Never For Sale

This country has spent 250 years fighting American aggression. How resistance and resilience became the heart of Canada's national identity.

- BY STEPHEN MAHER

ON JANUARY 7, DONALD TRUMP said publicly for the first time that he wanted to force Canada to become the 51st state. The president-elect had spent two months waiting to be inaugurated. He seemed to be yearning for action, to be on TV, to signal how he would lead. So he invited journalists to a gilded room in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, stood behind a podium and spoke in a way that no American president had spoken in living memory. “You get rid of the artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security,” he said. “Don’t forget: we basically protect Canada.” Trump was talking like American leaders in the 19th century, bewhiskered men who used spittoons, men who believed their republic had a mandate from God to conquer and improve territories governed by lesser peoples.

It was hard then to know how seriously to take him, so I called a former senior American official to ask what to make of it. He was rattled. “I actually think he wants the territory,” he said. His fear was contagious. An icy jolt went down my spine as he sketched out the scenario. Trump could escalate tariffs until the Canadian economy was in ruins, then make overtures to Alberta—a take-it-or-leave-it offer to tear it out of Canada.

“Why don’t you become a state?” he imagined Trump saying. “You don’t have to send billions of dollars to Ottawa anymore. Your tax rates will be lower. A dollar will be a dollar. You won't have to ask for permission to approve any pipeline, because you'll be within the United States.” Could Trump play the nasty kind of game that Putin has played on the margins of the Russian Federation—stir up trouble and then send in the troops to restore calm?