Unlikely Canada: One more time
I thought this was the right time to remind readers of my post on “Unlikely Canada,” Peter Zeihan’s prediction that Canada was unlikely to survive as a country beyond 2030, together with his claim that Alberta was destined to become the 51st American state. Ever since my youthful Canadian nationalist phase in the 1970s, I have rankled at Canada’s acting like an economic branch plant, as well as a cultural and political colony of the USA. The history of Canada has always been a story of its relationship with the USA. The Canadian Encyclopedia offers a succinct overview of this history, the vacillations from resistance to acquiescence and back again, from the American Revolution, to the War of 1812, to the Rebellions of 1837, from John MacDonald’s anti-American grumblings to Wilfred Laurier’s concessions to reciprocity. We live in the constant shadow of "manifest destiny."
A History of back and forth and con jobs
The USA was late to enter the First World War (three years after Canada), but in the 1920s and 30s the similarities between the two countries grew, and with the Second World War, the USA emerged as the great defender of the values Canadians held dear. Animosity between Diefenbaker and Kennedy kept Canada out of the nuclear arms race. (Diefenbaker blamed American inference for his election loss in 1963.) Pearson kept Canada out of the Vietnam War (politically if not materially), and Pierre Trudeau opened the door to accept American draft evaders. Flickerings of Canadian nationalism in the 1970s were extinguished with the Reagan-Mulroney bromance in the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under Mulroney, Canadian men and women served in George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 1990-91. (You may remember how we were conned by a young girl claiming to be a nurse telling stories of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of their incubators. She turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. See Petrodollar Warfare.) Jean Chrétien kept Canada out of George W. Bush’s bogus-WMD war in Iraq in 2003. After the Harper Conservatives had negotiated and signed the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protecton Agreement, the Justin Trudeau Liberals were elected, in 2015, on the promise of a free-trade agreement with China, Canada’s second largest trading partner and only leverage against total US economic domination. [The Government of Canada web site on Canada-China free trade has been removed since I posted a link to it on 11 October 2024. See Pubic Inquiry on Foreign Interference] * In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as US President. Unbeknownst to President Trump, his National Security Advisor, John Bolton hatched a plot in 2018 to make Canada the patsy by having the RCMP arrest the CFO of Huawei ensuring the breakdown of trade relations between Canada and China. Far from garnering respect and appreciation from the Americans, our mindless acquiescence to US interests in detriment to our own has made us appear weak, inept and fearful. The newly elected US President will not hesitate to exploit our ineptitude, weakness and fear.
The Merger: For and against (Conrad Black against!?!?)
In my faulty memory Conrad Black, one-time Canadian owner of the world’s third-largest newspaper empire, was an advocate of Canada joining the USA. I therefore read with great interest his critique and rebuttal of Diane Francis’s book, The Merger of the Century: Why Canada and the USA Should Become One Country. In his editorial (18 Jan. 2014), Black claims, “I was for a time reviled [. . . ] by some of the traditional, leftist Canadian nationalists, [that would be me] though I was never an annexationist.”
As Francis was promoting her book, arguing that the merger was already underway and nigh on inevitable, Black countered that
Diane Francis in 2014
Diane Francis laid out the basic arguments of her book in a lecture at the University of Western Ontario in 2014.
Diane Francis in 2025
Interviewed last week, Francis’s perspective seemed to have shifted slightly, as she emphasized the last chapter of her book on what Canada had to do if there was no merger with the USA: end tariff barriers between provinces, take over the defence of its own borders and coastline, expand its business and trade options. However, in the recent interview, she did return to the notion of Canada and the USA becoming a single federation, following a European Union economic model.
Can We now start talking about the US threat to Canadian sovereignty and independence, or should we maintain our focus on Chinese influence on Canadian elections?
One point that particularly struck me in this recent interview is her claim that she was blacklisted by the media as she attempted to promote her book in 2014. Perhaps we would have benefited from having a more robust conversation ten years ago. I tried to to make this point, from a very different perspective, in 2002, at a conference presentation at the University of Toronto: “ I am prepared to be unsentimental about the destiny of the Canadian nation, but I would consider it a tragedy if Canadians did not participate fully in the exchange and debate and decision-making process.
Will Trump force us to start acting like a sovereign nation?
Back to the question. In theory, it is thought that an external threat is sometimes what a nation needs to appreciate the value of its sovereignty, to generate solidarity and unity. For a moment I thought Donald Trump might be that beneficial threat. Unfortunately, so far the response has been lip service and chaos. And Danielle Smith has already responded like the Governor of Alberta, the 51st state, as predicted by Peter Zeihan: holding one-on-one meetings with President-elect Trump and refusing to join with Canadian Premiers and the Prime Minister in threatening to cut off energy supplies from Canada to the USA in the event of a trade war. The survival of Canada may still not be “unlikely” but it is looking less and less likely these days.
Addendum
* After a bit of searching I found another Government of Canada web page which makes reference to the Canada-China Free Trade Agreement which was in the exploratory stages in 2016.
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