Annexation is unserious because Canada already serves the United States

Canada will not become the 51st state because it has been and remains the satellite of an informal empire

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly commented about how Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. (Gage Skidmore/16@r/Wikimedia Commons/Suneet Gill)

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly commented about how Canada should become the 51st U.S. state. (Gage Skidmore/16@r/Wikimedia Commons/Suneet Gill)

Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and he’s already making a bold second impression.

This time around, he has it out for Canada even more than before, by declaring a 25-per-cent tariff on all Canadian exports unless his border security demands are met — something this country’s federal government has reluctantly accepted.

That is not all though. At a dinner meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has since announced his plans to resign, Trump quipped about making Canada the 51st U.S. state.

“The president was telling jokes,” Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who also attended the dinner, told reporters. “The president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment.”

It seems to be a joke that Trump has latched onto, prompting the Liberal Party’s non-allies — Official Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford — to speak out against annexation.

Annexation is not a serious threat, and I am not arguing from a technical standpoint that Canada is too large to be one state, that legal procedures prohibit it, or that it is a crass, uncivil statement a politician ought to not say for the sake of decorum. Rather, annexation is unnecessary because Canada is already subservient to the U.S.

In response to a Truth Social post from Trump lambasting and questioning why Americans “subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year,” Smith replied on X that “this is because Canada (especially Alberta) sends billions of raw materials … to your U.S. refineries and factories which your great American companies and workers upgrade and sell around the world, including back to Canada.”

That is the quiet part said aloud. Annexation is unnecessary because Canada, just like the rest of the western world, is already a willing participant in American imperialism. As Smith noted, Canada sells raw materials to the U.S. to be processed into finished goods, then sold back to the country of origin or other places — with value added. It is an imperialist relationship not unlike the olden days where beaver pelts were exported to Britain and re-imported as hats.

Examining the U.S. and Canada’s pages via the Observatory of Economic Complexity shows that the former is far less dependent on the latter for annual trade than vice versa. It is like a variant of the “Dutch Disease,” where Canada is overly reliant on one trading partner instead of one industry. 

While Canada is too independent to be a colony or client state, it is a satellite state within a very snug orbit of the political, cultural, economic, and military “centre of the universe.”

However, Canada is far from a victim. As already stated, it is a willing partner — Canada pitched its tent in “Camp U.S.A.” a long time ago and is not looking to break away any time soon.

With Canada’s history of mining in South America, exporting literal garbage to Southeast Asia, and the displacement of Indigenous Peoples to exploit resource-rich land, we as Canadians have our own colonial past and present that we benefit from but do not critically think about — if we do at all.

But, broadly speaking, when the U.S. chooses, Canada obeys. Even when Canadian goods are threatened with tariffs, politicians beg for mercy more convincingly than they puff out their chests.

In their 1953 essay “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson argued that “informal empires” based on indirect political and economic influence are preferable to “formal empires” based on colonization. The pair discuss this in the context of the late-Victorian British Empire, but it does not take much to recognize that the modern U.S. fits the bill quite well.

Why conquer Canada when it has already been subjugated so thoroughly?