Looking at Canada in particular, here's how I look at this now:
Losing Borden is consequential from a psyche aspect more than anything else, as Borden is far enough away from major population centers that civilian casualties will be fairly minimal. However, an airburst nuke there is likely to be visible across Toronto's northern suburbs (especially if the hit is at night), which is definitely going to have an impact. Kingston is rather more serious - you've just cut off the primary rail lines between Toronto and Montreal and there are likely no ways around it (as both CN and CP's bypasses by then had had the rails removed) and Highway 401 is now definitely out of commission for at least a few weeks. It passes far enough away from RMC (presumably the target here) that it will more than anything be a matter of clearing the debris out of the way. Queens University is now history, which is a major loss for Canadian education, and you've probably just resulted in ~15K-20K civilian deaths and a lot of injuries, which will surely swamp hospitals in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and everywhere in between.
And then....Edmonton and Halifax. Oh boy....
The loss of these two very literally changes Canada's politics in a dramatic fashion. Canada in the 1990s was seeing something of a revival of sorts of Western conservatism, which was primarily based in Alberta. The destruction of Edmonton (call it 150K-200K dead there as a result) ends that revival, full stop. They now need Ottawa and the two larger provinces out east to carry them and pay for the rebuilding of Edmonton, and the destruction there means Canada's oil production gets cut by at least two-thirds for several years before its all repaired, which will be a high priority but will take time. Alberta can forget about trying to push around Ottawa in this world for a generation at least, if not more. The province's government will surely shift to Calgary, which will make it the undisputed center of the province for decades to come. This also means logistically the northern regions are gonna be hard to service for a while yet, but that's repairable. Alberta will still be an oil producer (and the resources pumped into fixing the damage will result in new jobs and income there), but the "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" sort of attitude towards Ontario and Quebec is now as dead as the Social Credit Party.
Halifax, if anything from a social and economic front, is worse. Much worse. The Atlantic provinces in 1996 were living with the end of the cod fishery (devastating to Newfoundland and bad everywhere else) and now their economic and transportation hub just got glassed. Nova Scotia was struggling in the 1990s before this, now....the province will be safely called a failed state, and Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick won't be a whole lot better off. Getting jobs and economic life back to the province here is now going to take priority over anything else, but that will take money that only Ontario and Quebec have. (British Columbia will have its hands full helping now-destitute Alberta.) Halifax will get rebuilt - it kinda has to be as it is the only real good deep water port in the region - but rebuilding the economy of the Maritimes is gonna be hard as hell, and jobs and income will take precedence over EVERYTHING else. Sydney's steel works will continue to operate (it was a financial hole at the time, but in this world the jobs are more important) and the coal mines of Nova Scotia likely will be as well, and to hell if it pollutes or the mines need big bucks to be made safe. Likewise, Canada will surely begin re-establishing its fishing fleets for other fish, and in this universe foreign trawlers on the Grand Banks are just as likely to get their crews hauled off to jail and their vessels sunk by the Canadian Navy than run off by the Coast Guard. As there will be a need to get jobs and money to the regions, ANYTHING that works will surely be chased down, particularly in the Maritimes.
Basically, Ontario and Quebec will be deciding what happens in Canada for the next 30 or 40 years, and since the other provinces have no chance of rebuilding otherwise trying to fight that is going to be impossible. For Canadian Conservatives, this is bad news indeed. For the Quebec separatists, its probably worse because Ottawa now will be forced to lean heavily on Quebec to help rebuild the country, which means the Parizeau-esque separatist nonsense is probably going to go over like a lead balloon in Ottawa. They'll probably get told to knock it off or face sedition charges in this universe. The Reform Party has been absolutely crippled by the losses in Alberta, which means the merging of the Conservatives and their evolution into a party capable of governing is going to be massively delayed if not halted entirely. Jean Chretien and his successor now will pretty much be Prime Minister for as long as they want to be, but the policies of the 1990s aimed at improving Canada's government finances will be scrapped almost immediately - in the midst of such a depression and with two of Canada's largest cities destroyed by Russian nuclear weapons, Keynesianism and direct government involvement in the economy is going to be the order of the day, along with additional help from the US and probably UK and Europe. Canada's industrial base erosion of the 1990s also will surely be stopped dead, out of a need to keep jobs in Canada and raise finances to help fight the Depression and rebuild what has been destroyed.
