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During a tense discussion over border policy on Friday, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump suggested to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that if he didn’t like 25 per cent tariffs, Canada could always become the “51st state.”
Delegates at the dinner — both U.S. and Canadian — all took it as a joke, rather than a serious offer of annexation. Sources told Fox News that the reaction of the Canadians was to “laugh nervously.” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who was there, would later tell reporters that it was “in no way a serious comment.”
While the joke has galvanized a fringe coterie of U.S. expansionists on both sides of the border, Trump happened to be flirting with an idea that has never really gained traction for the chief reason that Americans weren’t interested.
As far back as the 1980s, this was the considered opinion of L. Craig Schoonmaker, a curious figure in U.S. political history. Schoonmaker was one of the founding organizers of the modern gay rights movement, and is generally credited with coining the term “Gay Pride.”
He was also a vocal Canadian annexationist, serving as the longtime spokesman for the Expansionist Party of the United States.
During the 1980s negotiations over a U.S./Canadian free trade agreement, Schoonmaker scoffed at Canadian fears that free trade would invite an American takeover of their country. As Schoonmaker wrote in a 1987 letter to the Washington Post, he’d been lobbying for years for America to pull down the maple leaf, but nobody was interested.
“It is not Canadian nationalism but simple U.S. apathy that has prevented annexation of parts or all of Canada,” he wrote.
The last serious U.S. attempt to annex parts of Canada actually predates Canada by just a few months. On the eve of Canada becoming an independent dominion in 1867, Republican congressman Nathaniel Banks introduced a bill calling for the various colonies of British North America to be admitted as a U.S. territory. But the bill fizzled out in committee just as the British North America Act was being approved by the British government.
And Canada's continued independence certainly isn't due to any U.S. reluctance to use force. Since the 1860s, the United States has staged armed incursions into more than 100 countries, ranging from Germany to Vietnam to most of Central and South America.
Rather, one of the main barriers ito U.S. annexation is political. Turning 40 million Canadians into American citizens could result in a seismic leftwards shift to U.S. politics — with potentially devastating consequences for Republican politicians such as Trump.
Even the most conservative corners of Canada, such as Alberta, would likely lean Democrat if given the chance. By poll numbers, Canadians are far to the left of their American cousins on issues ranging from abortion to gun rights.
And the trend becomes most obvious in polls where Canadians are asked how they would vote in a U.S. presidential election. The most recent edition, conducted by the Environics Institute, found that Trump would lose Canada in a landslide. Even in the Prairies — which is consistently a solid block of support for the Conservative Party of Canada — Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was favoured by 44 per cent of respondents as compared to Trump’s 33 per cent.
Thus, any U.S. president or Congress approving the annexation of Canada would do so in the knowledge that they were likely ushering in at least a generation of unchecked Democratic dominance.
The U.S. has long been extremely leery about accepting new states for fear of upsetting existing political balances. In the early 19th century, the annexation of new U.S. states was often held up over concerns that the new entrant would give a strategic advantage to either the pro-slavery or the anti-slavery camp.
More recently, the chief concern has been in balancing Democratic and Republican control of the U.S. Congress — particularly the Senate, where every state gets two senators regardless of population.
The last two new states — Alaska and Hawaii — were accepted at about the same time in 1959 for this reason. One, Alaska, leaned Democratic, while another, Hawaii, leaned Republican.
Although these allegiances have completely swapped in the interim decades, both states have effectively cancelled each other out in terms of their relative political influence on Washington.
The fact that the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico doesn’t have a Republican equivalent that could be granted statehood at the same time is among one of the signature reasons that its own statehood ambitions keep getting quashed.
Trump seemed to acknowledge as much in his Friday dinner with Trudeau. According to Fox News sources, Trump joked that Canada could be admitted as two states, a conservative and a liberal one — and Trudeau could be the governor of the liberal one.
But again, drawing up two Canadas – one Democratic and one Republican – would require a herculean feat of gerrymandering. With all of the main cities in the Prairies likely to lean Democratic, “Republican Canada” would have to be a bizarre cutout of rural and semi-rural areas spanning from the Rocky Mountains to parts of Northern Ontario.
But if the Americans are historically quite choosy about who gets statehood, one critical factor is that membership in the United States is not reversible. As the U.K. highlighted with Brexit, the European Union allows member states to leave peacefully. And even Canada has laws on the books outlining how Confederation might be dissolved.
The Clarity Act, made law in 2000, allows for provinces to secede from Canada, provided that secession reflects a “clear expression of a will by a clear majority of the population of that province.”
But once you enter the United States, you’re not allowed to secede. That’s actually what their civil war was about. Although the conflict was sparked by regional disagreements over the legality of slavery, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln ultimately pressed the war on the principle that seceded Southern states were not allowed to leave simply because they’d gotten tired of federal authority. About 600,000 military deaths later, the issue was considered settled law.
