The 51st State?

Whether President Donald Trump’s campaign for Canada to join the United States “is a negotiation strategy, a passing fancy, or reflects a genuine belief,” writes Riley Donovan at American Essence, “it has provoked a defiant and fiery ‘Never!’ from Canadian politicians and public figures across the spectrum.” The Canadian establishment, tone deaf to Trump’s trolling, is fighting mad, not merely with respect to Trump’s annexation whimsy but also his threat to impose a 25% tariff on Canadian exports in the absence of enhanced border security measures.

The tariff threat is real, at least in part, as a negotiating strategy. Despite the outrage, the 51st state is not. Canada’s total area is 3,855,100 square miles with a coastline 151,473 miles long. The U.S. has a total area of 3,531,905 square miles, and its coastline measures 95,471 miles. One cannot reasonably have a state larger in every dimension than an entire country, which puts paid to Trump’s thought experiment. 

But were such an arrangement possible, a not insignificant number of Canadians, especially among the younger cohort, age 18-34, would likely endorse it, in particular if their assets were converted to U.S. dollars. And why not? According to Julius Ruechel, Canada has become little more than “a tax and regulatory system that is plundering us at every turn.” A good friend of considerable political astuteness writes that he would like to see the country's political system evolving from an increasingly undemocratic parliamentary democracy into a much freer constitutional republic, as in the U.S.

However, the Canadian authorities are not about to go quietly into what they regard as the American night. In a bid to restore their legitimacy and stoke their chances for re-election, the flailing Liberals under disgraced Justin Trudeau continue to float the idea of halting energy supplies to the U.S. and imposing export tariffs on Alberta oil and other products destined for the American market as an act of reprisal against Trump’s 25-percenter. And they have most of the provinces with them.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, for example, desperate to protect his province’s auto export sector, which employs 500,000 workers, is busy rallying the troops to step up, “united and proud,” against the American behemoth. 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:

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.

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.

That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.