American Breakup

Beth,

We know Canada comes to the rescue (or whatever) of USA with Britain. What I'm
curious about is what kept US from falling apart during the same time period,
why we weren't in there helping the Yanks (or were we), and why some of this
disaster didn't spill over into our territory as well and how we ever put
together enough force to help out?

I'd suggest:
-- Canadian latent anti-US sentiment suffers a
rise in the 2000-2010 era due to ludicrous US
protectionism. This leads to a bit of a split and some nastiness which
convinces the Canadian populace that at least a minor military upgrade
is required (including some fringe-ist rumblings
from the US about "securing strategic oil and water resources" in the event of
trouble). This gives an upgunned RCMP and military to patrol the border and
help keep the US troubles from spilling over plus a chance to help the US out
when the chance comes.
-- Some troubles do spill over into Canada, and
some violence ensues. Not enough to destabilize things, but enough to make
people real serious about preventing a repeat. And a French Canadian
government (ousted as a result of the US collapse because it was ineffective
in preventing it and the ensuing chaos) has less interest in intervening in
the
USA than an equivalent ango-Canadian
government might.
-- The isolationist movements maintain a "we fix
our own problems, bugoff" attitude towards
external offers of help pre-collapse. So
Canadians, though wanting to offer a hand, aren't able to, and are sometimes
kind of irritated with the rhetoric that comes out of the various factionalist
leaders in the South.
-- As the protectionist and isolationist US
movements end up causing the calamity, perhaps Canada and Britain come in to
aide the American people (whom they basically like, if not all of them) with
the intention of maybe removing a mass of chaos and economic collapse (which
will impact the world situation rather unfortunately) with some semblance of
order again, maybe in the hopes to reconstitute the US in a more useful and
less volatile manner. For Canada, this might actually be self defense as a
lawless and divided nation to the south would be very problematic. It would
also be in our nature to want to help. We complain about our brethren to the
south, but in the same way you complain about annoying siblings. We'd still
want to go down and dig
them out. Besides, a lot of ex-pats from either
country live in the other.