA would be talking about annexing Canada, we would have called that a fantasy / no way it'd ever happen. But here we are.

Have a look through their comments. Hardly the first shitty take they've had

Quebec already set a precedent that Provinces can theoretically vote to separate. The Bloc Quebecois in the 90s held votes, and the claim then was that a simple 51% majority on the referendum would've triggered Quebec into declaring independence from Canada. The blocs remained a staple in Canadian politics ever since, historically promoting "Quebec First" and separatist values the whole time, with tons of support from people in Quebec -- one of the big surprises with the US rhetoric, is that Quebec is suddenly seeming more 'pro Canada', even while still electing a party who's roots are separatist. Canada's a federation of provinces, so it's theoretically possible for provinces to leave.

If Quebec can do that, there's no reason to think that other provinces can't do the same. And if Alberta were to hold such a referendum, and the vote showed 51% in favour of 'leaving' -- be it through semantic shenanigans on the phrasing of the question, or overt election manipulation aided by people like Musk -- it's unclear how the rest of Canada would react. Even more, if they did that, and Canada didn't let them "leave", the US could take that as a justification to help "free" the people and oil of Alberta.

Individual towns and regions might try to separate -- in the Quebec referendum, there'd been talks of the northern parts of QB wanting to stay in Canada. Practically though I don't imagine that'd happen. The division of powers between provinces and federal governments, and the authorities given them, are fairly clear cut. Towns and regions sorta just pop up at resource hubs within the province, and aren't as clearly demarked in terms of self governance / "the big" items for a nation. Again, we're a federation of provinces, but provinces aren't a 'federation' of cities.