Donald Trump wants an open border with Canada. At least, that’s what would happen if Trump were to execute his stated preference for annexing Canada as the fifty-first state.
In recent days, president-elect Donald Trump has made a number of comments suggesting that Canada should be annexed by the United States as a new state. For example, on Tuesday, Donald Trump told reporters at a press conference that the U.S. and Canada combined into a single country “would really be something.” This followed an earlier X/Twitter post in which Trump listed a number of benefits to Canada and concluded that “if Canada merged with the US” the resulting union would be “a great nation”
This depends on what one means by “great nation.” If the goal is to move the United States further to the left ideologically, and to make the US more like California, then yes, adding Canada as a new state would certainly be a good thing. For people who like freedom, on the other hand, it’s not a great idea.
The sort of MAGA voter who thinks this is a good idea is not exactly strong on critical thinking. Those who are capable of thinking things through, on the other hand, might notice that adding Canada as a new state would create an open border with a country of 40 million Canadians, most of whom hold political views well to the left of the average American. It appears that some of the same conservatives who complain about Californians moving to their states also want to open the border to a new California-sized state to the north.
How is Canada different politically from the United States? Generally speaking, it is far to the Left. For example, a recent poll of Canadians showed that 70 percent of Canadians support banning all new handgun purchases. 80 percent support bans of “assault weapons” variously defined. These numbers are typically ten to twenty percent higher than the numbers found in the United States. Similarly, 80 percent of Canadians polled typically support abortion on demand. In the United States, the number is closer to 60 percent. In the United States, 43 percent of Americans polled say the health care system should be run by the government. In Canada, 86 percent prefer government-run healthcare. In fact, as Ronald Hamowy has noted, support for government health care is near to being a religious dogma in Canada. Moreover, a voting majority of Canadians have long opposed freedom of speech, having adopted draconian “hate speech” laws since the 1970s.
This would surprise no one who is familiar with Canadian politics. As Peter St Onge has put it, Canadian “conservatives” are essentially what we would identify as centrist Democrats in America. The people we might call conservatives or libertarians in America are a tiny minority in Canada.
Apparently, The Trump plan—enthusiastically applauded by many of his loyal MAGA supporters—is to add to the United States millions of voters who want government health care, bans on all hand guns, more abortion, and hate speech laws. Moreover, Canada would enter the US as the largest or second-largest state ensuring dozens of new electoral college votes for Democrats. Put another way, with Canada as the fifty-first state, the only way the Republicans could ever win another national election would be to move even further to the left than they already have. With a “second California,” added to the mix, Congress would move significantly to the Left as Canadian voters sent dozens of new members of Congress—members with a Canadian political ideology—to Washington, DC.
Some defenders of annexation might claim that this would not be a problem if each Canadian province becomes its own new state. This wouldn’t help much, however. A majority of Canadians live in either Ontario or Quebec, and those provinces lean well to the Left, The Liberal Party routinely trounces the Conservatives in the largest provinces. The “conservative” provinces of Canada, such as Alberta and Saskatchewan would be among the smallest states if added to the United States, and we’d likely soon be reminded that Canadian conservatives are centrists by American standards.
Here, for example, are the 2019 election results for Parliament. (In Canada, blue is the color for the Conservative party.):
Sure, the GOP might pick up a handful of new seats in the smaller “states” of central Canada. Most new, post-annexation members of Congress, however, would be left-leaning Quebecois and Ontarians.
So, yes, if the goal is to add a second California to the United States, or at least one or two new copies of Illinois or Washington State, then annexing Canada is a great idea.
Moreover, there is absolutely no reason to assume that Canadians would stay in Canada if Trump succeeds in creating an open border on the north. Many would elect to move south and fill up American cities and suburbs with new center-left or far-left voters. The migration is likely to be larger than anything we now see out of California. The scale of California out-migration is limited by the fact that California weather and geography is very nice. On the other hand, Canada has all the high taxes, overregulation, and high cost of living of California, but with a terrible climate. The Canada exodus will make the California exodus look like a minor affair in comparison. If Trump gets his way, get ready to be regularly harangued by your new Canadian neighbors who just moved south and will now lecture you about the need for single-payer healthcare and gun bans.
Indeed, the prospect of annexing Canada exposes some interesting new angles on the problem of open borders. Conservatives usually frame the open-borders debate as a problem of letting in too many supposedly undesirable “third world” immigrants. Rather, we are told, the US should seek to import more “first world” migrants. Importing millions of (mostly) white, “first world” Canadians might not go quite the way that many conservatives think it would.
