The Great State of Canada? Time for a Rethink

By Thomas Peace

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought with it a revival of continentalist rhetoric to North American politics.

“It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada. I look forward to seeing the Governor again soon…”

A few days ago, when Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned, the President-Elect observed:

“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau.”

And just yesterday:

“Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!”

The idea Trump is putting forward is not a new one.

Since at least the early-to-mid eighteenth century, continental visions of empire – from Manifest Destiny to Annexation – have permeated North American political culture and haunted Canada’s self-identity.  Perhaps not since the Fenian Raids of the 1860s, and the broader nineteenth-century annexation movement, has an American threat to Canadian sovereignty been as visceral.

Contrasting these imperial visions, though, have been other ways of thinking about space, place, and home. Continentalism is not the only way to think about North America’s political geography. If we look to the past, we can see pathways towards a more transformative vision for North America that better reflects regional relationships and identities.

Before the border began to take shape in the 1790s – a process that took nearly a century from coast to coast – few North American peoples saw the boundary as meaningful.

In the east, the political geography of the Wabanaki Confederacy draws together peoples whose Homelands today are known to many of us as the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and the provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia.

In the southwest, well into the nineteenth century, parts of what are today New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas were dominated by the Comanche, holding back American expansion to their east and Mexican expansion in the south.

In both places, a clear border between the United States, British North America, and Mexico did not cement until the 1840s.

Indigenous power and geography are not the only ways to think about how present-day borders were less than meaningful in the past. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century nearly one million Quebecers moved to the United States. Today, one in five New Englanders can claim Laurentian ancestry. Likewise, turning westward, the corporate histories of the Oregon Territory reveal how the fur trade structured a west coast geography that was only divided in 1846 when settler pressure and the gold rush cemented the border to the Pacific Coast.

Even more recently, in the mid-Great Lakes, industrial histories have stitched together parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan with Ontario. Where I live, in southwestern Ontario, transportation companies – such as the Michigan-based Pere Marquette Railway – worked to make commerce and trade easier between the two countries. You cannot teach the pre-20^th century history here without understanding the deep cultural, economic, and political ties that make the Great Lakes a meaningful regional space.

The argument I am making is not just about the past. It is also about the future.

Many Americans and Canadians are deeply unhappy with the status quo. In the United States, tens of millions of people are fearful of what their country will become after January 20^th. In Canada, separatist movements in Alberta and Quebec (often supported by their provincial governments) have called for fundamental reorientations. Across the continent Indigenous nations and millions of settlers have demanded that the genocidal behaviour of the United States and Canada be recognized and atoned.

The history I outlined above points to opportunities for change that might respond to these anxieties in constructive ways. We could structure North American politics differently.

Donald Trump claims to view Canada as the 51^st state. It would not be unreasonable, however, to consider the opposite.

For some Indigenous peoples, enslaved and free Black people, draft dodgers (among many other groups and individuals), British North America served as a place of refuge in the face of oppressive American policies and behaviour.

Canada can still play this role. Perhaps it might be of greater benefit for New England and New York to become new provinces. Building deeper transportation and economic ties between Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, and Halifax with Boston, New York, and Buffalo strengthens existing and longstanding ties and removes artificial barriers that often hinder them. A similar case could be made along the West Coast where interests between British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California are more similar than those along the East-West trajectory.

Or perhaps we might be bolder.

For Wabanaki, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Niitsitapi, and Sto:lo nations and confederacies (among others) reorganization could much better respect their territories and relationship to the Land. With the creation of the border, and its enforcement, came genocidal policies that made it incredibly difficult for Indigenous peoples to thrive.

Rethinking political boundaries and communities provides a broader opportunity to reset relationships between immigrant populations and the Indigenous nations upon whose Lands Canada and the United States were built. Creating jurisdictions that respect Indigenous territories, laws, and cultures could go a long way in working against the genocidal practices of the past.

Donald Trump’s intention in framing Canada as the 51^st state is not clear. Is it frat-boy saber-rattling or a signaling of broader intentions? Either way, its implications are serious and need to be taken that way.

The idea, though, is not new. It has deep roots and a long legacy. If we want to live in places where the population has the maximum amount of freedom, there is an opportunity here for us to reconsider our political geographies in ways that reconcile with destructive histories, while also prioritize our collective well-being. The continentalist vision often misses this mark, but the past can point us towards a better future.

Thomas Peace is an Associate Professor of Canadian History at Huron University College and co-director of the Huron Community History Centre. His book, The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680-1790, won the 2024 Wilson Book Prize and the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Atlantic Prize.