Should Canada become the 51st state of America?

The answer to that is, of course, no. But why that is the case is more complicated than it first appears.

I grew up in Canada, not far from the US border, and my interaction with that border was a fundamental experience that shaped my politics a great deal. During the debates in Britain between 2016 and 2020 on Brexit and what it should look like, in particular what we were going to do about the border in Northern Ireland, I was always taken aback by certain Brexiters saying “The border between the Republic and NI could just look like the border between Canada and the States.” This was always immediate proof that the person in question had zero idea of what they were talking about, and had definitely never been to the 49th parallel.

I haven’t been to the border between Canada and the US in almost 20 years, but I struggle to think that it’s become more relaxed and chilled out since then. Back when I crossed it every so often, so let’s say from about the mid-80s until 2005, that border was not dissimilar to the border between North and South Korea. I’m sure that sounds like an exaggeration to a lot of you, but I swear to you it is not. It is militarised and carefully guarded and crossing it, either way, is massive pain in the balls. Border guards on both sides are like how I always imagined the East German police to have been. Everyone is treated with maximum suspicion. The Canadians are paranoid that drugs and guns are flowing over their border, and the Americans, well, I never really worked out what they were so scared of. Even now, with all of this talk of fentanyl coming over the border, apparently it’s less than 1% of the volume of that drug coming into the States. The Americans seemed to have only ever had to worry about young Canadians who want to start their own business and create jobs in the US - and they have worried about it a lot over the years, oddly.

I think that a much more relaxed set of relations between the US and Canada has always made a huge amount of sense to me - and has always, in my lifetime at least, been a billion miles from happening. So many people across the world that I’ve met just assume US-Canada relations are like the Australia-New Zealand relationship, not realising it’s always been much more like, well, North and South Korea.

That’s why all of this “The warm relations between Canada and the US are over” has just struck me as bullshit, mainly because I never thought the relationship was ever warm in the slightest. The US has always flirted with the UK (on occasion at least) and all that “special relationship” guff, seen Asia and Europe as more or less important at times - but they have always flaunted the degree to which they do not give the slightest shit about Canada. In fact, I think Trump’s “Canada should be the 51st state” is the nicest, warmest thing any US president has said about Canada in the last half century. I mean, Trump demonstrated he realises there is a country north of America, which is a big deal for a US head of state to have done.

Anyhow, I go into more detail of my experience of Canada-US relations and the wider question in the video above. Check it out, like and subscribe to the YouTube channel (really helps) and thanks for reading.