The day after airliners flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the National Post columnist Mark Steyn wrote, for the paper’s Sept 13 edition, that it was time to send U.S. troops into Canada. He based this advice on a rumour, later demonstrated to be false by the 9/11 Commission, that some of the terrorists who flew out of Boston had driven in from Canada. “[Just for the record, I mean this entirely seriously,” Steyn wrote. “[T]he U.S. should exercise an admittedly broad definition of the international right of hot pursuit and send forces across the border to track down the terrorist cells that operate out of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere.”It was a difficult time. But my question for today is: would Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and the amazingly adaptable Marco Rubio use a broad or narrow definition of hot pursuit if anything happened in Canada, or was rumoured by anybody to have happened in Canada, that caught their interest?

Source: National Post January 10, 2026 07:43 UTC