The Past Speaks

In late 2024, President-elect Donald Trump reignited diplomatic tensions with Canada by making provocative remarks about the country’s sovereignty. Trump referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the “Governor of the State of Canada,” adding with a smirk that Canada might as well join the United States if it wished to avoid the heavy tariffs on its exports. Trump took to his preferred platform, Truth Social, to repeat these sentiments. Over the following days, Trump’s posts escalated in tone, suggesting that Canada’s economy relied heavily on U.S. trade and that tariffs were inevitable unless it reconsidered its status. By mid-December, Trump’s comments had sparked widespread media attention, with some analysts unsure whether his statements were intended as serious policy proposals or simply political theatre or were simply a joke.

Here is some media coverage from India of the issue.

My educated guess is that they may be serious. There are certainly people around Trump who are concerned about the “browning of America” and who have, in the past, mused that incorporating Canadian provinces as states of the union would raise the Caucasian share of the US population (sorry I can’t find the link but they did say that). The same people seem to be fiercely opposed to Puerto Rican statehood). I don’t think that Trump is a racist ideologue, but I do think that he is interested in building a legacy and there would be no greater legacy than permanently expanding the United States. Changing the map of your country is a way to get your face on Mount Rushmore. That’s even better than being happy about Trump Tower becoming the tallest building in New York.  When I first heard the slogan “Make America Great Again” I noted that it didn’t specify when exactly American greatness had peaked. Like many, I had assumed that the imagined Good Old Days in this slogan were either some nostalgic version of the 1950s or the 1980s, a period when Trump was in his prime. But it could be the vaguely defined period of greatness underpinning the slogan is the nineteenth century, the period of manifest destiny.

Perhaps I am personally biased in thinking that Trump is serious about offering statehood to some or part of Canada because my PhD thesis looked at the 1860s, a period when that option was very much on the table. Maybe my background is skewing my analysis of what is going on right now.

In any event, Canadian popular reaction to Trump’s remarks was swift and defiant. Prominent politicians across the Canadian political spectrum rejected any notion of annexation, although I did notice the Premier of Ontario took the precaution of placing a US flag next to a Canadian and provincial one during a press conference. Polling data showed that Canadians overwhelmingly opposed closer political integration with the United States, with support for national sovereignty apparently at record highs. Only 1 in 8 Canadians are open to the idea of Canada, or their Canadian province, joining the United States. Even in the more politically conservative Prairie provinces, that number isn’t much higher than 20%.

Trump’s 2024 comments about Canada echoed his earlier proposal in 2019 that the United States should acquire Greenland, then an autonomous territory of Denmark. In August 2019, news broke that Trump had floated the idea during meetings with aides, reportedly framing the acquisition as a strategic move to gain access to Greenland’s natural resources and enhance the U.S. military presence in the Arctic. Trump later confirmed the proposal on Twitter, which is now called X. The proposal drew immediate backlash from Denmark, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen describing it as “absurd” and anachronistic. Her view was that while Tsarist Russia might once have been able to sell Alaska to the US, this isn’t 1867 anymore and we don’t do things that way. Trump retaliated by cancelling a state visit to Denmark, claiming Frederiksen’s response was disrespectful.

The idea of the United States annexing Canada has deep roots. During the early 1800s, tensions between the United States and British North America culminated in the War of 1812, during which some American leaders saw the conflict as an opportunity to annex Canadian territories and to liberate their inhabitants, many of whom were Anglo-Saxons culturally indistinguishable from people in neighbouring states, from British misrule. While the war failed to achieve this goal, the idea persisted among American expansionists. The Annexation Movement gained momentum in the 1840s, spurred by Manifest Destiny and economic pressures. In 1849, a group of Montreal merchants published the “Annexation Manifesto,” calling for Canada to join the United States to escape economic stagnation and benefit from free trade.

William Henry Seward, U.S. Secretary of State during the 1860s, was a vocal proponent of territorial expansion and believed that Canada would eventually be absorbed by the United States. In the 1850s Seward, who was an ardent abolitionist from New York State, said it was more logical for Canada to be part of the United States than it was for the slave states.  Seward was confident that economic integration and demographic trends would lead to Canadian annexation without military force. However, these ambitions, along with garden variety interest group politics in the US congress, resulted in the cancellation of the Reciprocity Agreement in 1866, which had established free trade between the U.S. and British North America since 1854. This Free Trade agreement’s termination was partly driven by American resentment toward British support for the Confederacy during the Civil War, as well as lingering annexationist sentiment. The cancellation intensified Canadian fears of U.S. expansionism and reinforced support for Confederation as a means of unifying and protecting Canada against American ambitions.

A paper I wrote long ago, “Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Chose a Unique Model of Sovereignty in the 1860s,” sheds light on why Canada ultimately resisted annexationist pressures. I wrote this paper because in part because I was sympathetic to the 1860s Canadians who favoured Annexationism, some of whom had arguments that were based on economic logic. (Annexationism was very strong in communities in which the border was an annoyance that complicated everyday life.) Once the US passed a constitutional amendment ending slavery, many Canadians, particularly farmers in the area west of Toronto, concluded that they could now safely join the Union. The paper argues that, unlike the United States and many Latin American nations, Canada adopted a model of sovereignty that preserved close ties to the British Empire while granting autonomy through Confederation. I argued that Canadian Confederation as a deliberate rejection of U.S.-style republicanism, emphasizing the desire to strengthen ties with the British Empire. Another reason the Annexation movement of the 1860s failed was the fact that Anglo-Saxon Americans were aware that Canada was home to a very large number of non-Protestants). Whether those ties were ultimately good for subsequent Canadian living standards is something we can discuss—as I argued in the final chapter of book published in 2008, post-Confederation Canada’s economy really fell behind the US. I speculated that the Canadian constitution designed in London in 1866-1867, which provided for an excessively centralized and not very democratic political system, had something to do with it. In the generation after 1867, vast numbers of Canadians voted with their feet in favour of the US and moved there, settling in places such as Ontario California.

My own personal view is that while I don’t like Trump, I think there is a strong logic in favour of continent-sized economic units, particularly those that resist the tendency to become protectionist blocks. I was totally opposed to Brexit and think that Britain would have been better off had it remained in the EU. (I’m agnostic about whether the UK should have adopted the Euro as its currency, as was once proposed by Tony Blair). By the same token, I think that Canadians and Americans would be better off if they combined their two countries at least in the form of an EU-style customs union with a common currency. The devil is obviously in the details. However, I think that we need to be able to separate the issue of which constitutional arrangement is economically superior from the political personalities of the day. When Clinton and Obama were presidents, support for greater integration in Canada was higher than it currently is. Whenever some particularly objectionable Republican gets in the White House, be it Richard Nixon or the like, we tend to see a nationalist reaction in Canada.  I bet that if the annexation of Canada were proposed by the likes of a Clinton or an Obama, the Canadian reaction would be different. I also bet that if the prospect of Canada’s ten provinces getting votes in the electoral college became a realistic one, many Republicans would become strongly opposed to the concept because at least nine of those provinces would be staunchly blue states.

While Trump’s recent statements may have been made in jest, they reflect a pattern of American leaders revisiting old territorial dreams to achieve economic or political goals. Canada’s current response is consistent with a historical commitment to maintain sovereignty in the face of external pressures.