My great-great-grandmother was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and first noticed the US as a 10-year-old. My great-grandfather was an Irish Canadian who married a Maine woman. My spouse’s father was born in Ontario, descended from an extended line of Newfoundlanders, and a print of skaters on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal decorates our pantry even now.
I supply these bona fides, proofs of a present of maple syrup operating by my youngsters’s veins, as a preface to a controversial declare: that Donald Trump’s kidding-or-is-he suggestion that Canada belongs inside our union isn’t a menace however a possibility, that Canada could be higher off joined to our continental Republic, with the wintry 1775 defeat of Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold lastly reversed.
Immediately Canadian sentiment is extraordinarily cool to this concept, with polls exhibiting at greatest about 10 % of Canadians open to membership in a Larger United States. And for comprehensible causes, since Canadian identification is so certain up in completely not being the united statesA. that, “Well, we’re not American” is actually the very first thing Justin Trudeau got here up with to elucidate Canadian pleasure not too long ago on CNN.
This has held true throughout a number of transformations in each nations. When the Nineteenth-century United States was seen as a radical democratic energy, Canada was the conservative, Anglo-Tory different, providing “peace, order and good government.” When the late-Twentieth century United States was seen as a land of libertarians, cowboys and evangelical preachers, Canada was the wise, secular, socialist different.
I think that Trudeau imagined his personal premiership extending this custom, contrasting a globalist Canada with Trumpian nationalism. However as an alternative his rule could also be remembered because the interval when not-Americanness lastly ceased to be a believable foundation for a nation-state.
On the one hand, Trudeau’s reign intentionally deserted each Canada’s Anglo-Protestant previous and the cautious multiculturalism that succeeded it — the hunt for steadiness between the Anglophone majority, the French-speaking minority and a fastidiously recruited immigrant inhabitants. As an alternative he positioned his nation as the primary “postnational state,” with “no core identification, no mainstream.”
This evacuation predictably yielded inner division — backlash towards an unprecedented surge of immigration, a revival of Québécois nationalism — however simply as necessary, it didn’t really place Canada towards America. As an alternative it reworked Canada right into a laboratory for American-style progressivism, its empty core full of woke concepts and shibboleths, with Trudeau as its Obama-lite and a powerful dose of euthanasia as its nice distinctive.
That this yielded a Trumpification of the Canadian proper, manifested most notably within the trucker protests of 2022, was likewise a lesson how a “postnational” Canada falls extra underneath American affect than earlier than.
The issue is that it’s laborious to see how Canada can efficiently renationalize. The nation isn’t going again to some Tory previous, there’s no clear narrative of assimilation for the hundreds of thousands of latest arrivals, and the one viable nationalism is the separatist spirit in Quebec. The liberal imaginative and prescient of Canada nearly as good international citizen serving to to restrain the American cowboy is likewise outdated: The “liberal worldwide order” has evanesced, leaving Canada caught between a fading Europe and an authoritarian and impressive China.
And, after all, completely adjoining to America itself, whose international hegemony could also be threatened however whose affect over the English-speaking world is being magnified by our very-online age. Which leaves Canadians in an unenviable place — pinned underneath American hegemony and buffeted by American tradition battle, however with out the company and affect that precise Individuals take pleasure in.
Which is the best case for simply turning into American, for including some variety of new stars to our flag. Because the Canadian political theorist David Polansky puts it, “Why shouldn’t a rustic that abjures all nationwide identification and pursuits search benefit in a sort of geopolitical merger?” As a result of there could be clear benefits:to take part within the nice drama reasonably than watching from throughout the border, to form the imperium reasonably than negotiating a place in its shadow.
If I have been a younger Canadian, particularly one exterior the Laurentian heartland, I feel I might really feel this imaginative and prescient’s pull. And sure, even when I have been a younger left-leaning anti-Trump Canadian — as a result of what higher method to serve these causes than to really pull Washington leftward, so as to add your votes to the coalition that simply didn’t defeat Trump?
That’s the rationale that it will be considerably unusual for American conservatives to really welcome Canadian accession right now — as a result of it will instantly destroy the Republican Occasion’s political benefit.
However since I’m imagining this over an extended time horizon, I’m free to examine a future the place the impulse to turn into American works a gradual change amongst Canadians, till they establish with elements of America that their forebears outlined themselves towards, American conservatism included — as a result of to unite with us could be additionally to converge.
