A Continentalist Manifesto

I have recently been teaching my students W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. The novel reads like a long love letter to American culture, ideal for foreign students hoping to enter university in the US. 

But it is written by a Canadian.

At the same time, I see a reference to The Band as the originators back in the 1970s of a new musical genre, “Americana.” Their albums are a celebration of everything American: “Up on Cripple Creek.” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Yet four of the five, including their two chief songwriters, are from London, Ontario.

It is not just The Band or W.P. Kinsella, either. Neil Young, from Toronto via Winnipeg, is also deep Americana. Leonard Cohen has a love affair with American country music. The most hyper-patriotic American Youtubers and political commentators seem to be Canadian refugees: Gad Saad, Steven Crowder, Mark Steyn, Gavin MacInnis, David Freiberg (“Viva Frei”), David Frum, “Clyde Do Something,” Jordan Peterson. Joe Schuster created Superman, who fights for “truth, justice, and the American way.” Schuster was Canadian.

Which leads me to the obvious conclusion: within every Canadian, there is an American screaming to get out.

Most Canadians, to be sure, define their Canadianness by not being American. But that makes the point. It is a textbook case of denial. The only thing that makes us not American is the mere assertion that we are not. By any objective measure, we are the same people, the same culture, the same nation, founded on the same principles: the same language, leaving aside French Canada; a shared geography, a shared home; a shared history; a shared legal system, the English common law; a shared form of government, liberal representative democracy and federalism; a shared patrimony in the UK; exposure to virtually all the same influences in our childhoods, Dr. Seuss and Disney, Sesame Street and Pixar; a shared religion, Christianity, with more or less the same mix of Protestant denominations and Catholicism. We play and have always played the same sports, often across our shared border: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse. All have deep roots in both countries--sports often unfamiliar in the rest of the world. Even our standard accents, let alone our language, are indistinguishable to outsiders and usually to ourselves. It is rare to find a Canadian, if not a recent immigrant, without known relatives in the US.

For Canadians, therefore, to criticize America or American culture amounts to self-hate. It is a poison that enfeebles us. Without our Americanness, we have no culture; for we are Americans.

For those brave few who embrace our Americanness, like Kinsella or The Bend, it is visibly exciting, dizzying. You can witness the enthusiasm. It is at last meeting our true selves, discovering our heritage, spreading our wings, and breathing free.

The best thing for Canadians is probably joining the US. Even without the economic benefits—we pay a premium in higher prices and lost opportunities by keeping our independence. Even without the security benefits—with the rise of China, it is reckless not to join forces. And Canada is too vast and underpopulated to defend itself.

For political reasons, the US would not want a full union. That would skew their electoral map leftward; Republicans would never agree.

Kevin O’Leary has the solution. Keep our pretty passports. Canadians do not vote in the US, and the Americans do not vote here. So the Americans can keep their electoral balance, and we can keep our Medicare. But full freedom of movement over the border, like going state to state or province to province. No tariffs, and the right to live and work in either country. Our militaries should be fully integrated, and so should tariffs on anything coming from abroad. We should have the same currency. 

We would be richer, our quality of life would be better, and we would be happier.

 

The Beaver that Roared

News is that the Canadian military has drawn up plans for war with the US. And their conclusion? “Canada would be defeated in two days or less and they hope Canadians would organize into counterinsurgency guerrilla groups.”

That’s about what I calculate. Quick tank run over flat terrain to take Winnipeg. Canada is cut in two. Quick tank run over flat terrain to take Vancouver. Canada is cut off from the Pacific. Now send tanks through the broad flat plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan to secure the oilfields and the North. If Eastern Canada is worth the effort, another quick run up the Richelieu to take Montreal cuts the remainder of Canada in two once again. Hook left to take Ottawa.  Canada does not have the vast distances of Russia to buffer an invasion from the South. Easily all over in two days.

Would Canadians launch guerilla warfare? The thought seems laughable to me.

Straight Talk on Annexation to the US

Reading local history makes clear how artificial the international border between Canada and the US is. Everyone had and has relatives in the States. A good number of men buried in the local cemetery fought for the Union in the American Civil War. American history is our history.

We are, by all accepted standards, the same people, culturally and ethnically, with the exception of Francophone Quebec. Not only do we speak the same language: we speak it with the same accent, so that I usually cannot tell, when I meet someone abroad, if they are Canadian or American. The same cannot be said of two Englishmen meeting abroad: they will know immediately by accent if someone is from Yorkshire as opposed to Cornwall. The same is true for France, or Italy, or Germany. They are far more regionally ethnically diverse than English Canada and the US.

The reason for Canada to exist as an independent entity was that some Americans at the time of the Revolution wanted to retain ties to Britain and to the royal family. That raison d’etre disappeared in about the 1930s. Canada now really has no more ties to Britain than does the US. The royal family is purely symbolic; just a face on the coins and stamps.

By all logic, English Canada should join the United States.

It is, in the first case, a matter of efficiency. It is costly to duplicate services. If Canadian Confederation was a good idea, joining the US is just an extension of the same good idea.

In the second case, it makes economic sense. A perfect common market would increase the prosperity of both sides by dropping significant barriers to trade and commerce. But it would especially increase the prosperity of Canadians, with greater access to the United States’ lager market.

But the strongest reason to unite is the Canadian Constitution. The passage of the Constitution Act in 1982 was a fatal mistake. It has turned Canada into a dictatorship by the unelected judiciary, it has enshrined gross inequalities, and it is virtually impossible to legally amend. The simplest course to change it would seem to be to join the US and come under the US constitution instead.

Unlike the US Constitution, or the prior Canadian Bill of Rights, the Canadian Constitution actually limits human rights. Citizens have rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” 

This vague phrase leaves it all up to judges. Who cannot be trusted—power corrupts.

The vagueness of the Charter generally gives the judiciary too much opportunity to interpret. The contrast to the clarity of the Canadian or the American Bill of Rights is striking.

Equality rights are denied by the phrase: “[this] does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

Any particular group can be declared disadvantaged, and thereby given preference. Indeed, this is the usual trick. Hitler argued that ethnic Germans were disadvantaged by the Jews. South African Boers considered themselves disadvantaged after the Boer War. Mussolini declared Italians disadvantaged after Versailles. The whites of the US South considered themselves disadvantaged by the carpetbaggers after the Civil War.

It stands to reason that any group given preferential treatment by government is not disadvantaged by definition. For “disadvantaged,” read “advantaged,” and the matter is clear. Discrimination is enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. It is not in the American one.

Equality rights are also violated in clause 25: “The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada.”

This means there will forever be at least two classes of Canadian citizenship, and never equality. Aboriginals have special extra rights and freedoms according to the constitution.

And the gross mistake of “multiculturalism” is also enshrined in the Constitution, so that it cannot be corrected. “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

This commits the government to working against the shared Canadian culture—just the opposite of what a government is there to do. For “multicultural heritage” read “ethnic ghettos.”

The fundamental problem is that those who drafted the Canadian Constitution had no vision nor principles other than the partisan considerations of their day: keeping various special interest groups happy. 

It leaves us no way out but either revolution, or annexation to the US. Of those who choices, annexation is vastly preferable.

Explaining Trump's "Erratic" Tariffs on Canada

 

Of course the Trump tariffs are not about fentanyl. Trump needed to declare an emergency to give himself the power to impose tariffs. Fentanyl and terrorists crossing the border are perhaps a real concern, but they are not the main issue. They are rather the legal justification.

It is also not about forcibly annexing Canada. This is what the Canadian left wants you to believe; this is a straw man argument. Trump has publicly ruled this out. He is issuing an invitation to join the US, which is quite a different matter. Is a man proposing to a woman forcibly annexing her?

An interesting piece from the New York Times, posted on Facebook by Warren Kinsella, claims that in his phone calls with Trudeau, “President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.”

So the problems are Canada’s supply-side management over dairy, chicken, and eggs; our restrictive banking regulations; and the GST. Probably also the carbon tax. All things we, as Canadians, should want to abolish. Eliminating them would make our lives better—especially for the poor.

Ordinary Canadians should support Trump against our own government on these issues. This looks like a case of patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel.

To be fair, the piece goes on to suggest Trump wants to tear up the 1908 boundary treaty. But this makes no sense; that treaty did not change the boundary, but dealt with how to survey and mark it more clearly. Nor would it be worth Trump’s while to upset the applecart for some island in Passamaquoddy Bay, or Port Roberts. If he is suggesting border treaties can be renegotiated, this looks like just another pressure tactic.

Trump wants fair trade.

The View from China

 

They left out Greenland.

One of my Chinese students asked me this morning whether Trump is really planning to take over Canada. And how I would feel about that.

Good question. It seems it is on everyone’s mind now, worldwide.

I don’t see why Trump would back down, now, on the devastating tariffs on Canadian goods. By imposing them, he wins any way you look at it. 

At a minimum, it cajoles the Canadian government into making a real effort to close the border, and improve our national defense. 

But I suspect this is not his preferred option. And, luckily for Trump, the Canadian government is determined instead to enter a trade war that only Trump can win. They really are that stupid.

Imposing and maintaining the tariffs gives Trump a major new source of government revenue. This allows him to lower income taxes, turbo-charging the American economy.

Trump says the US does not really need cars from Canada. He is surely right. The Auto Pact was always a gift. Trump wants to pull as much auto manufacturing as possible back across that border into the declining rust belt.

Trump says the US does not really need Canada’s oil and gas. That was supposed to be Canada’s trump card. But on paper, he is right. During the last Trump term, he made the US a net exporter of hydrocarbons. Fracking has opened up vast new reserves. Cutting off Canadian supplies encourages their development, boosting the US economy and keeping the money in the States. Those who think the US needs Canadian oil are thinking short-term, looking at how the infrastructure is currently set up for Canadian imports. But Canada is at least as dependent on this infrastructure: we do not have the transportation capacity, thanks to prior government decisions, to sell oil and gas in volume to anyone else. We have to sell it to the US, and if the US imposes tariffs, we may have to lower our prices to compensate, to preserve our market.

Some point to the electricity grid in the Northeast, dependent on purchasing hydro power from Quebec. And gloat over the Americans having to sit there in the cold with only candles. But here we have the same issue: if Canada cannot sell that hydroelectric power to the US, it just goes to waste. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs will be stirring the building of new nuclear plants to supply this need. An economic boom for America. For Canada, there is no up-side.

This will all cause the Canadian economy to fall into recession. Why is that Trump’s concern? If Canada gets poorer, it will have to sell everything it produces to the US at lower prices. If it collapses, all the better. Trump may lose the tariff revenue, but he can walk in and take all Canada’s resources. And he gains a far more defensible perimeter, from either foreign invasion or illegal immigration and drug smuggling: oceans on three sides and half of a fourth.

If Canadians were smart, they would clamour to join the US now as soon as possible. We may grumble, but it is the best option we have. It might call Trump's bluff, causing him to back down. He may not really want Canada.

And that is what I told my Chinese student.

He was more disturbed by the prospect than I was. “Not good for China,” he concluded.

Which, given the global competition, may be another reason to recommend it.

One Canada or No Canada

 

John Diefenbaker

I used to respect Andrew Coyne. But he now seems to me to be out of touch. He has grown too comfortable with the CBC and the rest of the commentariat. He now only promotes their narrative. In a recent CBC “At Issue” panel, he observed that Donald Trump had managed to unite Canadians with his proposal for annexation—that is, against Trump.

That is the line the politicians want us to believe. Patriotism, as Johnson said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. It is always the political move to wrap yourself in the flag.

It is true enough that all the federal party leaders and all the premiers came out immediately saying this would never happen, and talking about tariffs on American goods. But we now, thanks to the Internet, do not need to rely on the politicians to tell us what ordinary Canadians think. I find that the mood on social media is entirely different. I think Coyne is in the Ottawa bubble. Trump has in fact driven a major wedge between the good old Laurentian elite and the people they claim to represent.

If X is a guide, ordinary Canadians seem split into two camps. Both agree the current situation in Canada is untenable. Both believe that Canada is broken. Both believe it is not enough just to vote out Trudeau’s regime. We have discovered with shock that we have no protections for our rights. Another tyrant might always come to power. Moreover, there is no real reason for Canada to exist: the government itself has stripped Canada of any sense of pride or national identity.

One party in this dispute says the best course is to fold the tent, accept Trump’s offer, and get the protection of the US Constitution. The other camp says we should instead try to recover a Canadian nationality, an unhyphenated Canadianism without multiculturalism, the “One Canada” Diefenbaker advocated. And then we must throw out the current constitution in favour of one that has a stronger protection for our rights. 

Of the two, the first option seems to me the more realistic. The Canadian constitution is devilishly difficult to amend, and trying to do so in the past has led to periods of political paralysis.

Just wait until Trump’s tariffs take effect. If I had to place a bet, I bet Canada is on it sway to annexation. Perhaps within the term of Trump’s mandate.

How Trump Could Actually Do It

 

Here’s how Trump can annex both Greenland and Canada.

Greenland: first encourage them to vote for independence from Denmark. Denmark can’t object: it’s the right to self-determination of peoples, established by the League of Nations and Wilson’s Fourteen Points. And Denmark has already admitted Greenland has this right.

Then, no longer needing to pay off Denmark, the US offers every Greenlander one million dollars to cede sovereignty to the USA. There are only about 50,000 Greenlanders. This would only cost the US $50,000,000,000—fifty billion. Good price considering Greenland’s strategic importance and mineral deposits. Not only would every Greenlander be a millionaire; the US would then also begin developing Greenland’s resources, providing jobs for Greenlanders, and continuing royalties. Like Alaskans, who all currently get an annual payout, a reverse income tax, from resource royalites. On top of this, of course, every Greenlander gains the right to live and work in the USA. The much coveted “green card.”

Why wouldn’t they go for it? It is not as though they are giving up their sovereignty; they are not independent now. And they would never be viable as an independent state.

Canada: there are too many Canadians for a similarly simple deal. But here’s how it could happen. The long Quebec sovereignty debate has established the principle that any Canadian province has the right to separate. Alberta gets a raw deal now within Confederation, forced to pay equalization to most other provinces. They will be especially hard hit by Trump’s stiff tariffs. They are probably most dependent on cross-border trade with the US, for their oil and gas and agricultural products. At the same time, they are most valuable to the US, for that oil and gas. Not to mention the Alcan highway heading north from Edmonton to Alaska.

Canadian nomination meetings and party leadership contests are ridiculously vulnerable to foreign interference, as the Chinese have demonstrated. It would not take that much money for the US to maneuver supporters of Alberta independence and annexation into power provincially, working like China through local shell organizations. Externally, offer Alberta stand-alone statehood, a pipeline south, and a complete lifting of tariffs. Probably attractive enough to convince a majority of Albertans, if the politicians are also pushing the idea.

So Alberta votes for independence and annexation to the US, as Texas once did from Mexico. 

Canada is now, for all practical purposes, cut in two, east to west; and it loses a huge part of its tax and resource base. 

At this point, the attraction of remaining independent diminishes rapidly for other provinces. They should start falling like dominoes. British Columbia will be stranded, in relation to the rest of Canada. They needed a rail link to convince them to join Confederation in the first place. Now that link is gone. 

Saskatchewan tends to move in tandem with Alberta. Saskatchewan will lose its route to market. Saskatchewan will want to join as well, if Alberta has joined. 

If Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan have all left Confederation, there go most of Canada’s natural resources. The attractiveness of remaining in Canada falls further for other provinces, now much impoverished.

Manitoba will probably fall next, wanting to stay with its Prairie neighbours rather than become a remote outpost of Ontario.

If the momentum is now not yet enough to pull all the other provinces in, the game can repeat. If either New Brunswick or Quebec pull out of that rump Canada, it is once again cut in two. 

Target New Brunswick: small enough to subvert without too much financial outlay. If New Brunswick goes, PEI, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, stranded, will likely follow.

And as far as Quebec is concerned, there is no great loyalty to Ontario. Why not try for a better deal with Washington?

Leaving Ontario, and a landlocked Ontario. Not viable. Game, set, and match.

As for the Panama Canal, here’s a gambit: the US could put pressure on Panama by threatening to build a new, and wider, canal in cooperation with and through Costa Rica or Nicaragua; losing Panama virtually all its revenue from the present canal. Then it proposes, to forestall this, a deal with Panama in which Panama still gets a healthy remittance from the current canal under US management.

How Canada Falls

 

I think Trump is serious about annexing Canada. He’s been harping at it, recently referring to Trudeau as “governor of the great state of Canada.” 

Trump is moving the Overton window, He’s forcing the discussion. He’s done this before. Eventually, it becomes the standard wisdom. Remember when building the border wall was a crazy idea? And it was racist to object to illegals? 

The annexation makes every kind of sense from the American perspective. It is ultimately the only way to secure the northern border. 

Trudeau, predictably, is reacting in the worst way possible, from Canada’s point of view. He always wants a fight; this is how he reacts when challenged. And he does not care what damage he does to Canada; as noted in a recent column, as a narcissist, he probably wants to burn the place down because it is no longer inclined to vote for him.  

Trudeau is idiotically threatening to raise tariffs on American products coming into Canada as retaliation; rather than trying to reach accommodation.

In any trade war, Canada is bound to lose. Canada’s economy depends far more on trade with the US than the American economy depends on trade with Canada. The trade war will probably crash the Canadian economy, and soon have Canadians begging to join the US.

As it stands, an online poll has Canadians evenly split on whether they’d rather stay independent or join the US.

Trudeau’s intransigence may be part of Trump’s calculations. He might have expected this reaction. As a skilled negotiator, he probably studies his opponents’ weaknesses. He seems to be deliberately provoking Trudeau to do something stupid. 

I can see it happening. This or that individual province votes to join the US. The US then piles forces in, forestalling any action by the federal government. If any province but Nova Scotia, PEI, BC  or Newfoundland make this move, they cut Canada in half, making it unviable. 

I’d put my money on Alberta going first.

Poilievre might yet right the ship; but I think it is going to happen.