Manifest destiny, part 2: Canada

As we noted yesterday, although Greenland may be of considerable strategic or economic value, and of course is very important to the 57,000 or so people who live there, it is not big enough to make much difference to the politics of the United States. Canada, with more than 41 million people, is in a very different category altogether.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Canada to become the “51st state” of the US. Like much of what he says, this makes little sense; he shows no awareness of the fact that Canada is already divided into states (known as “provinces”). If it were to join the US, those provinces would undoubtedly insist on their separate identities being maintained, so Canada would become states 51 through 60.

Canada is not densely populated: those ten provinces, on the latest census figures, have a population a little less than California. But that’s still enough to have a big influence. If they joined the US, on my calculation they would get 45 seats in the House of Representatives (assuming its total size remained the same), more than ten per cent of the total, as well as twenty senators. That would also give them a big say in presidential elections, with 65 seats out of 558 in the electoral college.

Since most of the new voters would probably align with the Democrats, that’s another reason to be sceptical about Trump’s intentions. Although it could also be that his plans for the future of the enlarged country don’t include free elections.

Whatever the reasoning behind it, Trump’s expansionist rhetoric and its accompanying economic warfare has provoked a fierce reaction in Canada. And with a Canadian federal election due this year, relations with the US – never far from centre stage in Canada – are set to become the major political issue.

Until the recent upheaval, the election was looking very much like a foregone conclusion. The Liberals (centre to centre-left) under prime minister Justin Trudeau have been in office since 2015 and, as often happens, have become tired and stale. The opposition Conservatives, led since 2022 by Pierre Poilievre, had built up a big lead in the opinion polls, of the order of twenty points.

At the beginning of this year Trudeau announced his retirement and last week a ballot of Liberal members by a wide margin chose Mark Carney, an economist and central banker who has never been in parliament, to replace him. He is scheduled to be sworn in as prime minister tomorrow. The election is not due until October, but Carney will have the option of calling it earlier if he wishes.

Which a few months ago would have seemed a suicidal idea, but since Trump took aim at his northern neighbor there has been a rapid turnaround in the polls. Poilievre has joined in the general outrage at the threat to Canada’s independence, but he has been unable to shake the impression that he is much the more Trumpian of the contenders. The Liberals are now polling about even with the Conservatives, back at or above the 32.6% of the vote that they won last time.

A constant in Canadian politics is the very rough relationship between votes cast and seats won. In 2021, when Trudeau won a third term, the Liberals were more than a percentage point behind the Conservatives but won forty more seats. The two parties with the balance of power – the leftist NDP with 17.8% and 25 seats, and the separatist Quebec Bloc with 7.6% and 32 seats – both lean to the left and have helped to keep Trudeau in power.

Polarisation on the Trump issue seems to be hurting the minor parties, and the election, whenever Carney chooses to call it, looks like being more than usual a two-party contest. But appeasement vs defiance of the US is not an easy choice for voters to make; a Trumpian trade war will mean devastation for Canada’s economy, but it’s far from obvious how it can best be avoided. Like the rest of the world, but with greater urgency, Canada needs to find a sane way of dealing with a madman.