A Better Plan Than Trump’s: Let’s Surrender to Canada!

After Donald Trump said he’d like to make Canada our 51st state, Ontario Premier Doug Ford made a counteroffer: “How about if we buy Alaska? And we’ll throw in Minnesota and Minneapolis at the same time.” Ford isn’t thinking big enough. Canada should make the United States its 11th province.

“Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!” Trump said January 6 on Truth Social. He wasn’t wrong. But instead of torturing Canada with tariffs until it surrenders to Manifest Destiny, the United States should beg Canada to annex the Lower 48. Here’s just some of what we’d gain by jettisoning our dysfunctional government and replacing it with Canada’s:

• National health care. In the United States, you have to wait until you’re 65 to qualify for Medicare. Canada’s Medicare program predates ours and, since 1984, it’s been available to every Canadian. That could be you! In Canada, the patient receives, entirely free of charge, all services by physicians and hospitals deemed medically necessary. That includes abortion coverage. Abortion in Canada is not only still legal, but subsidized unashamedly by the government. Is Canada’s single-payer model more expensive? To the contrary. Per capita, health expenditures in Canada are roughly half what they are in the United States.

• Greater upward mobility. Here in the United States we revere Horatio Alger, who celebrated pluck and grit. This country was indeed notable for its upward mobility in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but those days are long gone. More recently (as I explained 13 years ago in The New Republic) we have lagged most other comparable industrial democracies, including Canada. Income inequality, though rising, is also much lower in Canada than in the United States.
  

• A more democratic legislature. In the United States we have the House of Representatives, which is numerically representative of the population (though susceptible to gerrymandering), and the Senate, which is not. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population, and some states are so tiny (Wyoming, for example), that they end up with more senators than representatives. This situation has grown more intolerable as urbanization has concentrated more of the population within the most populous states. But we can’t easily change it because the Senate is written into the Constitution. Canada, by contrast, is governed by a parliament. Technically, Canada’s parliament is bicameral, like our Congress, but the upper chamber (also called the Senate but modeled on the United Kingdom’s House of Lords; members are appointed) wields very little power. It may veto legislation passed by the lower chamber but almost never does. An enviable feature of parliamentary government is that if you get an absolute dud for a leader (like you-know-who) you can get rid of him or her fairly quickly. The shortest-ever parliamentary term in Canada was that of Charles Tupper, a veritable Liz Truss who lasted only 68 days. 
  

• Mandatory retirement for Supreme Court justices. I’m grateful to my Canadian former colleague Dahlia Lithwick of Slate for referring me to an interview she conducted in July on this and other matters with retired Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella. Canada pushes out its Supreme Court justices at 75. If we had that in the United States, Clarence Thomas would be gone and Sam Alito would be out the door on April 1. “Strongly endorse this idea,” Lithwick told me by email.
  

• Low per capita defense spending. Nobody has invaded Canada since 1812, when the United States last tried (and failed) to conquer the place (it was a British colony at the time). Yet Canada spends only 1.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product on defense. In the United States we spend about 3 percent of GDP on defense, and our economy is more than 10 times the size of Canada’s.  “Spend it on schools and roads and art museums instead,” Michael Ignatieff, the historian and former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, emailed me. “Forget about those pesky Chinese.” 

• Fantastic deli. The best smoked meat comes from Montreal, not New York City. I’m told (by my editor, among others) that the bagels are quite good, too. He recommends Montreal’s St-Viateur.

• Best view of Niagara Falls. I’ve never been to either side, but everybody says that it’s prettier when seen from Canada.

To be sure, Canadian rule poses a few drawbacks. The price of containing a charming French-speaking subculture is an intermittently troublesome separatist movement. The late Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (Doug is his brother) was at least as embarrassing as Donald Trump. Canada, as a member of the British Commonwealth, recognizes Charles Windsor as its monarch, which doesn’t thrill me even granting that he exercises no power there. Canada’s housing crisis appears to be worse than ours. And I cannot countenance poutine. I should here concede that my opinions about Canada are largely second-hand because I’ve never been there. Strange, I know. I haven’t avoided it; just never had a reason to go.

You may have guessed by now that I’m not being entirely serious, and neither are Lithwick or Ignatieff. “My preference is not to treat any of this as a joke,” the Canadian Atlantic writer David Frum replied to my query. “One of the ways Trump works is by inuring us not to be shocked by the shocking.” 

I take Frum’s point. But treating Trump seriously doesn’t work especially well either. The United States is not going to conquer Canada; that’s just this week’s fancy from an attention-craving narcissist whose cognition is on the fritz. That this crackpot is about to be president is without question a serious problem. But we can’t spend the next four years pretending the man isn’t a jabbering fool. And I’m quite serious when I observe that for all its current turmoil, Canada is, at this moment, governed more soundly than any other North American nation. That Trump thinks Canada would benefit from becoming part of the United States gets it exactly backwards. It is, in every sense, a joke.