Rachel Hawley
Although it is tempting to lump President Donald Trump’s obsession with turning Canada into the fifty-first state and his mockery of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in with his other bouts of delusion, Trump is far from the first American leader to broach the possibility of incorporating Canada into the United States. The fantasy of annexing Canada into the United States has a long history, dating back to its earliest years.
In 1777, the Second Continental Congress made an offer of incorporation to Canada—then a British territory—through Article XI of the Articles of Confederation. Though Canada firmly rejected the proposal, the Founding Fathers did not appear to get the message and scoured for reasons to declare war against the British Empire in order to seize Canadian territory. When the British attacked the USS Chesapeake in 1807, Thomas Jefferson declared that “If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada, which wants to enter the Union; and . . . we shall no longer have any difficulties with our neighbors.”
The motive for expanding into Canada was primarily economic. In his 1959 book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, historian William Appleman Williams writes that “colonial Americans had viewed the acquisition of more land as a primary way of solving their problems and fulfilling their purposes.” As Sidney Lens notes in The Forging of American Empire: From the Revolution to Vietnam, one nineteenth-century Republican newspaper based in Washington D.C., made the case explicit when it declared that “the country around Lake Ontario is almost everywheres extremely fertile . . . . All agree that Canada must be ours.” Another Republican publication, The Lexington Reporter, celebrated that “our government will at last make war, to produce a market for our tobacco, flour, and cotton.”
While beating their war drums, early American politicians continued making claims to Canadian territory. Speaker of the House Henry Clay, the “Great Compromiser,” said that “Canada is the avowed object,” and believed that “the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada” under U.S. control.
But the War of 1812 proved a perfect disaster for the United States. The British avenged the burning of York in Ontario by burning Washington, D.C.—and the White House—to the ground. In Detroit, Fort Shelby surrendered to a smaller force of British and Native Americans without a fight. The war may have produced “The Star Spangled Banner” and the war hero origins of future-President Andrew Jackson, but it failed to result in American control over Canada.
Nevertheless, some American leaders continued to push for annexation of Canada in the twentieth century. While defending a free-trade treaty between the United States and Canada in 1911, Speaker of the U.S. House Champ Clark declared, “I look forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole. The people of Canada are of our blood and language.” This was received poorly in Canada. The country’s Liberal Party defended the free trade treaty, but paid a heavy political price, while the Conservative Party, which had long opposed free trade, capitalized on a wave of anti-annexation and anti-American sentiment.
After the end of World War I, U.S. leaders dreamed up a variety of “color plans” for potential imperial wars. One such proposal, labeled War Plan Red, outlined an assault against the British Empire carried out primarily in Canada. Parts of the plan involved strategically bombing the port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, then seizing territory for absorption into the United States to eliminate it as a port for enemy shipping and poison gas attacks, the latter of which was illegal under international law even then. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho proclaimed that the United States should set up “puppet governments” in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, to better defend the nation’s vital interests. Secretary of State George H. Curtis assailed Clark for suggesting “that we adapt Hitler’s methods of dealing with neighbors.” While annexing Canada has not been revisited as a serious proposal since before World War II, some conservative commentators, such as Pat Buchanan, advocated for it as recently as 1990. (Buchanan, oddly enough, also called for the United States to take Greenland from Denmark, presaging another imperial obsession of the Trump Administration.)
The idea that the United States wishes to subsume Canadian sovereignty has long been an animating force for the Canadian left. In 1948, the communist historian and activist Stanley Ryerson argued for greater political and economic independence from the United States in his pamphlet, “Why Be a Doormat?” Nearly twenty years later, democratic socialist Member of Parliament Tommy Douglas assessed the situation during a debate on the Vietnam War: “In Washington they have their hawks and doves, and in Ottawa we have our parrots.” The New Democratic Party’s now-defunct Waffle caucus sought “an independent socialist Canada” free from U.S. influence, warning that U.S. control of the Canadian economy posed a major threat to the country and its people.
So far, the White House promises to use only “economic force” to induce Canada to give up its independence. This force initially manifested in a planned 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods, though Trump backed down on the tariffs earlier this month when Trudeau agreed to greater funding of border security. Even so, the trade war has already resulted in political casualties: The tunnel bus between Windsor and Detroit has been canceled, American liquor from Republican voting-states has disappeared from shelves in British Columbia, and the Conservative Party of Canada’s once-certain victory looks less likely due to its closeness with Trump. Perhaps the Liberals will manage a 1911 in reverse by capitalizing on a resurgence in Canadian nationalism.
In Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Williams wrote that by “expanding its own economic system throughout much of the world [the United States] has made it very difficult for other nations to retain their economic independence.” When Williams wrote that in 1959, there was little if any question that Canada’s future political independence from the United States was secure. That this is no longer the case paints a stark portrait of the direction of American expansionism under the new regime.