The trope that Canada should avoid becoming “the 51st state” has never made much sense to me. While the Americans would surely not allow Prince Edward Island to carry on as a separate polity (and certainly not under such an overtly royal name) and would perhaps even merge all three Maritime Provinces into a single state, they would also not disregard our federal structure entirely and merge eleven constitutionally entrenched polities into one. We forget that the United States of America is also a federation and that the US Constitution contains a division of powers between two orders of government just as our Constitution Act, 1867 does.
I base my view on historical precedent.
Back in 2020, I wrote about H.R. 754, the bill tabled in 1866 by Republican Congressman Nathaniel Banks, a Republican from Massachusetts who served as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War. Banks would have granted the former British North America four states and three territories, which would have eventually become states under the principles of the Northwest Ordinance. He would only have subsumed Prince Edward Island into New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada East. “Selkirk” would have included what are now northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, parts of eastern Saskatchewan, and much of Nunavut, while “Saskatchewan” would have covered the area now delineated between Saskatchewan, Alberta, some of northeastern British Columbia, most of Northwest Territories, and some of Yukon. The western boundary of the Saskatchewan Territory would probably have followed the watershed that flows into the Arctic, while Columbia would have covered the Pacific watershed and that of the Yukon River.
So Donald Trump could at least have had the decency to troll Justin Trudeau with the prospect that the United States would annex Canada as, say, five states – Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic – instead of one. Canada could become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 54th, and 55th states, and Trudeau could become the Governor of Quebec.
Similar Posts:
- British North American History
- Manifest Destiny Hijacks the Monroe Doctrine: A Bill to Annex All of British North America into the United States (August 2020)
- Canada’s Counter-Manifest Destiny (July 2018)
- George Brown and Canada’s Manifest Destiny (July 2017)
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