If you want a 'cast with more dissension and alternate views, see if Gwynne Dyer will come on, about what we need military for - and how that has changed. Flipped 180. I'll just recommend "Canada in the Great Power Game".

What I have flipped on, is I agree that the defence budget must be doubled! But not to buy American weapons. That's also buying into the reason we bought them: currying favour.

In return for nuclear protection, we've been buying American weapons and shutting down our own high-tech military production for decades; it's delicately offered protection money, if you ask me.

So we opt out of the game. We do what Chretien did with the Iraq demand from Bush, when we doubled down on total military action, but not for what they wanted. We spent every penny and life on the UN-sanction police action in Afghanistan instead. Deke!

So you step on the bully's toes, as Churchill prescribed. Start the announcement with "We are doubling our military spending." But, then: "However, we are reducing our national spending on military equipment from American sources, because of recent remarks so offensive they have caused a collapse of trust. The F-35 contract will have to be cancelled again. So will other recent purchases."

The cancellation works better if I'm wrong about the execrable F-35. Because then the announcement says, 'This is costing us. But still, worth it.' Acceptance of loss shows the bully your resolve.

You hit them in their pride. They don't make movies about bourbon, they make movies about warplanes.

This is the easiest thing, in a way, for Canada to do. Getting private companies to take a hit is really hard on a small number of people and jobs. Letting the whole population bear the burden, evenly, via tax dollars, is much more fair. It should be government purchasing that is cancelled. And military is basically a government-to-government sale. It hits the American manufacturers best able to bear it, too, no victim-towns.

Best of all, it allows immediate, publicity-grabbing, dynamic action, Trump's recent monopoly. The Free Market sucks at action. Change trade laws and the market changes some jobs months later.

It would be weird for the generals to say "the civilians have to fight this with job loss and higher prices for themselves; you can't ask us to give up our beloved, powerful, awesome American arms". Their tears will dry when they get the doubled budget.

Where to spend their keen new money, then? On our troops care and salary. On Ukraine. European alternatives to American systems. Navy for the Arctic. And, nuclear weapons. Of course, obviously nuclear weapons.

Which is a whole other topic.