Canada, a valuable asset or woeful liability? Our northern neighbors have lived in world-class symbiotic peace on the longest shared international border for over two centuries. With the exception of a few bloodless border stand-offs in the Pig War and Aroostook War, Canada has enjoyed the most peaceful international borders in the world — sporting zero armed conflict since 1815.

In the minds of many Americans, Canada is the product of an accident of history. Both the U.S. and Canada were spawned out of the British Empire, and are largely English-speaking. Whose initial founding populations were Northwestern European. Our trade is deeply integrated, and if one were to traverse across the border without noticing the customs process, their transition would be hardly noticeable outside of perhaps Quebec.

But is Canada worth the annexation? For all intents and purposes, Canada is not a sovereign country. Its military is token, with the last serious mobilization of military assets for combat purposes taking place during the 2011 NATO intervention in the Libyan Civil War. But just because a country might be easy to militarily overpower, does not mean it will be easy to govern.

Americans often don’t understand the Canadian governance system. Most of the land is uninhabitable and in permafrost. This makes for a fairly stark divide between east and west. Western Canada can best be described as a condensed version of the US west of Illinois. The economy is primarily agricultural, with rolling prairies dominating until hitting mid-Alberta, where the terrain becomes mountainous. Alberta sports a large oil industry, and Vancouver in British Columbia has its own tech ecosystem that is integrated with Seattle's and San Francisco's. The East is entirely different. Ontario resembles a blend of Midwest and New England, while Quebec is almost an entirely different country with large segments of the population not proficient in English — a division that, to some extent, outweighs the east-west divide. 

In fact, the Quebec issue is so profound that virtually the entire federal political landscape in Canada is shaped around it. Any annexation of Canada would require addressing this inherited problem, and while the US has a greater capacity to culturally overwhelm Quebec, this is not an issue that America has had to deal with on such a scale, at least since the pre-WWI Midwest Germans. 

An autonomy route would have its own problems as well. Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking jurisdiction within the United States whose residents do not enjoy political representation at the federal level, but have been relatively successfully integrated into US rule. However, Puerto Rico is an island isolated from the mainland. Any serious annexation of Canada would see a broad further integration of economies, and it would likely be inevitable that, similar to the issues currently experienced in Ottawa, any form of autonomy given to Quebec would not be enough to shield it from cultural domination.

Outside of Quebec, a Canadian annexation without disenfranchising Canadians from federal representation would result in further Democrat dominance at a federal level, and could risk turning the electoral landscape in Congress and in the White House into a one-party state. Polls have time and time again shown Canadians’ preference for Democratic administrations and candidates in US elections outside of heavily conservative and oil-based Alberta. 

Canada’s economy is also lagging in terms of its dynamism, as seen in its lagging behind the US in terms of GDP per capita since Trudeau took office. Almost all of the net contribution to the federal budget comes from Alberta, with massive amounts of government spending pumped into the Maritime provinces. This is in addition to those very same Maritime provinces having roughly the same representation at the federal level as Alberta, despite having half the population.

Canada is a resource-rich nation that offers many opportunities to America in the event of annexation, but comes with it immense political baggage that must be accounted for and a completely different political system that is completely alien to ours. Any sort of undertaking must be done with caution as to the possible ramifications on US politics, internal stability, and the economic shifts Americans will have to grapple with, given a frictionless regulatory environment and most of North America under one flag. Poor execution would set a terrible example for the world and risk damaging Washington’s credibility irreparably and potentially shift the center of power markedly towards the left.