14 Questions about the 51st State (An Open Letter to President Trump)
Pre-conditions for a theoretical Deal.
(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to the Substack platform because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)
(This essay is in the form of an open letter that I just sent to the White House (acknowledgement of receipt included at the bottom of this essay) — please add your questions for the President in the comments below.)
Dear President Trump,
I am writing as a Canadian citizen and independent writer (so, not in any official capacity) in an effort to bring questions to your attention that many Canadians are asking about your offer for Canada (or for any individual province, like Alberta) to join the United States.
As I’m sure you are aware, your generous invitation of acquiring full statehood (an offer that has not even been extended to Puerto Rico despite being under American rule for over 125 years!) has sent Canada’s political and media landscape into a meltdown. Our media has portrayed your invitation as an “invasion threat”, some of our state-funded and state-subsidized media outlets have even asked if Canada should instead join the European Union, our Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, has spoken about building a nuclear alliance between Canada, Britain, and France to protect Canada from a USA that has turned “predator” (her words), and the official Conservative opposition under Pierre Poilievre is campaigning on a platform of “we will bear any burden and pay any price to protect our sovereignty and independence”.
Despite these politically motivated theatrics, the fact is that an increasing number of people (especially the younger generations who see their prospects for a viable future vanishing as Canada continues to deteriorate) are receptive to your invitation. The polling company Ipsos released a poll in mid January, even before you took office, which showed that: “43% of Canadians age 18-34 would vote to be American if citizenship and conversion of assets to USD guaranteed”. That number has assuredly risen since then as Canada’s social and economic landscape continues to unravel.
I also ran an unofficial poll on my X feed over a period of three days in early February with responses from 12,857 respondents. The results speak for themselves, as shown in the image below. If you remove the portion of respondents who only wanted to see the results (3rd category), 85.5% (9,064 out of 10,594) voted in favor of US statehood as long as their province was offered “full rights equal to every other state”.
Since our two countries are not yet officially at war 😉, I have taken the liberty to exercise my dwindling Canadian right to “freedom of expression” by reaching out to ask what it would look like, in practical terms, if Canada (or some of our individual provinces) decided to take up your offer to join your American Republic.
I believe it is urgent for this clarification to happen for Canadians to be able to judge your offer through your own words, in their entirety, and in context, rather than through the escalating theatrics of our media and politicians. The United States is clearly leaving the post-WWII era behind it and opening the door to a new chapter in its history — Canadians need to gain a complete picture of what that future will look like depending on whether Canada chooses to join with or remain on the outside of Fortress America.
What follows below are a series of questions to flesh out some of the details.
Some of these questions are my own as I think through the challenges and opportunities of joining your Republic. Other questions are drawn from my conversations with my fellow Canadians from all across our country in order to dispel some of the falsehoods that are spreading here about what US statehood would actually look like. Still others are intended to clear up misunderstandings that are prevalent here in Canada about how your political system actually works, which are generating a lot of unnecessary fears of being exploited, dominated, or culturally erased upon joining your Republic and acquiring US statehood.
I’m going to start with the easy stuff to dispel a few myths in order to try to put those who are most fearful at ease, and then we’ll dive into the nuanced details of how this might actually work to give Canadians a full picture of the Deal you have put on the table. I believe it is important for Canadians to hear the answers to these questions in your own words so they can give your offer the fair and measured consideration that I believe it deserves.
ANNEXATION vs INVITATION
In your first address to Congress on March 4th, you had a message for Greenland: “we strongly support your right to determine your own future and, if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.”
In light of how your comments about the 51st State have been portrayed by many here in Canada, I think it is important to begin my list of questions with the simplest of them all: Is your offer for Canada to join the U.S. an open invitation or a threat (as claimed by our media and politicians)? Is it “would you like to join us, but you have the option of saying “No”?” or is it “join us, or else”?
FULL STATEHOOD OR TERRITORY
Is this an offer of full statehood? — i.e. equal in rights to all 50 other states, just like Michigan, California, Texas, South Dakota, Alaska, or Hawaii), with equal representation in Congress (two senators per state, proportional representation in the House of Representatives) and full participation in the electoral college to elect presidents)?
Or would Canada become a territory like Puerto Rico or Guam? Or would the US require a transition period for Canada to prove that it has regained the ability to responsibly govern itself again before acquiring full statehood and full representation in Congress, as some have suggested? If so, what would that transition look like?
And would all Canadian citizens be granted full US citizenship, with freedom of movement and equal rights to all other US citizens, including the right for Canadian-born citizens to run for the US presidency, as is the right of every other citizen who is born into US citizenship?
51st STATE OR TEN OR MORE NEW STATES
Although we all talk about the “51st State” as though Canada would join as a single unit, realistically (as you yourself hinted in a recent press conference), given Canada’s enormous size (it’s larger than all other 50 states combined) and given the enormous geographic, economic, and cultural differences between provinces, would each individual province realistically have the opportunity to apply to Congress to join as their own state?
PUBLIC HEALTHCARE
A lot of Canadians I have spoken to have expressed that their #1 concern about joining the United States is losing their publicly-funded healthcare. While I personally do not share their enthusiasm for the Canadian public healthcare system based on my own experiences with it, it is nevertheless a valid question, and a necessary one to clarify some confusion about state versus federal authority in the United States.
The current Canadian and American healthcare systems are both heavily criticized for very different reasons, but many Canadians are especially terrified of leaping into the American system in which a health crisis might overwhelm their private insurance coverage and tip them into bankruptcy. This letter isn’t an attempt to open up a debate about which healthcare system is the lesser evil, or how to reform them, but rather to seek clarification on something much simpler:
In Canada, each province manages its own public healthcare system. Upon becoming a US state, is there any federal law that would prohibit a new province/state from continuing its existing provincial public healthcare system if their citizens give their new state legislature a mandate to keep it? Or for that matter, if their citizens would prefer to combine the best (or worst) of both systems by switching to a dual public/private healthcare system like that which exists in Germany or Switzerland, would individual states have the autonomy to do that, or would this break any federal laws?
My understanding is that, as it stands today, every US state (existing or newly joined) has the full authority to implement their own state-run healthcare system if their voters wanted that (or to adopt some version of a German-style or Swiss-style dual public-private system). Some existing US states (Vermont, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, etc.) have tried to implement such a system in the past, but in most cases their citizens ultimately voted to remove it again (or their attempts were abandoned) because of the high costs… with one exception — Hawaii — which has near-universal healthcare that covers 95% of their population. Hawaii grafted a state-run system on top of the federal Medicare and Medicaid systems. So, in theory, any newly joined Canadian province/state could maintain its existing public healthcare system after joining.
Mr. President, perhaps you could shine some light on this issue to help Canadians understand the practical implications of healthcare in the US republic, the limits of federal authority to interfere in state-run affairs, and the latitude granted to individual states under the US Constitution to manage their own affairs, all of which is very different from the top-down system we have here in Canada.
WHO WILL OWN CANADA’S NATURAL RESOURCES?
Some Canadians have expressed fears that America’s interest in having Canada join the USA is so that America (and Wall Street) can “steal Canada’s resources — oil, gas, minerals, water, etc.”. Consequently, I think it would be beneficial for Canadians to hear you clarify several issues related to this topic in order to address their fears directly:
ON MINERAL RIGHTS:
Would each province/state maintain its own oil, gas, and mineral rights, or would those natural resource rights be transferred to Washington (federal)?
As an example to underscore what this would look like, would a Canadian province like Alberta theoretically be able to manage its own mineral resources to mimic the Alaskan system, in which every Alaskan citizen receives an annual royalty dividend cheque from the state-run Alaskan oil fund (for context, in 2024 every eligible Alaskan resident received a cheque for USD$1702 (approximately Cad$2,458)? Upon joining the US Republic, would individual provinces/states have the authority to implement some version of the Alaskan system and begin issuing royalty checks to the citizens of their province/state?
ON WATER RIGHTS:
On the same topic, would the United States “steal” our water? Please explain the protections that are in place to prevent the water-starved lower 48 states from sucking us dry and leaving our communities, farms, and businesses running short? For example, could eminent domain be invoked to forcibly redirect water from British Columbia to send to Washington, Oregon, or California against the wishes of the province/state?
ON EQUALIZATION PAYMENTS:
On a separate but related topic, would Washington demand Equalization Payments to redistribute wealth from rich to poor states, as happens currently in Canada? My understanding is that the United States does not have any formal program to redistribute funds from wealthier states to poorer ones. However, I believe it would put a lot of minds at ease to hear this from you directly, especially for those currently living in Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan.
FORTRESS AMERICA — IMPORT TARIFFS AND FEDERAL INCOME TAXES
Both you and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have expressed that going forward, America’s trade relationship with the world will change on several fronts as the defunct post-WWII era ends and America opens the door to a new era. Many of the arguments against the 51st State idea are based on assumptions of how the world worked during the now exhausted post-WWII era, so I believe it would be beneficial for Canadians to hear you explain the full nature of these upcoming reforms and how they will impact Canada over the long-term to give them a picture of how Canada-USA relations will change depending on whether they choose to join this reformed vision of the United States, or whether they choose to remain independent on the outside of your updated Republic.
RECIPROCAL TARIFFS
Are reciprocal tariffs going to be a permanent new thing (announced to begin April 2nd)? Please explain what this will look like (with a few examples like car parts, aluminum, oil, gas, lumber, cattle, banking, cross-border investing, etc.). And please explain how you plan to deal with non-monetary trade barriers that other countries use to artificially create one-way trade with America, like those that Canada uses to protect its retail banks, telecoms, and quota-regulated agricultural products like dairy, chickens, and eggs.
FEDERAL INCOME TAX
You have indicated that you would like to get rid of the Federal Income Tax and permanently replace it with an External Revenue Service in order to switch to funding the federal government through tariffs collected on imports into the United States.
By this plan, manufacturing and industry would be incentivized to relocate inside this new “Fortress America” to avoid those tariffs, thus reviving America’s hollowed out industrial, manufacturing, and agricultural landscapes. This change would also free up American citizens to keep a much larger share of their hard-earned money as they no longer have to pay any federal-level income taxes (you also mentioned your intention to drop federal corporate taxes to 15%).
All combined, this looks like a very attractive package to incentivise a home-grown economic revival inside Fortress America, unmatched by any other jurisdiction in the Western world. During your address to Congress on March 4th, you indicated that over the first 43 days of your new term, you have already had over $1.7 trillion dollars of new investment inside America as companies invest in new mega-projects or re-shore their operations to the United States.
Please confirm that erecting this wall of tariffs around Fortress America is your plan, whether it would be a permanent change, and provide additional details about this new system to help Canadians evaluate whether they would prefer to be on the inside or on the outside of this reformed American Republic.
CURRENCY CONVERSION UPON JOINING
Some people have floated the idea of a dollar-for-dollar conversion of Canadian to US currency upon joining (this would give a big boost to the value of bank notes and savings accounts, though obviously not to assets like homes, land values, and wages, which are set by market forces and would simply be repriced in US dollars).
While this suggestion of a dollar-for-dollar conversion seems somewhat far fetched once you dig into the details, it is also true that many Canadians have suffered greatly because of the disastrous plunge in our currency caused by the mismanagement of Canada’s finances and economy. It is also true that if a union between our two countries was announced, our Canadian dollar would likely plunge still further in the weeks prior to a merger as demand for the obsolete Canadian dollar dries up. Thus, Canadians are naturally worried about the consequences of such a merger and need to understand how the value of their savings would be protected from currency fluctuations during the transition, how their mortgages would be converted, and how this would affect their Canadian dollar-denominated debts.
A clear picture of how we would navigate these risks during the transition phase in order to have confidence that they will emerge from the transition financially intact is key to helping Canadians decide whether it’s worth taking the plunge.
Furthermore, many have asked whether there would be a “buyout” cheque that would be sent to individual Canadians to help sweeten the Deal, much like the idea of the USD$5,000 DOGE dividend cheque that you and Elon have proposed in order to return some money back to American taxpayers from the savings created by DOGE.
At USD$5,000 per Canadian citizen (Can$7,247 at current exchange rates), that would amount to a payout of US$200 billion (less than the US aid sent to the Ukraine) and would give every Canadian a much needed boost, from children saving towards an education fund, to young people contemplating homeownership, to homeowners who are overextended on their mortgage payments, to retirees who are struggling on meagre Canadian pensions.
As that money trickles down into our local economies, it would also help repair provincial balance sheets to put those provinces back on a secure footing upon joining the republic. Seven out of the ten Canadian provinces have trapped themselves in a growth-killing debt spiral with debt burdens larger than their economies (i.e. provincial debts exceed 100% of annual provincial GDP) — they have passed the point of no return at which further borrowing does not offer meaningful additional benefits to economic growth (and actually hinders it) even as living standards stagnate.
Canada’s colossal untapped mineral wealth and unrealized economic potential has done little to actually uplift Canadians. After a decade of severe self-inflicted mismanagement by federal, provincial, and municipal governments, the average Canadian is now poorer than Alabama, one of the poorest states in the United States, despite the fact that our richest province, Alberta, would instantly become the richest state in the Union if it joined the United States (especially as it is unburdened from Canadian Equalization Payments).
For additional perspective, consider that California has a population equal in size to Canada’s, yet its annual GDP is almost double that of Canada’s. So, even socialist California is almost twice as productive as Canada’s failing economy. And that’s despite the fact that Canada’s landmass (and natural resource base) is larger than all 50 states combined! Such wasted potential!
Both America and all of Canada’s provinces stand to gain a lot by Canada joining the Republic. Canadians have been decimated by a decade of living under the financial wreckage of the Trudeau Regime. 35% of Canadians — 14.6 million — are already insolvent (their current income is insufficient to cover their debts and bills). This matches an earlier report that found half of Canadians are $200 or less away from being unable to pay their monthly bills. And visits to Canadian food banks have reached the highest numbers ever recorded.
But change is scary. And, quite frankly, a lot of Canadians have been burned by previous grand schemes because change in Canada usually comes at the cost of the many for the benefit of the few.
Many would feel much more confident about taking this leap if there was some kind of financial payout to help them stabilize their finances to navigate the uncertainty of the transition as we join the Republic. And, most importantly, it would send a strong signal that all Canadian citizens, and not just the corporations and leading families, would benefit from this new chapter in our history.
Would you consider offering Canadians some kind of guaranteed conversion rate and/or other direct financial benefit (i.e. the USD$5,000 cheque) for joining? That would help sweeten the Deal and help bridge the gap until the downstream financial benefits and lower tax burden begin to take effect.
Besides, if you brought DOGE to Canada (and by God, do we ever need it! — the US bureaucracies will look like saints compared to what you will find here!), all of that buyout money (and more), would likely be recouped just by tracking down all the rampant corruption and improper spending that has infested our political system — Ottawa has long been a black hole into which our money disappears, largely without a trace. I actually suspect that much of the hysterical political and media response to the idea of the 51st State stems from that very fact, in the same way that vampires are terrified of sunlight.
Furthermore, much as El Salvador’s president recently pointed out in a clip circulating on social media about his efforts to stamp out crime in his country, eliminating Canada’s rampant organized crime and money laundering, which has been occurring right under the blind eye of our permissive Canadian government, would also likely give our GDP an instant boost to make up for that “buyout”.
President Nayib Bukele stated that gang crime used to represent 10% of El Salvador’s total GDP — his economic advisors warned him not to dismantle crime too quickly in order to prevent a fall in GDP. But he ignored them and stamped it out in one ferocious swoop, yet GDP didn't drop after all — instead El Salvador’s economy surged by 3.5% as the incentives in society were re-aligned towards honest hard work and honest wealth building.
I wouldn’t want to speculate what percentage of the Canadian economy is fueled by the proceeds of drugs, money laundering, and other crimes, but if you have been following Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper (video link), you’ll have a sense of the colossal scale of the problem (not least of which is the effect on house prices as money is laundered via the casinos and then poured into real estate — it’s even officially called the Vancouver Model by anti-money laundering experts!).
FEAR OF TOO MUCH POWER IN WASHINGTON
Despite how politically divided Canadian society has become, I think it is safe to say that most voters (on all sides) fear that America is drifting from decentralized bottom-up republic to becoming an increasingly top-down, centralized, quasi-imperial system with far too much power concentrated in federal hands, in direct contrast with the decentralized bottom-up vision of limited government envisioned by your Founding Fathers.
Many propagandized Left-leaning voters are genuinely terrified that you will “seize power” to become a dictator and never let go. By contrast, although many Right-leaning voters do not share the Left’s fears about you, they in turn are terrified of what would happen if the Democrats were ever to return to power after your term ends.
In short, each in their own way is terrified of jumping from the frying pan into the fire as America gradually morphs into a centrally controlled top-down system. And we should know — Canada already lives under a quasi-dictatorial top-down system when you consider the immense (and mostly unaccountable) power that is concentrated here in the Office of the Prime Minister. We see that America is gradually becoming what we already are.
Canada joining the Republic might therefore represent an ideal opportunity to nip that “centralization of powers” in the bud with constitutional reforms to steer the Republic back towards the decentralized bottom-up vision of your Founding Fathers so that the federal government truly stays the Servant of the people and does not continue to evolve to become their Master.
Compounding this is that, despite the extraordinary levels of corruption and waste that are being exposed by DOGE, the question remains: how do you plan to prevent the federal overreach and administrative octopus that has been strangling America from growing back once you and your immediate successors leave office and as America’s mood turns to other things and to solving new problems, which will inevitably re-incentivize the impulse to regrow institutional and federal authority?
All this leads to the question I have for you: What steps do you plan to take to place permanent constitutional limits on presidential, congressional, and bureaucratic power in Washington to nip this evolution from republic to empire in the bud? The answer to this question would, I think, help put many minds at ease to reassure Canadians that they aren’t jumping from one top-down authoritarian state into another.
One of the most important suggestions that I have written about in detail in my recent article, called Clipping Leviathan’s Fingers, is to repeal the 17th Amendment to return the Senate to the original structure intended by the Founding Fathers, in which senators in Washington were appointed by STATE legislatures, rather than being directly elected by the people of each state. I know this may sound controversial to some readers, but bear with me for a moment...
The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution like a three-legged stool, with a president elected through the electoral college, a House of Representatives directly elected by the citizens themselves to represent the Voices of the People in Washington, and a Senate appointed by state legislatures to represent the Voices of State Legislatures in Washington. This push-pull of state versus federal authority was designed to prevent the federal government from usurping state authority and building ever larger federal institutions.
After 157 years of Canadian provinces being unable to defend themselves in Parliament against federal overreach (and only having federally-appointed courts to turn to when overreach occurs), I think Canadians are uniquely positioned to warn America about the importance of restoring the US Founding Fathers’ vision of the state-appointed Senate to give state legislatures their voices back in Congress, and the dangers that await the Republic if this is not restored.
As it stands today, the 17th Amendment has essentially transformed the Senate into a second version of the House of Representatives, just elected in a different way. Repealing the 17th Amendment would restore the ability of state legislatures to block legislation that grows the federal government at the expense of state authority (after all, each state began as a fully sovereign state, with the federal government merely being a treaty to accomplish the few things that individual states could not easily do for themselves, like protecting national borders, managing interstate commerce, and operating a navy powerful enough to keep the British from retaking what they lost during the Revolutionary War).
Repealing the 17th Amendment would also cut down on corruption and lobbying in Washington as state legislatures regain their ability to fire senators who act against the best interests of their home state. In order to sway votes in Washington with state-appointed senators, lobbyists would have to try to infiltrate 50+ separate state legislatures in 50+ separate states, with an average of 148 legislators each for a total of 7,386 legislators in all) — a much harder task — whereas in its current form, lobbyists only have to corrupt 100 senators in order to get their way and they can do it all from a single location in Washington.
Repealing the 17th Amendment to give provincial/state legislatures a direct voice in Washington again would relieve the fears of many Canadians who worry that their local authority would being undermined by joining the Republic. And it would put our provincial legislatures at ease that they would gain rather than lose power to defend their interests against federal overreach, which would make it much more appealing to ditch Canadian Confederation in order to join the Republic as it would give Canada’s provincial legislatures a significant tool with which to defend their interests in federal policymaking, which they simply do not have in the Canadian system.
I also believe the idea of repealing the 17th Amendment would gain significant traction inside America itself: from state legislatures, from libertarians, from the Ron Paul and Tea Party movements, from the MAGA movement that wants to see the Swamp drained and for it to stay drained, and perhaps even from Democrat voters who have been convinced by media and left-leaning politicians that the Trump presidency is morphing into a dictatorship. A strange mix of bedfellows perhaps, but it’s a once-in-a-generation alignment of interests nonetheless, which would (perhaps for the first time in America’s 250-year history) dismantle federal power and return greater decision-making authority to the individual states.
Repealing the 17th would expose for all to see that you are using your power as president to dismantle excess federal power, not to grow it further. After all, America’s vitality and prosperity and the reason why it has always been a beacon of liberty for the world has always come from its decentralized nature, which encourages competition, autonomy, and local political experimentation, all while putting limits on centralized power, in contrast to the top-down European vision of strong centralized bureaucratic government that ultimately strangles everything it touches.
As I explained in my aforementioned linked article, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the rapid expansion of federal power and the explosive growth in federal bureaucracies in 1913 when he deliberately passed the 17th Amendment to remove this natural power-limiting feature from the original Constitution in order to pursue his vision of the “Masterful Progressive Administrative State”. The bloated post-WWII order traces its origins to this grave mistake, which unleashed a century of bureaucratic suffocation and federal overreach. Repealing the 17th would help put the genie back in the bottle and would ensure that the Swamp you are draining today remains drained for future generations.
~
Another controversial suggestion that immediately comes to mind to limit government expansion (again arising from the Canadian experience in which there is a significantly higher percentage of government employees per capita than in the United States), would be to pass a constitutional amendment so that government employees (and anyone who benefits from government contracts or subsidies) cannot vote in an election at the level of government at which they operate (i.e. federal employees cannot vote in federal elections, contractors receiving provincial subsidies or contracts cannot vote in provincial elections, etc.).
Again, the Canadian system serves as a warning of how, as government employment expands and as subsidies, grants, and regulatory privileges pile up, those who directly benefit from ever-expanding government gradually grow to become the largest voting block in elections — thus, government starts being run for the benefit of government employees and those who benefit from government largess, not for the public at large — a kind of tax farm that preys on the many for the benefit of the few.
As I documented in another of my recent articles, entitled The Great Unravelling, the Canadian government has grown so large that 44% of every dollar spent in Canada is now directly spent by the government, and that number rises to 64% when you factor in coerced spending (compliance costs, tax subsidies, spending mandated by regulation, etc.). And government employment has grown so large that 1 in 4 employed Canadians (25%) now works directly for one of the various branches of government (federal, provincial, and municipal) or in the multitude of bureaucratic institutions that keep the gears of government turning (for perspective, in the United States that number currently sits at around 14.5%).
Now consider that during elections, only around 60% of eligible voters bother to vote (often even less). Yet almost every public sector employee is likely to vote — they're even given paid time off to go do so — which means that the 25% of Canadians who work in the public sector actually represent closer to 42% of the voters who bother to vote. And that’s before accounting for all the contractors and subsidized companies who get money or regulatory privileges from the government.
In other words, Canadians whose salaries depend directly on the government are thus the single largest voting block in Canadian elections. There’s no voting your way back to sanity once you cross that threshold. As government expands, government employees and government dependants become the most powerful voting block, and the entire legislative process begins to focus on keeping them happy. It’s has become a kind of kleptocracy — no more, no less.
The conflict of interest is obvious. You cannot be both servant and master at the same time — the Canadian experience should serve as a warning that this is how limited governments transform themselves into mega-parasites. It would put a great many Canadian fears to rest if, as a precondition for joining, the US election system was reformed to resolve this conflict of interest to prevent America from following Canada’s path to becoming a tax farm, enabled by the voting box and run for the benefit of politicians, government employees, and their well-connected friends.
HOW TO PROTECT AMERICA’S ELECTORAL COLLEGE FROM CANADA’S LEFT-LEANING VOTING HABITS
The biggest concern among Americans that I have spoken to about the idea of the 51st State is that if Canada’s left-leaning voters are added to the U.S. electoral college according to our current provincial boundaries, this would likely tip the U.S. electoral college into the hands of the Democratic Party… for generations.
I have great hopes that voting habits will change once Canadians are released from the propaganda flowing from our government-funded and government-subsidized Canadian media organizations, as Canadians gain a taste for freedom under the US Constitution, and as they discover the many tools available in the US system to hold their governments accountable. However, I do nonetheless have an out-of-the box proposal to safeguard the Republic from Day One…
When you look at Canada’s electoral map at the resolution of electoral districts, our provinces are actually quite conservative outside of the Left-leaning mega-cities. But our mega-cities are so large that they completely override conservative voters when Canadians go to the polls. (For American readers, please note in the map below that our colors are reversed from the American system — Liberals are in red, Conservatives are in blue, orange is the NDP (even further left than the Liberals), the Quebec-only left-leaning Bloc Quebecois is shown in light blue, and the far-left Greens are in green.)
The same issue is repeated at the provincial level (shown in the map below from the 2024 BC provincial election, which the leftist NDP won (in orange)). As you can see, provincial voters are actually quite conservative but our votes outside of the mega-cities are essentially meaningless in determining the outcomes of provincial elections. The net effect is that the urban areas basically write the rules for everyone. That’s not democracy.
The simple solution, which would resolve this urban-rural tension at both the provincial and federal levels, and which would allow the balance between Democrat and Republican voters to be preserved in the electoral college, is to change the provincial borders to create an entirely different mix of states.
The #1 provincial/state border reform would be to split out any large metropolitan areas with a population over a certain threshold (i.e. 1 million) to automatically become their own city-states. This new rule would also allow new states to continue to emerge in the future as America’s population continues to grow larger, effectively preserving the idea of local decision-making to safeguard the original intent of the Republic.
The idea is not as radical as it first appears. In Germany’s republic, the cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin are all also their own provinces/states (shown in red in the map below) — in each case the metropolitan and provincial/state boundary are one and the same. This relieves urban populations of the financial burden of supporting their rural neighbors so the cities can optimize their financial resources and build out their infrastructure to suit the needs of their urban populations. Meanwhile, their surrounding more rural provinces/states would be freed to govern themselves according to their own needs, gain the authority to develop and regulate their own industries and resources, and be liberated to trim away the strangling regulations that have been imposed by distant city-dwellers who don’t actually understand the realities of living out on the land. Win-win.
Many existing US states could benefit from this reform also — consider how different the culture is in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and even rural California from their left coast mega-city cousins. Increasing the number of states wouldn’t grow the size of the House of Representatives, only the number of senators, but it would create new political boundaries that would greatly improve local decision-making.
Our current provincial/state boundaries in both Canada and the United States are all remnants of another era when most of the population lived a much more agrarian lifestyle, when our provinces/states were much more sparsely populated, when the cities were much smaller, when government as a whole had much less authority to meddle in our lives, and at a time when the global economy had not yet evolved to create such starkly different priorities between urban administrative hubs and everyone else.
And so, while this reform would produce a radically different political landscape in America’s Republic, it would help heal many of our hollowed-out regions and defuse the by-now unreconcilable tensions between many urban areas and their surrounding more rural regions.
And, by splitting mega-cities off as their own provinces/states (i.e. Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, etc.), it would instantly reduce the risk that Canada’s voting population would destabilize the balance between Democrats and Republicans as the emergent conservative-voting rural provinces/states neutralize the impact of the more liberal-leaning metropolitan mega-cities. With this change, the balance in the House might end up leaning slightly to the left, the balance in the Senate might shift slightly to the right, and the electoral college at the presidential level would be balanced out to remain largely unchanged.
I know it’s out-of-the-box thinking, but would you be willing to consider redrawing provincial/state boundaries, both to bring Canada into the Republic and to allow existing US states to resolve some of their internal tensions? Is this something that would have to be initiated at the state level (in which case, would you be willing to float the idea to get the process started), or could this redrawing of boundaries be initiated at the federal level?
As Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, once observed: “Great changes are easier than small ones.” Canada joining the American Republic is an unprecedented opportunity to think outside the box to root out past mistakes, shake up the system, and redesign the entire layout to update it to modern political realities.
PUTTING A LID ON MILITARY ADVENTURISM
Another issue raised by many Canadians is that they don’t want any part of the military adventurism that has led to disasters like Vietnam, Iraq, and so much more. They are equally put off by the cozy relationship between government, defense-oriented corporations, and Wall Street investors, which appears to create a circular profit motive to fuel America’s never-ending interventionist wars. (Who can forget the conflict of interest of neo-con Dick Cheney, who served as George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense during Bush Sr.’s Presidency during the 1st Iraq War, who then rotated out of government during the Clinton era to serve as CEO of Halliburton (one of America’s largest defense and energy contractors), only to return to government as George W. Bush’s Vice President during the 2nd Iraq War.
President Eisenhower warned us about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex and the disastrous rise of misplaced power in his farewell speech in 1964, but the warning fell on deaf ears. As have the warnings of Senator Ron Paul, who spent his entire political career warning about the blowback of US interventionism.
Under your leadership, we are currently watching America pull back from its typical post-WWII-era warmongering (much to the horror of the warmongering Democrats and their neo-con allies), but living in a system in which we are only one election away from empowering the next warmonger doesn’t give a lot of confidence about the future. Watching former leftist peaceniks (in Canada, in the U.S., and abroad) turn into raging pro-war lobbyists clamouring to expand the Ukraine War shows that no matter who is in power, the voting booth provides little restraint on the urge to use the military to go crusading around the world while raiding the treasury and risking the lives of our children in the process. The justifications may change depending on which party is in charge, but the urge solve problems with tanks and bombs remain the same — as the old saying goes, when you’re holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Ironically, today, having grown accustomed to living under America’s protective security umbrella, it is the weaker countries (like Canada and many EU members), who are the loudest voices trying to drag a now reluctant America into war. Someone will always be banging the war drums.
What reforms can be made to rein this in?
From an outsider’s perspective writing from Canada, an obvious first step would be t pass legislation to close the revolving door between government, regulatory agencies, and corporations (an issue that has also been raised to rein in the undue influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the regulatory agencies, among many others).
A withdrawal from NATO would also be welcomed by many so that a large and wealthy Europe cannot drag America into its wars anymore. If Europe stopped mooching of America, it’s combined Eurozone economy is more than large enough to fund an army that would dwarf Russia’s. Without NATO, European warmongering would put European money and European lives at risk without being able to drag in American to do the dirty work and foot the bill (the wars in Ukraine and Libya both come to mind as the most obvious examples of Europe abusing its NATO alliances to drag America on crusades that serve European political objectives).
Others have pointed out that the original Constitution granted Congress the sole power to declare war so that the people’s directly-elected representatives had the sole power to make such a fateful decision. But that limit has been ignored and overruled so many times that it serves no practical limit today. Some have said that the solution is to pass new legislation (or a new constitutional amendment) to re-impose that limit on executive power.
Others have suggested that, with Canada and the US combined to form Fortress America, our security on the North American continent would be so absolute that this would necessarily lead to a less aggressive stance abroad — the seaways would still need defending to maintain a global trading community, but the urge to jump into war on other continents would be greatly reduced.
Still others have suggested that, after a century of playing Global Policeman, America is exhausted and has learned its lesson of involving itself in everyone else’s problems. Yet I am sceptical that this lesson has been learned, especially under the cloud of current warmongering coming from our Canadian leaders who made lots of political hay criticizing America’s neo-cons during previous wars, only to become those neo-cons themselves the moment America lets off the gas.
Given how many Canadians have raised this concern in discussions about the 51st State, I would appreciate you weighing in with your thoughts on new legislation or new constitutional limits that could be imposed to curb the warmongering impulse across future administrations.
THE QUESTION OF FUTURE SECESSION
Still other Canadians have asked: what if the marriage fails and individual provinces/states have second thoughts after joining the republic? Can they choose to leave?
Canada has a legal pathway for provinces to leave Confederation, laid out in our Clarity Act. The process is extremely difficult, and in my opinion was deliberately structured to frustrate any attempt to navigate this tangled web of conditions by dragging the complex process out over so many years that citizens would reconsider and “return to the fold” of their own accord without Canada having to pull an Abraham Lincoln to prevent the dissolution of the country. According to the Clarity Act, the process begins with referendum, after which any province looking to leave Confederation would then need to negotiate terms that are acceptable not only to the federal government, but also to all the other provinces, AND to all the individual indigenous peoples within the province — good luck… that’s a virtual recipe for failure. Nonetheless, in theory if not in practice, the option is there.
By contrast, Abraham Lincoln seemingly settled the question in America about whether individual states (or a block of states) can secede from the Union when he launched America into the Civil War in 1861 to prevent the secession of the Confederate states. In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia stated that “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”
I understand the logic and recognize if individual states ever chose to secede from the Republic, these small suddenly fully independent states would be likely be picked clean by hostile foreign powers prowling on the outside. Furthermore, if a large block of states chose to secede to form two equally powerful rival blocks of states (like during the US Civil War), this is a recipe for repeated outbreaks of war. Europe’s history of never-ending war between equally powerful rivals and never-ending predation by big powers on weaker neighbors should serve as a warning to us all.
Remaining united as a single, large, bottom-up, decentralized republic composed of many smaller semi-sovereign member states is also a safeguard against local tyranny — freedom of movement within the larger republic safeguards everyone from getting trapped inside a smaller state from which there isn’t an easy escape (imagine if California was its own country so you couldn’t simply rent a U-Haul to Texas to escape California’s tyranny — Canadians in our centralized top-down system don’t have to imagine, we live this reality every day).
Having many small states bound together in a decentralized republic makes it easy to sidestep the tyrant within. If some individual state legislature goes off the rails and doesn’t amend its ways, it will soon run out of investors, businesses, and people upon whom to prey because, by having each province/state be part of a larger republic, no individual state has the right to build a Berlin Wall to keep its long-suffering citizens from escaping to freer neighboring states.
This is one of the reasons why an independent Alberta or an independent Quebec could quickly become a hollow victory as citizenship inside one of these small independent nations turns into a trap without an exit to escape their new national government if it turns tyrannical. Historically, it is better to be a semi-sovereign province in a DECENTRALIZED REPUBLIC than under the thumb of a small sovereign nation. Fully sovereign nationalism is every bit as much of a suffocating trap for citizens as top-down empire or dictatorship — a topic I explored in detail in another of my recent articles: The End of “Pax Americana”.
These three reasons — 1) to safeguard small sovereign states from being captured by hostile foreign powers, 2) to prevent a fractured continent from devolving into war, and 3) to prevent small sovereign states from becoming tyrannical towards their own captive citizens — are the three foremost motivations for why America’s founding thirteen colonies chose to band together as a decentralized republic in the first place.
Within the envelope of a republic, peace, stability, and liberty reign within, even as there are plenty of guns to keep everyone else out.
However, that vision of peace, stability, and liberty only remains intact as long as the republic remains decentralized, with only a light federal touch over the internal affairs of each member state.
But as central power grows every larger to become a ham-fisted federal dominion, this marriage without an option for divorce is a recipe for tyranny (or for civil war if there’s no other way to resolve a predatory relationship). If there’s a clear and simple path for a divorce, it forces the federal government to maintain a light touch on the reins to keep everyone happy on the inside. Imagine how much less tyrannical Canada would have been towards its own people over the last 157 years if there had been a simple, quick, and clean divorce process to escape Ottawa’s tyranny.
The ever-present option of divorce also prevents some provinces/states from hijacking the federal political system for the benefit of others. Once again, this is another reality for Canadians — from Day One, the Laurentian East leveraged federal power to milk the Western provinces for their benefit (such as by blocking trade to the United States in order to force western farmers to send all their produce by rail to Toronto and Montreal, even as the railroad (owned by the politicians’ friends) was granted a 20-year monopoly during which it systematically bled farmers dry via freight charges). This federally-imposed predatory relationship was compounded in 1957 with the introduction of Equalization Payments that allowed more socialist provinces (like Quebec) to force richer, more free-market-oriented provinces (like Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan) to pay for their expansive welfare programs.
The Canadian experience under Ottawa’s quasi-dictatorial power leaves many Canadians deeply wary of joining a republic without an exit option. Canada is the perfect example of an overbearing federal system that has become tyrannical towards portions of its own people, yet that same overly powerful federal government was purpose-built to resist reforms (or exits).
In reality, the exit path for provincial secession via the Clarity Act is little more than a picture of a door painted on a brick wall. It is a recipe for either tyranny or a future civil war. The only escape is for unhappy citizens to emigrate to another country (as has happened many times in our history, with the US serving as a pressure release valve for unhappy Canadians, like the farmers who got plundered by the railroads in the late 1800s, or the Albertans that fled to America after Justin Trudeau’s father’s failed experiment with nationalizing Canada’s energy industry in the 1980s).
Clearly, some balance must be struck.
Please weigh in on this with your thoughts.
For example, could some kind of trigger be built into the US Constitution to keep the door to secession firmly closed as long as America remains decentralized, but that throws the door wide open to states voluntarily leaving (by simple referendum) IF the federal government grows too centralized and too expansive?
In my opinion, two separate and equally important proxies could be used as a measure of excess federal power — federal spending as a % of GDP and federal debt as a % of GDP.
Each could serve as a separate trigger — like the famous sword of Damocles (from ancient Greek mythology) that forever hung above the throne, suspended by a single horsehair. The threat of these two triggers throwing the door open to secession would hang above the federal government as a permanent reminder that the erosion of the republic through excess centralized power will lead to its destruction.
In other words, as long as the republic remains decentralized to preserve provincial/state sovereignty, there’s no exit door. But if federal power is allowed to grow, those triggers will be hit, and the exit door will be thrown wide open for any state or block of states to choose to leave by simple referendum. It’s a clear message to every American, “this is a bottom-up republic — it you want more government interference in your life, you’ll need to ask for it at the state level, not at the federal level.”
If these triggers (or some version of them) had been built into the Constitution as a kind of natural limit on federal expansion, much of the history of the last century would have played out very differently. And a trigger of that nature would certainly have prevented Canada from unravelling into the dysfunctional and unhappy state of affairs that it currently finds itself.
WHAT FEDERAL INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS WOULD AMERICA MAKE IN ITS NEW CANADIAN PROVINCES TO BRING CANADA INTO THE FOLD?
While much of the economic boost that would come to Canada after joining your Republic would come from private investment as that pesky land border between us is removed and as businesses and employees alike are able to fully enjoy the benefits of free trade and freedom of movement between our two countries, I think it would nevertheless be beneficial for you to give Canadians a picture of the kinds of federal investments Washington would make as our provinces join your Republic in order to bind our two countries together as one.
Would America invest in extending the interstate highway network into Canada?
Would the federal government underwrite the construction of new water reservoirs to better manage our water resources and help solve some of our local water shortages, which are beginning to impact some of our agricultural communities?
Would the federal government build new roads all the way to the Arctic Ocean and up to Hudson’s Bay to connect these remote regions into our integrated economies, encourage mining in these regions, and to solidify America’s military footprint across the continent?
Do you envision a build-out of military bases and deepwater ports across the High Arctic, strategically placed to simultaneously revitalize the economies of our remote High Arctic communities?
Where else do you anticipate building new deepwater ports for trade or military purposes, such a revitalizing the port in Churchill, Manitoba, within Canada’s massive inland sea?
You mentioned during your State of the Union Address that you expect a massive revival in shipbuilding — would any of that shipbuilding be relocated to the Canadian provinces, such as to the Maritime Provinces that have suffered economic stagnation for a long time?
Would you foresee building any new cities to take pressure off our overcrowded existing ones? Or to build new cities in the Arctic, much as Russia has done to secure its hold over its sub-Arctic and Arctic regions? Would you issue new university grants to found universities in the High Arctic to draw people north and bring an economy to struggling northern regions?
What plans do you have for the Arctic Ocean to keep up with Russia and China’s rapidly expanding presence in the region? Russia is in the midst of opening a shipping route through the Northeast Passage to bypass the Panama Canal altogether — would we build out a fleet of icebreakers and deepwater ports to do the same (for more about Russia’s arctic expansion, I recommend Avetis Muradyan’s recent article, The Arctic Gambit, which really puts into perspective how important it is for North America to move quickly secure its grip over its portion of the High Arctic and the ocean beyond).
What kind of investments and subsidies would Washington undertake to encourage mining and processing of critical minerals and rare earth minerals? I mention this with an eye to developing lower grade rare earth mineral deposits in order to break North America’s dependency on China, which currently controls 87% of the global market for refined rare earth minerals, an issue which represents a major national security vulnerability that is at least as dangerous (or more dangerous) than when the Middle East was able to cripple North America during the 1970s oil crises, which put America on the brink of running out of oil.
I could go on, but I think the point is well made in that I think Canadians considering the 51st State would benefit greatly from having you flesh out a full picture of how our two countries would benefit economically from integration and how integration would, after decades of languishing behind, also finally bring economic opportunities to our Maritime and far northern regions, even as it allows us to establish a vigorous military presence in the North to keep up with changing realities as both Russia and China aggressively expand into the region. And so, I invite you to make a pitch to give Canadians a full picture of our joint future, a vision that our own theatrical leaders are trying very hard to prevent them from seeing… 😀
IF WE WANT THIS, WE CAN’T WAIT FOR CANADIAN POLITICIANS TO MAKE THE FIRST MOVE
I see the enormous potential that would be unleashed for both of our countries following a merger. In many ways it solves both of our festering problems even as it opens the door to a new joint Golden Age of growth, prosperity, and freedom (especially if we take this opportunity to make some deep constitutional reforms, like repealing the 17th Amendment, to simultaneously restore your Founding Fathers’ vision of a bottom-up decentralized republic.
For America, as I summarized in my two-part article called Trump’s War on Global Socialism: Greenland (part 1) and Canada (part 2), our union would resolve many of your most pressing national security vulnerabilities, create a new common nation-building exercise full of new opportunities to help America to move past the divisiveness of the past decade, remove a slowly failing state off your northern border that’s currently on its way to becoming “Venezuela With Snow”, and secure North America as a stronghold against both Chinese infiltration and the spreading darkness of the Global Socialist mindset.
Similarly for Canada, as I wrote in a separate article, I view your offer as a kind of “Get Out of Jail Free Card” after Canada has run itself into a ditch economically, even as its political structure makes it virtually impossible to reform itself — for many of us, patriotism is no longer about defending Canada from foreign enemies, but rather it has become about defending our communities against what Canada has become.
However, our Canadian political leaders and top elites are not going to be on board with this, most especially as it would deprive them of the fiefdom that they and their friends have been able to milk for 157 years and counting.
And so, if the 51st State is ever going to happen, it will require you to make a strong case for it by appealing directly to the Canadian people to show them the benefits of joining in order to sway the opinion polls so that, as support grows, eventually our political classes will have no choice but to jump on board in order to remain relevant.
There are many additional questions that concerned Canadians have raised — from the question of how to accommodate Quebec’s distinct culture and language within the republic, to how to wind up the supply management system in a fair way, to the most pesky question of all that might derail the 51st State even if everything else can be settled amicably — the question Fahrenheit. Canadians are prepared to compromise on inches, feet, and miles, but forcing Fahrenheit on us could be a dealbreaker if you don’t allow our provinces/states to keep Celsius.😉
I will leave it for readers to add their questions in the comments below so that the conversation may continue to evolve with everyone’s participation.
On the issue of Quebec, it is the canary in the coal mine — the constitutional reforms that I have suggested above to preserve America’s bottom-up decentralized republic are designed to ensure that Quebec can maintain sufficient local autonomy to be confident that it too can preserve its culture within our North American union without the risk of suffering a repeat of two centuries of “social engineering” at the hands of successive British and Canadian governments, which tried to try to turn them into Englishmen. A decentralized republic with equal rules for all, yet sufficiently decentralized to even keep Quebec happy, would be a strong signal to us all that every province/state within our newly expanded decentralized republic can defend its liberty and its local autonomy against the temptations of centralized Empire.
I urge you to make your pitch directly to Quebec — and do it soon because Quebec’s separatist movement is currently experiencing a rapid revival to escape Ottawa’s suffocating post-national grasp. If they leave and choose full independence, it might be another few generations before they are ready to reconsider your offer. Vivre le Québec libre à l'intérieur de l'enveloppe protectrice de la république américaine!
AN EXPEDITED PATH TO US CITIZENSHIP FOR CANADIANS WHO ARE TIRED OF WAITING FOR THE 51ST STATE
While I remain hopeful of a union between our two countries, I am also well aware that it may take a while for Canada to overcome its attachment to “not being American” — after all, that is the primary (and perhaps only) remaining cultural distinction that separates us after 138 years of Hollywood pumping its product onto Canadian television screens.
However, many Canadians are running out of time as young people are becoming demoralized, as skilled tradesmen begin to look outside of Canada for worthwhile opportunities, as intellectuals seek to escape our woke Canadian universities, as talented professionals and investors seek to flee Canada’s suffocating ecosystem, and as many aging Canadians seek to retire someplace where life is more affordable.
The exodus has already begun, with over 81,601 leaving permanently in 2024 to try to build a new life for themselves outside of Canada. That exodus will only continue to grow; the only question is whether their talents and hard work will benefit America or whether they will have to search farther afield to find a new home.
And so, I have one last request before I end this open letter…
You recently rolled out your Gold Card visa program to bring the wealthiest immigrants to America. And you also revealed your ambitious vision for America’s future. We have a very large number of Canadians who already share America’s culture and values and would readily jump on the opportunity bring their talents to America.
You’re going to need talented, hard-working people to build your vision — if Canada continues to drag its heals, who better to help you build your vision for America than these Canadians who are fed up with Canada’s socialist direction. There’s probably no better vetting process to assure a seamless assimilation into your system than a Canadian willing to rent a U-Haul to join America’s new Golden Age.
And as the exodus increases, it would also help us send a clear message to Ottawa that if Ottawa doesn’t clean up its act, it’s not just Canada’s big businesses that will leave, but also Canada’s best and brightest. People voting with their feet is the most raw form of political pressure we can put on the politicians holding our country hostage to their self-serving interests.
So, would you consider creating a streamlined immigration program (path to citizenship) for all those Canadians who do not qualify for your Gold Card program, but are either:
self employed and willing to bring their small business with them,
skilled tradesmen,
those with professional experience,
farmers interested in relocating to America,
financially independent citizens (or those on a secure pension), so they will contribute to, rather than being a burden on, the American system.
and citizens who are increasingly feeling directly threatened by Canada’s radical ideological stances and/or infiltration by foreign governments into Canada — such as Canada’s long-established Jewish community, which is watching in horror as our federal government courts the pro-Hamas vote (see Erza Levant’s recent report on Rebel News Canada about what has been happening inside Canada’s Foreign Affairs department), or Chinese-Canadians who have been harassed or intimidated by the Chinese government on Canadian soil, seemingly under the permissive eye of the Canadian government (see this report by Canada’s CBC News).
If Canada digs its heels in and remains on its current path, many of these individuals will leave for greener pastures. A lucky few will make it to America via the current onerous immigration system, but many more will drift away to Mexico, Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, Israel, and even Russia. With a simpler path to citizenship, like that which you announced for South African farmers, most would almost certainly jump on the opportunity to come to America. They await your invitation.
~ ~ ~
I look forward to hearing from you in the hope that your answers and the discussions that emerge from this will help Canadians develop a full picture of the possibilities of a joint future together. And maybe, fingers crossed, it will inspire Canadians to rally together around this new joint vision for a prosperous, peaceful, and free North American republic that spans the entirety of our beautiful continent!
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Sincerely,
Julius Ruechel
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Great article Julius. I think one of the largest stumbling blocks to this deal or idea of a deal is seniors. Myself I am on the edge of retirement and currently drawing my CPP and OAS but had planned to work for another couple of years especially in light of our current economic governance and outlook. So I'm sure many others would be in a similar situation as I am, As everything is right now I can afford to retire however, if it gets much worse that might change. I'm sure many seniors will wonder about what might happen to their CPP and OAS. Stabilizing that idea might go along way towards garnering support from the senior population.
Great points to study and analyze. Thank you for bringing them to the theoretical deal.
There's more than meets the eye and reading this, I believe president Trump may have not been serious about it.
Let's hope Canadians try to fix country within. I cannot believe no one has heard of the PPC party under Maxime Bernier. There's a reason for it, he's the only one that is proposing common sense solutions and to reduce government.