Why Canada Stays Out of America’s Clutches
As one of the roughly 800,000 Canadians living full-time in the United States, my jaw dropped when I first heard about Donald Trump “joking” that Canada ought to be the 51st state. I was horrified. As a professor of international relations, however, I’m familiar with the long history of American threats against Canada’s sovereignty, dating all the way back to the American Revolution.
The U.S. has invaded us twice—first in 1775, and again during the War of 1812. Back then, Canada was just a collection of colonies. It survived largely thanks to its Indigenous allies in North America and backing from the British Empire. Aside from a few close calls in the 1800s, Americans have decided against conquering us for the last 200 years, despite the clear military imbalance between us. (The U.S. spends 35 times as much on the military as we do.) Over the last year, as part of a larger project on the formation of Canada, I’ve researched why and how we’ve managed to stay out of America’s clutches for so long. As it turns out, history can provide us with a lot of lessons for how to best react to Trump’s current threat.
You might think that past annexation plots have failed because Americans just plain like Canadians, and it’s hard to go to war against your friends. There is some truth to that. A YouGov poll from January showed that 76 per cent of Americans have “very or somewhat favourable” views of Canada. (The same poll revealed that Canadians have a less rosy view of Americans: 56 per cent reported having a negative opinion of the States, which Trump is obviously not helping.) Even if some U.S. politicians—say, an orange-coloured president—wanted to invade, they’d still face the challenge of persuading a reluctant public. Wars are bloody and costly affairs. American voters know it, and elected officials, for all their faults, tend to pay attention to them.
On its own, though, public opinion is an unreliable political force. Sometimes that’s because of outside events—just look at how Canada’s federal politics changed in the last year. Other times, politicians can manipulate popular sentiment all on their own. Republican voters used to have a strongly negative view of Russia, for example, until Donald Trump changed it. The good news is that, according to recent data, more Americans oppose the idea of Canada joining the U.S. than support it (42 per cent versus 36 per cent, respectively). The bad news is that the net difference between those views isn’t large, and a hefty 22 per cent were undecided on the matter. You might wonder, Does this division leave the door to annexation wide open? This is where history can help.
Consider an incident from 1854, just prior to Confederation. At that time, the U.S. imposed high tariffs on Canadian goods—sound familiar?—and the five British colonies of Canada were interested in a free-trade agreement. Lord Elgin, then the governor general of British North America, travelled to Washington to see if he could strike a deal. He did, but it came with a surprising condition, one that tells us a lot about why Canada has repeatedly avoided absorption. The senators representing the southern states were willing to vote in favour of free trade, but only if Lord Elgin promised to keep Canada British. The last thing the slave-owning states wanted was a bunch of colonies belonging to Britain—where slavery was outlawed—upsetting the internal balance of power in the U.S.
This story nicely captures a recurring pattern: since about 1820, whenever some Americans have proposed annexing Canada, other Americans have been strongly opposed. The way that the United States has grown territorially has long depended on what it would mean for Congress and the presidency. In 1820, northern-dwelling Americans wanted to create the new, free state of Maine, but the slaveholding states in the South opposed it; at the same time, the South wanted to create the new state of Missouri where slavery would be allowed, which the North opposed. This conflict birthed the Missouri Compromise, which created both Maine and Missouri as new states. It became the template for U.S. expansion even after the Civil War settled the slavery question. Whenever a new state wanted to join the union, Democrats and Republicans would ask themselves how the proposed expansion would affect their chances in future elections.
Adding Canada to the United States has always been unattractive to a sizable fraction of Americans for precisely this reason. If our 40 million voters were suddenly scooped up, it would give the Democratic Party a big advantage. Most Canadians support universal health care, abortion rights, labour unions and public retirement benefits like the Canadian Pension Plan—values that skew more blue than red. In fact, when Trump first floated the 51st state idea to Justin Trudeau over dinner last November, one of the other diners at their table pointed out how problematic that might be for Trump’s own party. It would create an ugly choice for Republicans: face 40 million new Democratic-leaning voters or disenfranchise Canadians entirely.
There is another reason, besides the machinations of American democracy, why Canada has stayed independent for so long. When the United States flexes its muscles to try to coerce Canada—or any other country—it usually creates a backlash. In 1890, U.S. President William McKinley raised average tariff rates to about 50 per cent on Canadian goods. McKinley’s Republicans hoped that Canadians would be so eager to avoid the tariffs that they’d happily join the Union as the 45th state. Instead, the opposite happened. Canadians were enraged and saw those tariffs, as we do today, as an existential threat.
A determined resistance also makes it hard for interlopers to stay in control. The Americans who occupied Montreal in 1775 during their War of Independence from Britain discovered this the hard way: they were pushed out, in part, because they failed to gain the loyalty of the French Canadians and the local Indigenous peoples. Present-day Canadians are rallying against the Trump regime’s tariffs, just in different ways. They’re boycotting U.S. products, cancelling their trips south of the border and booing the American anthem at sporting events. Nationalist anger can be a powerful thing.
Just like in the 1800s, Americans themselves are providing resistance. The ones still planning trips to Canada are understandably concerned about how they’ll be received. (As The Daily Show’s Desi Lydic joked, “Canada can’t become part of America! That’s the country I pretend to be from when I’m travelling abroad!”) And while fears for Canada are just one of the many reasons for the growing protests against the Trump administration, collectively, those grievances are driving hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.
There is one caveat: popular pushback among Americans will only matter so long as the United States remains a democracy. Some thoughtful analysts have rated the chance of the country slipping into authoritarianism as high as 50-50. The more serious the risk of democratic breakdown, the more Canadians should prepare for the security risks it would generate for us. Still, history cautions us not to overreact. I never imagined that my research project would suddenly become so timely. But, if anything, it shows that, time and again—over two centuries—U.S. internal politics have tended to counter any impulse to annex Canada. Our two countries have had to bury the hatchet many times, and for good reason. Despite recurring frictions, we’ve always been stronger and safer when we work together.
Jeff Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
