the idea that canada can just build a protective igloo across the border and go it alone isn't some kind of noble defiance. canada is not some righteous path in a sea of corruption. canada's as bad as any other capitalist actor, and in many ways we are worse. we will not survive.
churchill had his ass handed to him and needed help not just from the americans but from the soviets. his speeches of defiance were delusional hogwash. britain was on the brink. and he was a piece of shit, anyways.
if you want a history lesson, you might study the punic wars, or the trojan wars (as they've come down to us) or, yes, the peloponnesian war, too. you might look at the mongolian conquest of china, or of the collapse of the roman empire. there are tactics to use to get inside the larger, more powerful actor and eat away at it from the inside. the chinese infested the mongolian horde and came out in control of it. roman culture emerged in tact after the german invasions.
if canada wants to seriously survive, rather than carry out a performative form of "survival", it needs to leverage the allies it has in the united states, and it has a lot of them, and it has a lot of leverage.
i think any smart person will concede that merger is inevitable, as a merger of the north and south of china was, or a merger of italy and germany was, or a merger of scotland and england was. if we want our culture to survive and prosper in lieu of theirs, we need to approach the merger with an upper hand, and not run from it, or try to avoid it. if we do that, we will just be wiped out.