Canada Join Trump’s US? OK! Here’s How We Play It

Donald Trump has spent the weeks since the U.S. election creating a parallel world where tariffs don’t affect American prices, China’s army is running the Panama Canal, Greenland becomes a kind of Puerto Rico with ice, and Canadians are thinking seriously about becoming the 51st state.

Any or all such statements should get him disqualified under the 25th Amendment, which permits his cabinet to declare him unable to perform his duties and swear in the vice-president to take over. Since that would put JD Vance in the Oval Office, no one is eager to take that step.

The idea of a merger of the United States and Canada has passed across the American mind since the American Revolution, when the Continental Army invaded Quebec in 1775 and 1776 to persuade Quebecers to join the side of the 13 rebel colonies. (The expedition was a failure.)

In 1921 a Canadian intelligence officer developed Defence Scheme No. 1, based on a pre-emptive invasion of the United States after confirmation that the Americans were about to invade Canada.

As part of it, Canadian troops would occupy Seattle, Spokane and Portland, then retreat while destroying bridges and railways to slow the Americans down while British reinforcement hastened to help us.

The Americans may have caught wind of this, because later in the 1920s the U.S. War Department developed War Plan Red, outlining a possible war with Britain that would involve defending against Canadian invaders.

Trump isn’t likely to be planning a war. He’d prefer anticipatory obedience leading to a single new state of Canada, presided over by a governor. Over Christmas he said he’d like to see Wayne Gretzky in that job, though Gretzky wisely declined.

We can consider this an opening offer by a self-styled artist of the deal. But any Canadian negotiators should spurn such an offer out of hand, for several reasons.

A key reason: each American state gets two senators.

California, population 39 million, gets two senators. Six American states (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Delaware) have under one million citizens each.

Four more (Montana, Rhode Island, Maine and New Hampshire) have between one million and 1.3 million citizens.

So the 10 least-populated states have 20 senators — most of them Republicans.

The American historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out that in the 1890s a Republican administration turned several territories into states long before they acquired the populations considered minimal for statehood. They even doubled down, splitting Dakota Territory into North and South Dakota, and staged a massacre of Indigenous Lakota at Wounded Knee to ensure enough votes for statehood.

In the process, the Republicans acquired eight new Republican senators.

Here’s our counter-offer

As the 51st state in America, Canada’s 41 million citizens would be as under-represented as California’s. We’d get a lot of congressional representatives, but the U.S. Senate would still be controlled by places like Montana and South Dakota. Not much in it for us.

So let’s consider a couple of counter-offers.

First offer: we go in as 10 new states, one for each province. That gives us 20 senators out of a total of 120. Trump turns this offer down fast.

So we sweeten the deal. We’ll go in as five states, which consist of:

• North Maine, including Newfoundland and Labrador and the Maritime provinces;
• Ontario;
• Prairie, including Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta;
• South Alaska, formerly British Columbia; and
• Turtle Island, a “distributed” state comprising all the Indigenous Peoples north of the Medicine Line.

What about Quebec? Not part of the deal. Quebecers see this merger as a perfect opportunity to become a francophone republic, and the next referendum will surely pass.

With five new states, we get 10 senators out of 110. They won’t necessarily be Democrats or Republicans; our present Canadian parties will do just fine, and could also run in the original 50 states. So our Conservatives and the People’s Party could compete with the Republicans for the right-wing vote, and the New Democrats and Liberals try to replace the Democrats who just lost to Trump. Good luck to the poor dears in the Greens.

In future elections no party would likely win a majority, so we’d have a coalition in the U.S. House and Senate and a president who would have to work well with the coalition and especially its northern members. We might even see a Canadian-born politician elected president.

Choose your system

Second, once the Americans have agreed to five new states and 10 senators, we can get down to harmonizing two legal and political systems that have grown very different in the last two centuries. How do we sort that out?

Dead easy. The five new states also hold referendums on which system they prefer to operate under — the American or the Canadian. Even the new state of Prairie, conservative though it is, will go with the Canadian system.

What’s more, we offer the original 50 states the same deal: Canadian laws or American? Medicare or private health insurance? The Second Amendment or gun control? Abortion as health care or abortion as crime? The U.S. Bill of Rights or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The Supreme Court of the United States, or the Supreme Court of Canada?

I admit I’m biased, but I would expect we’d get the whole West Coast plus Michigan, Minnesota, the New England states, New York and maybe New Jersey.

A government of migrants

We also demand a migratory House of Representatives and Senate that moves annually between Ottawa and Washington. In Ottawa, politicians would operate as a Westminster parliament; in Washington, they’d follow the American congressional model. The president, obliged to be in the House, would find question period an interesting experience, and the Senate in Ottawa would be mercifully irrelevant.

The deal should also guarantee free migration between American- and Canadian-system states. Trumpists could move to American-system states, while everyone else heads for life under the Canadian system. Eventually, it will dawn on the Americans that they’ve been taken over by those quiet neighbours upstairs. Most will be very grateful.

Of course Trump would reject such a deal, preferring to let things stand as they are. He might threaten 50 per cent tariffs, or occupy Greenland as a warning. But about three weeks of such tariffs would end with torches and pitchforks on Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by a brisk retreat to no tariffs at all. When he realizes that, Trump will call off the merger.

But just to show we’re good sports, we’ll promise to string drone-patrolled razor wire from Maine to Point Roberts — just as soon as Trump’s willing to pay for it.