To Those Who Would So Easily Sell Canada Out

 

 

I was listening to US President Trump’s comments at a press conference on February 3, 2025, in which he broached again the topic of Canada becoming the 51^st state.  It was noteworthy that he recognized that there would be pain involved, even if “people played the game right”.  But, he said, “most of the pain would be theirs.”  Some in Canada, especially in the 18-25 age bracket, have voiced a willingness to “become the 51^ststate” if they were granted immediate citizenship, and their assets were immediately converted to US dollars.  Let me warn you: That will not happen.

 

The process of absorbing one country into another is not just a matter of removing border controls, extending citizenship, and switching currencies.  Some members of the European Union have been working toward more integration since the 1950’s.  There was even the somewhat painful process of introducing a common currency (the Euro), which some member states still do not use.  All these decades later, the European Union is still a collection of separate countries with separate governing systems, tax systems, and citizenships, each providing for their own national defence, even if it is coordinated with others.  They have achieved the elimination of trade barriers, including the ones hampering people moving from country to country (free movement of labour), but they are not one country—far from it.

 

Even Germany, which reunited its two halves, separated only for 40 years and otherwise sharing a thousand years of common history, has not yet achieve full integration.  Personal histories, common national stories, cultural assumptions shaped over generations do not simply disappear.  The United States itself has such an example: the re-integration of the southern breakaway states following the Civil War (1861-1865).  Although they were only independent for four years, official “Reconstruction” lasted for twelve years (1865-1877), but the divide between “North” and “South” lingers and continues to shape US politics, as Heather Cox Richardson points out so well in her, “How the South Won the Civil War”.

 

Were there ever to be a situation in which there would be enough public support in Canada to seek statehood (or rather, “statehoods,” as I shall point out below), and the governing establishment of Canada were prepared to see the matter through (setting aside, for a moment, the constitutional hurdles), and the US authorities enacted the pertinent legislation, the process of actual annexation and full statehood would be a multistep process that could drag on for decades.

 

1) The Balance of Power in Congress

As the United States of America was growing by acquiring territories and admitting them as states, power balance politics always shaped which territory was admitted when.  Before the Civil War, the great divide was between “free states” and “slave states”.  The latter, run by a powerful oligarchy of plantation owners, was mindful never to let free states outnumber slave states in Congress.  Thus, the admission of a new state that wanted to come in as a free state had to be balanced by the admission of a slave state.

 

After 1865, this became a contest between predominantly Republican and predominantly Democratic states.  So, for example, Arizona and New Mexico, which had been US possessions since 1848, were not admitted until 1912, some 64 years later.  To boot, some of the delay for New Mexico was the fact that it continued to have a Hispanic (called “español,” in the parlance of the old New Mexico families) majority for a very long time.

 

Today, that Republican-Democratic divide (“red state vs blue state”) is the major power struggle in Congress and for controlling the White House.  Canadian values overall align more closely with those promoted by the Democratic Party.  It would be a non-starter for Republicans to just willy-nilly admit nine or ten new “blue states” as this would keep them from power for at least a generation.  Even if Canada were admitted as one state (an unwieldy and unworkable size for such a level of government), it would still affect the balance in the House of Representatives and the likelihood of a White House going “blue” for quite some time.

 

Congress might choose to rearrange the borders of the existing provinces to create conservative-progressive pairs to ease the admission process.  For example, the interior and northern portion of British Columbia could be constituted into one or two more right leaning candidates, while the southwest coast could form one or two more left-leaning ones.  This gerrymandering could go on across the former Canada, enabling statehood, but perhaps slowing the process overall.  For each of the new jurisdictions, there would be the daunting task of starting all over. 

 

 

2) Americanization

Historically, the United States has admitted a territory to statehood once it could demonstrate that it had been Americanized (thus the delay with New Mexico).  Hawaii is another example of a territory that did not become a state for over 60 years (taken over by the US in 1898; admitted to statehood 1959).  The problems for those in Washington, D.C., were two-fold: too many non-whites, and, as a constituency leaning to the Democratic Party, there would need to be a territory to balance it off.  Alaska was that territory waiting in the wings, but it had such a large land area, and its population was so small that it was not viable as a state for a long time. States must be self-financing.  It took 92 years (1867-1959) for Alaska to finally become a state.

The fiscal arrangement for territories varies.  Some territories are meant to one day become a state, but others are retained for strategic reason, such as Guam.  Territories have been sometimes subsidized from Washington, D.C., and sometimes not.  One of the reasons that the National Forests and Parks are predominantly in the western states has to do with such territorial economic arrangements that carried over into statehood or became a condition of statehood.  Congress might demand the handover of former crown lands to become National forest land, especially in British Columbia and Yukon.  Do we want this?

 

US leaders are unlikely to extend full citizenship and statehood to Canadians and Canada immediately.  There would first have to be a process of Americanization.  School and university curricula would have to be changed to teach American stories and historical mythology.  Canada’s story would be intentionally minimized or suppressed, ending up in sidebars or footnotes.  Ideas of loyalty to the monarchy or French, Métis, or First Nations identity would have to be rolled over to bring to the fore “Amerika über alles” (if I may indulge in pointing out the unreformed nationalism of American patriotism).  It is here where, if there was enough push-back from the percentage of Canadians remaining loyal to the idea of Canada (and there is certain to be some significant number of these), the statehood process might be shelved for a generation to give this phenomenon time to fade.  Should there be any inclination by some Canadians toward armed resistance, a military occupation would be sure to follow and the boundaries of that jurisdiction sealed.

 

Québec, of course, would pose a special challenge.  While it is conceivable that the powers that be in Washington, D.C. might, for simplicity, leave Québec out to remain the last vestige of independent Canada (lots of historical irony there), the greed for territory might also force Québec in, only to find itself with the same status as Puerto Rico, which is a non-English speaking, traditionally Roman Catholic population, taken from Spain in 1898, and still not fully integrated into the United States.

 

 

3) Aligning Laws and Institutions

The United States has only annexed two fully independent countries: Texas and Hawaii.  Texas had been a part of the newly independent Mexico.  Seeking economic development, the Mexican government of the 1820’s encouraged settlers from the United States.  These were predominantly southerners, many of whom brought enslaved workers.  In one of those historical moments of foreshadowing, when Mexico’s government implemented a ban on slavery, the settlers in Texas rebelled and established an independent country, modelled very much on their old homes in the southern United States.  The US war with Mexico began over the annexation of the nine-year-old Republic of Texas.  The alignment of the laws of Texas and the United States was straightforward, and no Ameircanization was necessary.

 

Hawaii was a different matter.  It was a traditional Polynesian monarchy that was adapting itself to the encroaching modern world in the 19^th century by inviting investors to develop the lucrative growing and processing of sugar cane.  In 1893, the reigning monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, suddenly found herself a prisoner in her own palace when the American businessmen of Honolulu, whom her predecessors had so graciously invited to their shores, staged a coup and proclaimed a republic.  The American leaders of the Republic of Hawaii implemented an American style government, and when the US administration was satisfied that Great Britain, which had been one of the guarantors of Hawaii’s security, would not intervene, they proceeded to make it a territory.  The long territorial history of Hawaii gave ample time to align its laws.

 

The remainder of US acquisitions were either conquests (from Mexico and Spain), or purchases (from France, Spain, Denmark, and Russia), or the division of shared colonial territories (the Oregon Country and American Samoa).  Some of these territories became states, some remain territories.  The status and process are unique to each case, dependent on the political winds in Washington at the time.  An annexed Canada will find itself beholden to similar winds of fashion, exigency, prejudice, horse trading, and black swan events.  Don’t hold your breath for immediate citizenship, though US-dollarization will probably precede anything else.

 

Furthermore, it would be demanded of provinces seeking statehood that they change their systems of government from the current Westminster parliamentary form to the “presidential” form of the States.  Old case law would come into question.  How would cases decided under the old system be treated in the new?  Would they carry any weight?  What of the relationship between the Crown and the First Nations of Canada?  Given that the United States rejected the Royal Proclamation of 1763 (considered one of the “Intolerable Acts”), the aboriginal people of Canada would find themselves suddenly beholden to a less reconciliation friendly overlord.

 

 

4) Privatization of Health Care

The one feature of life in Canada that comes up consistently as a plus in polls and conversations is universal health care.  While the system today has its problems and deficits, for any except the monied, the advantages are clear.  Even the poorest individual or family, if they need emergency, lifesaving, pre-natal and natal, or many other types of care can just go and be cared for, no financial barriers and no bankrupting bills.

 

The system works because it is universal, across all income levels and across the whole country.  Though managed by each province separately, the standards are laid out in the Canada Health Act.  The federal government assures compliance by contributing large block funding to each province.  Were Canada to be taken over by the United States, this system would cease.  Without federal input, former provinces (if they were to be left intact) could try to sustain pared down versions of the system, but much would be handed over to the private sector out of necessity.  Decisions would need to be made as to who would be eligible for continued public care.  The culture of social responsibility would be eroded and those who do not receive publicly funded care would begin to embrace the petty greed of Ayn Rand style thinking: "Why should I pay for other people?  No one pays for me!"  This way of thinking is widespread in the United States.

 

 

 

 

The Road Best Not Travelled

The road to annexation by the United States for a country as large and well-established as Canada would be long and hard.  As even US President Trump acknowledged, there would be pain on both sides, but most of the pain would be on us.  And those eager to get to “the Wizard of Oz” to have their economic or social problems fixed might not themselves see the day of any reward.  It might not be until two or more generations later that the dislocation and emotional and economic wounds would finally fade.  On the other hand, if the north-south rift, or Germany’s experience of reunification are at all informative, the gap may never be fully bridged, the wounds never fully healed.