Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
Rick McGinnis:
With the re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Canada has become an interesting place, though like almost any other time when this has happened, the circumstances aren’t necessarily welcomed by Canadians. It all began with what was probably a joke, though when it comes to existential questions and particularly how we’re viewed by our neighbours to the south, Canadians tend to lose the sense of humour we like to brag about.
In a Dec. 18th tweet cross-posted from his Truth Social account to X, the president-elect confidently proclaimed that “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State,” kicking a hornet’s nest of reaction that few anticipated would be on his list of priorities. There was predictable outrage from the expected sources: Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada governor and a perennial on the list of possible replacements for prime minister Justin Trudeau, accused Trump of “casual disrespect.”
Stewart Prest, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, accused Trump of bullying and said that “bullies don’t stop because you do what they demand that you do.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said that Canada becoming a 51st state will “never happen,” and claimed that he has “the strength and the smarts to stand up for this country.”
The president-elect doubled down, threatening a tariff war against Canada, referring to Trudeau as the “governor” of Canada, and suggesting that hockey legend and Trump supporter Wayne Gretzky should run against him and assume leadership of the 51st state.
This is undeniably world-class trolling by Trump, who knows that Trudeau is vulnerable, suffering from cratering popularity in the polls, but Trudeau did travel to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s alternative White House, for further chastisement, then sent a delegation from his cabinet to meet with the president-elect while he left Ottawa for a Christmas ski vacation.
But Trump did elicit a reaction from Canadians who admitted that the idea wasn’t unattractive – enough to make it echo in both national and international press in ways that can’t be comforting to whatever government is leading this country in a year’s time.
A Daily Mail story cherry-picked responses from self-described conservative Canadians – “maple MAGAs” and supporters of Albertan independence were particularly enthusiastic – like “sounds pretty good,” “the dollars we earn would also have way more value than the weak Canadian dollar,” and “you’ll have the rights to bear arms, which you should have.”
The story noted that a recent Leger poll found less than 15 per cent support for a merger with the U.S. among Canadians, and quoted Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, part of the government delegation sent to visit Trump, insisting that “the president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment.”
Which is probably true, but it’s hard not to speculate how those tweets will echo well past Trump’s inauguration and even past our imminent federal election. And perhaps it’s time we had a debate about what it means to be Canadian, and just what our government and its institutions aren’t providing that make a Canada-US merger more than a mere joke.
It didn’t help that our current head of government told the New York Times Magazine the year he took office that Canada was a “postnational state” and that there is “no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Writing about this in the Guardian, Charles Foran noted that this would have been a radical statement from a European politician while “to Canadians, in contrast, the remark was unexceptional.”
Trudeau was, according to Foran, CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, “voicing a chronic anxiety among Canadians: the absence of a shared identity.” He traces this “postnational” idea through Mavis Gallant, Yann Martel, John Ralston Saul, and no less than Marshall McLuhan, with this brain trust of writers and intellectuals telling us that Canada was at heart an “experiment” and that there was no point trying to define Canada because, even after a century and a half as sovereign state, there was no “there” there.
Is it any wonder that, a decade after we had been presented to the world as less of a country and more of “a convenient waystation: a security, business or real-estate opportunity, with no lasting responsibilities attached,” some small but measurable minority of Canadians might want to stop the experiment and take themselves to a place that had a palpable idea of what it was, and what it should be?
But first it must be said that absorbing Canada would be a bad deal for the U.S., and not just because of demography, geography, culture, or economy. As long as Canada includes Quebec, acknowledged officially as a “distinct society” within our borders that represents itself to the Rest of Canada (ROC) as a referendum away from leaving us in pursuit of its own manifest destiny, we’re more trouble than we’re worth.
And this would be especially true if current polling holds true and the Bloc Quebecois, the party of separation, becomes the official opposition in the House of Commons this year.
Back in 1997, two years after the second Quebec referendum on separation, Robert A. Young published a revised and expanded edition of his 1995 book The Secession of Quebec and the Future of Canada. He laid out all the potential scenarios if Quebec had voted “yes” in the referendum and the machinery of “sovereignty” had been set in motion with the ROC forced to face a future without Quebec.
From the perspective of the mid 90s Young acknowledges “the suggestion that a fragmented ROC would sooner or later join the United States. Some provinces or regions might be forced to opt for this course almost immediately; others might maintain their independence longer. Obviously maintaining any degree of constitutional unity in ROC would become much more problematic if individual provinces or regions joined the United States.”
Young imagines that Atlantic Canada might be the most obvious region to become a 51st state, and makes a case that British Columbia would find it attractive to become part of a rich contiguous region of Pacific states stretching from Alaska to California, facing Asia more than Europe. And he notes that “the psychological blow to people in the remaining provinces would be substantial; more seriously, if a large component of ‘outer Canada’ left ROC, the problem of Ontario dominance in the remainder would be accentuated.”
Western separatism, which has a strong voice today in Alberta and Saskatchewan, didn’t get looked at seriously, and Young stated confidently that “from official statements and from the opinions of experienced American observers of Canada, it is evident that the United States’ preferred option is that Canda remain intact.”
But that was then and this, as they say, is now, and even if the president-elect is trolling us by tweeting about a 51st state, the idea is in play and the response hasn’t been altogether negative. Sensing that Justin Trudeau is vulnerable – some polls project the prime minister losing in his own Montreal riding – Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon recently promised a third referendum in the province.
At the time he made this promise, support in Quebec for separation remained around a third of the province, numbers lowering among younger voters. But everyone knows that in politics and the economy, change (or crisis) happens very slowly and then suddenly, and separation might see a revival with the Bloc Quebecois as official opposition in Ottawa and support for Francois Legault’s CAQ party softening in Quebec going into a 2026 provincial election.
What has changed is that support for federalism isn’t anywhere near as strong in the ROC as it was during the 1980 and 1995 referenda. An Abacus poll in 2022 revealed that only 15 per cent of the ROC thought Canada and Quebec were moving closer together, while 46 per cent said we were moving farther apart. Only 18 per cent of the ROC thought Quebec was moving in the right direction while a whopping 52 per cent said they were unsure.
That is a significant block of undecided voters in a country where the unsure crush incumbent parties in elections when they think the country is going in the wrong direction. And if we can say anything for certain right now it’s that dissatisfaction with political leadership and the status quo is making the last year of the Trudeau government less of a victory lap and more like a walk of shame.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so we might be overdue for a debate about what Canada is and what its future holds. And if that means talking frankly about divorce, custody, fire sales, redrawn maps and ending an experiment whose goals remain unclear to its subjects, there’s no time like the present.
