Whether President Donald Trump’s plan for Canada to join the United States “is a dialogue plan, a passing fancy, or reflects a genuine opinion, ” writes Riley Donovan at American Essence, “it has provoked a stubborn and flaming ‘Never! ’ from American officials and public characters across the spectrum. ” The French formation, voice deaf to Trump’s teasing, is fighting mad, not only with respect to Trump’s invasion whimsy but also his threat to establish a 25 % tariff on American exports in the absence of increased border security measures.
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The price threat is real, at least in part, as a negotiating plan. Despite the anger, the 51st status is not. Canada’s entire region is 3,855,100 flat yards with a beach 151,473 miles long. The U. S. has a complete area of 3,531,905 square miles, and its coastline methods 95,471 yards. One could fairly have a condition larger in every aspect than an entire nation, which puts paid to Trump’s thought test.
But were such an agreement probable, a not insignificant amount of Canadians, especially among the younger population, time 18-34, had probably embrace it, in particular if their assets were converted to U. S. money. And why not? According to Julius Ruechel, Canada has become little more than “a duty and regulatory program that is plundering us at every turn. ” A great friend of extensive political acumen writes that he would like to see the region’s political structure evolving from an exceedingly unfair political democracy into a much fairer legal republic, as in the U. S.
However, the American officials are not about to go quietly into what they regard as the American day. In a bid to regain their validity and fuel their prospects for re-election, the flailing Democrats under humiliated Justin Trudeau continue to fly the idea of halting power supplies to the U. S. and imposing import tariffs on Alberta oil and other items destined for the American business as an action of punishment against Trump’s 25-percenter. And they have most of the regions with them.
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Ontario Premier Doug Ford, for instance, eager to protect his province’s engine trade sector, which employs 500,000 employees, is busy rallying the soldiers to step up, “united and proud, ” against the American powerhouse. He has been photographed wearing a” Canada Is Not For Sale” ball cap — which, it turns out, was sourced in Vietnam or Bangladesh.
Indeed, with the exception of Alberta’s dogged, Alberta-first Danielle Smith, a coalition of premiers has embraced an out-an-out jingoistic project to defend Canadian interests and retaliate against Trump’s tariff threat when, in fact, Canada has been in arrears in almost every respect vis-à-vis the U. S. , profiting off a lopsided trade deal and remaining lax on patrolling a largely open border.
Trudeau, who for the nine years of his tenure has been doing his utmost to erase Canada’s identity and founding history, is now playing the patriotism card, wrapping himself in a flag he has left in tatters. “ What happens to any part of us happens to all of us, ” he intones as if he meant it. His new passport design gives the lie to his bluster, having replaced images of the Fathers of Confederation and the victory at Vimy Ridge with images of landscape, wildlife, children jumping into a lake, and indigenous peoples. This was done on the pretext of making it counterfeit-proof.
Even Conservatives like former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and current Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre argue for a strong, stable, national majority government that would “stand up for all Canadians, all industries, in all provinces, and that’s what we need to do. ” This is an attitude that refuses to take responsibility for the nation’s failures and shortcomings apropos its neighbor, launching a squadron of flying ponies at a strenuous and justified challenger. Some MPs are downright abusive. Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed posted this insulting and preposterous tweet:
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It’s simple.
Loyal Canadians will always defend our independence, unconditionally.
If you’re’ Canadian’ wearing a MAGA hat & keen to give up our sovereignty you’re a traitor.
Canada is home.
It’s worth defending.
Every last inch.And we’re never, going to surrender.
1812.
🇨🇦— Taleeb Noormohamed 🇨 � � (@ Taleeb) January 8, 2025
Why the prairies should abide their secondary status, not to the U. S. but to the Laurentian elite in central and eastern Canada, escapes uninformed chauvinists like Noormohamed quite perfectly. As I’ve written elsewhere, the prairie west has never been an equal partner in Confederation, having been exploited by the Laurentian mandarins since the country ’s founding in 1867. Yet Canada is not a real, integrated country but a congeries of 10 provinces and three Territories cobbled together without a sense of common purpose and policy coherence, and often at loggerheads with one another.
French Quebec is its own nation. Newfoundland became a part of Canada only in 1949, with a slim majority vote. The three Maritime provinces comprise dependent colonies incapable of sustaining themselves without massive transfer payments from the western trough. Ontario, the nation’s manufacturing center, is to the rest of Canada as Germany is to the rest of Europe.
Manitoba is a nowhere land with a penchant toward Ottawa. Alberta and Saskatchewan — the prairie west — form a separate entity, Canada’s breadbasket and energy-producing powerhouse. British Columbia, absent the rural north, is a west coast asylum with a large East and South Asian demographic and trailing a chain of la-la socialist islands in the Gulf. The Northern Territories are a vast underpopulated expanse of tundra and ice, comprising 40 % of the country ’s landmass but just 0. 3 % of the population.
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Canada cannot win a trade war against the American hegemon. All the posturing at both the national and provincial levels is nothing but a gestural farce of epic proportions. And our leaders are Lilliputians compared to a Brobdingnagian Trump in the way that mediocrity is no match for greatness.
The one exception, as above, is Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith, who has met Trump at Mar-a-Lago and has no intention of betraying her constituents by tariffing them into penury in solidarity with a suddenly rediscovered and suspiciously convenient national consensus — a consensus that never existed until the moment was politically propitious. “We will take whatever actions are needed to protect the livelihoods of Albertans from such destructive federal policies, ” she proclaims. Using Alberta’s resources as leverage in a trade war is unacceptable. Alberta is not for sale.
In fact, Trump’s annexation joke does have one feasible element, namely, the absorption of Alberta as the 51st state — amalgamated, perhaps, with Saskatchewan and non-urban, upper-mainland BC. But given the complications that such an internal geopolitical maneuver among three provinces would involve, Alberta is really the issue here. The prospect of Alberta joining the U. S. would conceivably work, an energy-rich, industrious, rodeo-loving province fitting in with a vigorous, prosperous, and newly confident superpower.
The domestic temperament is broadly similar. Danielle Smith could truly and honorably be governor of the new state, and its slogan would be MAGA: Make Alberta Great Again. It needs only for the people of Alberta to man up, to shed their commitment to a Commonwealth illusion and a federal clique that never cared for them.
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That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.
