How to Make Canada the 51st State

Hint: And the 52nd, the 53rd--and vive le Québec libre

Dec 05, 2024

The other day, Donald Trump joked that if Canada wanted to avoid his tariffs, it needed to become the 51st state.

Let’s concede it was a joke. But it’s a joke in the context of Americans not knowing a heck of a lot about Canada. So let’s take it seriously as a way to learn more about the Great White North, strong and free to join the Union.

Here’s the punchline: you can’t do this, not without astronomical costs, and you probably can’t bring all of Canada in even if you’re willing to pay because there’s no way in heck Quebec would ever fit as a state.

Fun fact: the Articles of Confederation contained a provision to allow Canada to join the Union whenever it wanted, which I’m pretty sure if you get five Supreme Court justices drunk would still be binding.

Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.

The first thing we need to get straight is that Canada can’t be admitted as a state. That’s not because it’s too big, or because it’s too expansive, or any of that stuff. No. Canada is a federation and the federal government of Canada just … doesn’t do the same sorts of things that U.S. states do. What does it do? Postage, banking regulation, the census, national defence … a list more or less similar to the U.S. federal government, except for some differences like marriage and prisons.

Admit Canada as a “state” and you’re left with a comparative nullity—something that literally couldn’t fulfill the roles that a state needs to do. Yes, yes, if we’re admitting Canada, then presumably we can assume that we’d be abolishing Canada as a federal entity, but here’s the thing: you don’t want to turn Canada into a giant state in which the provinces and territories become, the equivalent of counties or other state subdivisions, because Canada …

… well, here’s the thing, Americans. Canada is a different country. Not just a separate sovereignty than the United States. I mean it’s literally different. Things don’t work the same way that glib jokes about the 51st state would imply.

If the Canadian federal government is somewhat familiar to Americans (as long as you ignore the fact that there’s a King of Canada), provincial governments are not. They’re states on steroids. They taste more of the sovereignty of the polity than do U.S. states. So, for instance, Canadian provinces share powers over immigration with the federal government—and they dominate in health care, education, policing, and so on. Also, there’s the Notwithstanding Clause, which (skipping over many fine details) lets provinces opt out of fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the federal Constitution. Plus Quebec never ratified the constitution.

Ah, yes, and you can’t mention intergovernmental relations in Canada without mentioning equalization payments, the process by which richer provinces (basically Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta) pay (through taxes to the federal treasury) to ensure the other seven provinces can maintain similar access to social programs. In principle, a State of Canada might be able to keep this going, but I really wonder if that could be fiscally sustainable, given that all of a sudden Canadians will be paying U.S. federal taxes that will be much higher than provincial taxes.

A unitary State of Canada—a 51st state—would be extremely unwieldy. You’d be asking a government that’s hitherto been doing normal national-government stuff—appointing ambassadors, running a spy agency, mismanaging a postal service—to suddenly start coordinating a unified set of social services. The civil service just isn’t set up to do that, and you can’t just recruit anyone from the provinces-now-counties, because they don’t have any experience doing that. It just won’t work.

Canada can’t be the 51st state because Canada’s confederation just really isn’t set up to do any of this. The federal government of Canada has a fascinating history and is the heir to a fascinating imperial tradition, and also it just … doesn’t do U.S. state things. The provinces do.

So we’re going to have to admit the provinces, not Canada, as a state.

This will be a problem.

Not because any of the new states will be too large in terms of population. Ontario would slot in nicely as a roughly Pennsylvania-sized state; British Columbia is Alabama-sized; etc.

It’s because most provinces are too damn small. Manitoba and Sasketchewan have about Maine/Montana populations. That’s fine but I’m not happy about giving them two senate seats each.

It gets worse from there.

New Brunswick is Wyoming-sized — and it’s only the eighth-largest. Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island (that’s two provinces) are, well, tiny. Newfoundland and Labrador has a population smaller than Wyoming; who wants to exacerbate malapportionment in the Senate?

And Prince Edward Island has a population of … 154,331. That’s a mid-size, maybe a small-size, county. We’re going to give them two senators and a representative?

Do you really want to hear stories about how the senior senator from PEI is holding up consideration of a debt-limit bill until funding is approved for an Anne of Green Gables theme park?

Oh, yes: Bear in mind that unless you increase the size of the House, congressional representation is going to be skewed as hell if any Canada-sized chunk joins the union—you’re going to be asking a lot of House members to vote themselves out of a job to make this deal happen, because with House membership capped at 435 the whole pie is going to be re-cut when U.S. population jumps by 12 percent overnight.

And we’re not even talking about the territories. The three territories (Northwest, Yukon, Nunavut) have a shockingly large share of Canada’s landmass and a combined population on the order of Springfield, Illinois—or (roughly) a third of Anaheim’s. I guess they’d stay territories.

“All right,” you say, “ten provinces, ten new states. What’s a little crowding of the Senate between friends? And we can just proportionally increase the House—yeah, sure, and we’ll build a new House office building while we’re at it. What’s the big deal?”

Quebec.

Quebec is unassimilable. That remark I had about the provinces tasting more sovereignty than the states? That’s mostly because of Quebec.

Quebec is different. It’s not just that a heck of a lot of them speak French. It’s not just that it’s vast—nearly Alaska-sized. It’s also distinctive from the rest of Canada in a profound way.

I mentioned that they haven’t ratified the constitution there yet. They also have distinctive political parties and a full axis of politics orbiting around whether they’re just another province, a distinct culture, or a sovereign country in waiting.

Ever since New France came under British rule in 1763, Quebec has been distinct in northern North America. It was majority-Catholic in a Protestant world. It was French-speaking in an English ocean. Its laws are based on a civil code, unlike the surrounding common-law jurisdictions. It was part of la Francophonie but distinct from France’s more famous later empires in Asia and Africa—settled by those from the provinces, cut off by manners and dialect. It is defined to the rest of the world by a metropolis—Montréal—with which it has an ambivalent, even hostile, relationship. (I’ve personally heard as many languages spoken there as I have in New York.) And from the 1960s or so, a cultural revolution (the Revólution tranquille) beat back the power of the Church and an Anglo-speaking elite in favor of a secularizing French-speaking dominant force. Those movements led to separatist movements which form the greatest force for separatism in North America, and to a cultural nationalist movement that has, among other policies, enforced a stringent pro-French language policy that gives the province a notable flair. (The French thing isn’t for tourists or, like Irish, a nod to cultural heritage. It’s real: go outside of Montreal and you’d better have your phrasebook handy.)

Quebec simply can’t, politically, become a part of the United States. At most, it could enjoy a free association status, like Puerto Rico, with a common citizenship and easy trade relations, but full control over its cultural policies. But the culture and politics of the province would be incompatible with the powers of statehood; there’s no way Bill 101/Loi 101 survives a First Amendment challenge, to say nothing of the (uncomfortably Islamophobic!) prohibitions on other practices. And I can’t see Quebec going for any of the other requirements.

So we’re down to nine states, plus three big territories.

Maybe you think that works. But it really wouldn’t.

All of this discussion has been at the level of the law and the politics of a North American in-gathering. The economics would be … we’re not supposed to say “crippling” anymore, are we?

The economic aspect would be challenging, to say the least. Seventy percent of Canada’s GDP is in services (which is actually less than the United States!), but a giant chunk comes from resource extraction—mining, petroleum, natural gas, and so on—and another giant chunk from manufacturing.

Huge chunks of this GDP would be in line for significant disruption. Canada is a lower-productivity economy than the USA (really! I was shocked). That suggests that a unified economy would lead to tremendous shake-ups in the north. In general, Canadian firms seem to be smaller and lower-productivity than American ones (don’t hold me to this, I ain’t one of your fancy industrial-organization specialists). Some Canadian retailers would thrive (looking at you, Couche-Tard), but others would be threatened by an influx of newly domestic capital and competitors. Public administration (6.28%) would be challenged—entire provincial governments and agencies would have to be overhauled). “Cultural industries” would almost certainly be threatened by the loss of tax and currency advantages (sorry, Vancouver! sorry, random Canadian towns that produce Christmas movies!), to say nothing of Canadian content requirements.

Licensing requirements would rock the professions. How/would Canadian medical licensing translate into the USA? What would lawyers do to make the transition? Or accountants? These seem trivial because when we think of admitting new states I suspect we think of admitting the Plains states, Washington DC, or Puerto Rico, all relatively compatible or, bluntly, simple economies. But the USA has never admitted an advanced economy driven by services into the Union. We’ve never done it. The last states to enter were all long-term territories—frankly, military and mining reservations—and had no such complications. I don’t think that statehood is on the docket for an advanced economy simply because the transition costs would be too high—my wild-ack guess is in the ballpark of German unification.

And just think of the remedial spelling education we’d have to pay for. Canadians can’t even spell “honour” right. (At least the “NHL” would finally make sense.)

But let’s say the legacy Americans are willing to pay the burden of the transitions—and let’s also say that they’re willing to assume Canada’s national debt as part of the burden; we’re all one family now, after all. What happens next?

Well. I suspect we’d see a tremendous brain-drain southward, not least because a number of immigrants who’d angled for Canadian citizenship would now have American citizenship instead. I also expect that this would affect folks from poorer provinces, and yes I mean the Maritimes, even more, compounding their issues (although possibly reinvigorating Maine for a while).

Ah, but what about the long-term politics of it all? Certainly this would bring in a number of Democratic voters, no? (Republicans say this with fear, Democrats with anticipation.)

That’s the conventional wisdom, and if you look at polls of Canadians, you’d certainly assume they’d be running to pull the D lever. But—if you’re not a citizen of the USA, your interests are different than if you are. For one thing, you don’t pay taxes. For another, you don’t see the million little policy details that matter to you when you’re in a polity that people outside don’t. (I remember learning that a huge issue for Israelis as they head to the polls was, basically, housing costs, which is not a subject that gets discussed often in US discussions of Israeli politics!)

Some provinces, I’m willing to bet, would be pretty darn conservative. Alberta would fulfill its destiny as the Texas of the north. But Ontario also has a stubborn habit of electing Doug Ford, who would probably make a recognizable governor-type in the USA. The next government is likely to be formed by a rather conservative Conservative party. On some issues, then, I expect Canada’s entrance would move Americans leftward, but I wouldn’t assume that this is One Weird Trick to a permanent Democratic majority. (Maybe if we bargain hard for Montreal as an exclave inside an independent Quebec.)

Oh, and as recent German history teaches us, when a unification leaves a bunch of depressed communities in places pining for a lost identity … it’s not great for anyone.

Have I sold you on the idea that this probably wouldn’t work? Even in Alberta, probably the best case, enjoy litigating the differences between US and Canadian subsoil (oil) rights.

The irony is that, if you were trying to craft a realistic best-case scenario for the United States and Canada, or even the USA alone, one that would involve maximum benefit for both without the extraordinary costs of political unification, you’d probably try to create a customs union in which you sought maximum integration in productive industries while allowing dumb little carve-outs for special interests on both sides as part of the cost of doing business.

In other words, you’d create NAFTA, or USMCA, or whatever we’re going to call it.

And if you wanted the strategic advantages of cooperation that worked to the US benefit, you’d press for integrated air defense and intelligence gathering. Oh wait that’s literally NORAD.

To put it another way: there’s very little upside to political unification for either side relative to the gains you can get through less costly alternatives.

If you have a nineteenth-century view of the world—if you think that economies are land and stuff under the land—this doesn’t make sense. But if you realize that most of what advanced economies do now is making services work within densely regulated and socialized institutions, then it’s pretty obvious that we can’t move borders and laws around without causing immense disruption. (Yes, IR scholars, this is basically the “does conquest pay” debate applied to annexation.)

This is a roundabout way of saying that any proposal that, even jokingly, proposes annexation as a solution is just too dumb to engage with. The real questions should be how to make the US-Canada bloc work better together for maximum gains, not how to discard a painstakingly arrived at set of institutions for no gains. (Breaking up NAFTA won’t bring jobs back to Detroit, at least not in a way that pays.)

But it’s also my way of reminding Americans that Canada really is a real place with real differences to the USA. The goal of liberalism should be to enable cooperation despite difference. It’s not easy! But in the long run it’s a hell of a lot better than snuffing out difference, cooperation, or both.