Why Shouldn’t Canada Be the Fifty-First State?

Not quite two decades later, it seems unlikely that Donald Trump — not known for the depth of his reading or attendance at literary salons — has been inspired by Hitchens’s joke or his book on Jefferson. Nevertheless, in recent weeks, after threatening Canada with across-the-board, economy-bludgeoning tariffs of 25 percent, the president has launched a series of his own jokes about Canada becoming the fifty-first state. He has repeatedly referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor” and posted maps of North America redrawn to show Canada as part of the United States. But unlike Hitchens’ philosophical teasing, these jokes no longer appear to be just jokes. Speaking to reporters several weeks ago, Trump declined to rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. He appeared to be quite serious about incorporating Canada into the United States, albeit via the use of economic force instead of arms.

Trump often makes outrageous, internet-trollish statements, and as with his first-term threats toward North Korea of “fire and fury like the world has never seen” — which the world has still yet to see — his declarations of territorial expansion are likely just typical capricious Trumpian bluster. If there is any logic to it at all, he is likely simply trying to intimidate Ottawa into acquiescence on any number of trade, border, military spending, or drug trafficking issues. Perhaps the expansionist threat is a ploy not directed at Canada at all — or at least not uniquely — but instead, together with the Greenlandic gambit, aimed at pressing NATO members on their commitments.

Or maybe he’s actually very serious about territorial conquest in the north for personal, self-aggrandizing reasons. If Trump pulls off an acquisition on the scale of Canada — a far greater prize than the purchase of Alaska or Louisiana, or even “just” Greenland — then he goes down in history as a nation-builder, easily eclipsing anything that his great nemesis, Barack Obama, accomplished.

Whatever the case, federal and provincial leaders in Canada have started to treat his comments as potentially having real consequence. After initially ignoring Trump’s comments — with the political equivalent of nervous laughter — Canadian leaders have started to take them seriously.

In almost all cases, however, the rationale these leaders have offered as to why Canada should not be annexed by the United States has been feeble.

Canadians Are Canadian Because . . . They’re Not American?

Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters that Canada becoming the fifty-first state is “never going to happen.” He posted on X/Twitter that there is “not a snowball’s chance in Hell” that Canada would become part of the United States. But why? “We are Canadian because we’re not American.” If tautological vacuity-spouting were a sport at the Winter Olympics, Trudeau could just win the gold.

Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, the likely next prime minister following an expected spring election, merely repeated Trudeau’s warning that it “will never happen” without offering any substantive argument why not. Meanwhile, Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, who has threatened to match Trump’s proposed tariffs by cutting off energy supplied to the United States (some 60 percent of US oil imports come from Canada, as do 90 percent of its electricity imports), pushed back against annexation on Fox News. Host Jesse Watters said he found it offensive that Canadians didn’t want to be part of America, and that it should be viewed as a privilege to be taken over by the United States, “but for some reason that’s repellent to you Canadians.”

Ford, sitting in front of a Canadian and American flag with a forced laugh and smile, said gnomically, “That property’s not for sale. It’s as simple as that,” adding, “We’re proud Canadians, just like there are proud Americans.”

If Trump is serious, these statements are weak beer. We are proud to be Canadian . . . because we are proud Canadians who are not American? We must remain independent because . . . we are independent? This is not even bumper-sticker-worthy logic.

The closest any leader has come to offering a substantive rationale for Canada’s continued independence has been former Ontario Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, who told a TV Ontario panel show that annexation would endanger Canada’s social services, radically altering Canadians’ quality of life. “We would be in a fight about public health care and publicly funded education,” she said.

An odd concern, given that her own government cut some $4 billion from the very public health care system for which she professes concern. But her words prompt the question: If the United States were to adopt the exceedingly popular demand of Medicare for All, overhaul its education system to match Canada’s more equitably funded and better performing public schools, and more broadly expand its welfare state to Canadian levels, would annexation then become acceptable? Socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders seemed to think so, cheekily stating on X/Twitter, “I’m all for it,” if Canada becoming the fifty-first state means that Americans “can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50 percent less per capita on health care.”

Ordinary Canadians in man-on-the-street interviews have made similar policy-based defenses of an independent Canada, citing worries over abortion rights, America’s mass shootings, its lax gun laws compared to Canada’s much tighter regulations (that are still looser than those of most European Union member states), as well as its higher gun ownership rate (Canada’s, though lower than that of the US, is still higher than in many other developed nations). But again — if the United States reformed its gun laws and expanded reproductive rights, would a Canadian-American union suddenly be okay?

Is Canada, then, merely a set of public policies — health care, schools, a middle-of-the-road gun culture — that any country could theoretically adopt? Is there any remainder that makes Canada Canada?

From Canadian Left Nationalism to Canadian Left Self-Loathing

Socialists are supposed to be critics of nationalism. The worker has no nation, after all. We are universalists and humanists, rejecting the particularism of patriotism. All humans, regardless of where they were born or what citizenship they hold, are equally deserving of liberty and justice. But please, if Canada insists on having a national identity, could it at least come up with one that is robust enough to critique?

Jagmeet Singh, the head of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), the country’s social democrats, has said he is proud of his country and “will fight like hell to defend Canadian jobs,” sounding the most rhetorically belligerent notes of any national leader on this question. But he too has not really laid out why Canada should remain independent. Where is the straightforward left-internationalist argument that the sovereignty of other democratic polities must not be compromised?

Outside parliament, the broader left has largely remained silent in response to Trump’s aggression. This is perhaps not surprising, given the anti-Canadianism that dominates much of the liberal-left in the country, which has, in recent years, embraced rhetorical tics meant to signal decolonial bona fides — referring to “so-called Canada,” declaring “Canada is illegal,” and replacing “Canadians” with “people in Canada.” For many on the activist left, Canada —like the United States to their American counterparts — is the ne plus ultra of injustice.

Historically, Canadian conservatism has valorized the nation as a heroic project that tamed a threatening wilderness to construct a free and prosperous parliamentary democracy — while largely ignoring the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the unequal position of Quebecers, the brutal exploitation of Chinese railroad workers, the oppression of women, and the exploitation of labor more broadly. Yet much of today’s activist left simply inverts this narrative, seeing in Canada not an incomplete or contradictory project but one defined solely by injustice, as if nothing progressive ever emerged from its construction.

This marks a striking shift from the 1970s and 1980s, when the Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada — more commonly known as “the Waffle” — embraced a left-nationalist critique of American imperialism. Viewing Canada as a “branch-plant economy” subject to US control, it drew parallels between Canadian subjugation and American depredations in Cold War Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. “The major threat to Canadian survival today is American control of the Canadian economy. The major issue of our times is not national unity but national survival,” its manifesto declared. “Canada has been reduced to a resource base and consumer market within the American Empire.”

Whether in the form of self-pity or self-hatred, the Left’s conception of Canada has too often been defined by external comparison to American villainy — both real and imagined — instead of a rigorous, sui generis analysis of Canada’s own contradictions.

Ironically, the most forceful defense of Canada’s independent existence has come from Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québécois — a party of Quebec nationalism but also, crucially, of social democracy. “The most surprising thing is that there are people in Quebec and Canada who fantasize about this crazy idea,” Blanchet told the francophone news channel LCN, “and are ready to abandon the social safety net … and expose themselves to the very, very private-sector practices of the US.” Echoing Bernie Sanders’s critiques of a corrupt system where billionaires can buy elections, he added that America’s private financing of politics is “a whole other reality.”

Perhaps Blanchet’s position isn’t ironic, after all. It is not unusual to hear Quebec separatists say that while independence is their first choice, absorption into America’s rapacious capitalism is their third. Blanchet’s argument is far more developed than Liberal Kathleen Wynne’s cursory mention of the fight for public health care. Blanchet instinctively grasps that social democracy — more than any individual policy — represents a genuine step forward in the trajectory of human liberation, beyond the liberal democracy that was heroically set in motion by the American and French Revolutions.

So what is the purpose of Canada? What is its role in the grand sweep of history? Does it have one? Without quite meaning to, Blanchet provides the answer: yes, actually, it does.

Benjamin Franklin’s Unfinished Business

One Canadian political leader has bent the knee before Trump. Danielle Smith, the Tory premier of Alberta — whose province sends 4.3 million barrels of oil to the United States every day — told Ontario premier Ford to “walk back” his threat to cut off energy exports. She later warned that any such move, if coordinated by Ottawa, would “provoke a national unity crisis.” Smith also planned to attend Trump’s inauguration to applaud the man who had just threatened to erase her country, though a last-minute venue change left her watching from the Canadian embassy when her ticket was no longer valid.

Two weeks ago, she visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort alongside two fellow Canadians: Kevin O’Leary, the multimillionaire reality TV star and former federal Tory Party leadership candidate who backs Trump’s plans for a takeover, and Jordan Peterson, who this past week published an essay on the front page of the National Post — the country’s main conservative newspaper — attacking “socialist” Canada and encouraging Alberta to join the United States. O’Leary, for his part, later told Fox Business that lower taxes under US rule seemed very enticing and that “at least half of Canadians are interested.”

That number is false. A December poll found that only 13 percent of Canadians support annexation, while 82 percent oppose it. Among conservatives, support rises to 21 percent, while on the Left, opposition is strongest — just 6 percent of respondents endorsed the proposition.

However, support for American annexation is not confined to the Right. A few figures on the Left have also asked: “Wait, but why shouldn’t Canada be the fifty-first state?”

To better understand the significance of Canadian social democratic development, it is worth contrasting this question with some contrarian left-wing flirtations with Trump’s expansionism. One writer, Chris Cutrone — a Marxist whose provocations I normally appreciate — has mounted a defense of Trump’s designs on Canada in Compact magazine. In his essay, he argues that “the US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution,” echoing Trump’s declaration that the northern border (but not the southern one) is “artificially drawn.”

Cutrone, however, is not acting like some MAGA-communist cheerleader. Instead, he situates Canada’s status in a deep historical context: the original, revolutionary-era beef between the Patriots and the Loyalists, between democracy and feudal autocracy. He notes that Benjamin Franklin had, after the Revolutionary War, proposed that Britain cede Canada — then British North America — as either rightful American territory or as compensation for war damages. Later, after the Civil War, there was some discussion in Washington about annexing Canada as compensation for British support of the Confederacy.

“Canada, then, remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars,” Cutrone argues.

Annexation as Liberation

Discussing his essay on podcasts and social media, Cutrone went further, accusing Canada of supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. He also invoked the Monroe Doctrine —originally conceived to block European colonialism in the Americas but later used to justify US interference in hemispheric affairs, particularly during the Cold War — as a revolutionary doctrine, framing Trump’s expansionist rhetoric in that light. Greenland, he noted, is under Danish colonial rule and desires independence, while Canada “remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing.” By this logic, the annexation of Canada and Greenland would be an act not of imperialism but of liberation — Trump’s expansionism, rather than being colonialist, should be seen as anti-colonial, developmentalist, a necessary step in the liberation of humanity.

American journalist Matt Stoller, a trenchant critic of US oligarchy and monopoly capitalism, has also argued Trump’s designs on Canada follow a certain internal logic: “The Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland all have one thing in common. The US has to defend them and has to pay for that. Trump’s view is that if we’re going to defend them we should get something for it.” By this reasoning, however, the United States should also annex much of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, a string of countries in the Middle East, and all of the antipodes, since it also foots a large part of the bill for their defense.

Even Friedrich Engels, as far back as 1888, reached conclusions that were not so different. Reflecting on his time in Montreal and Toronto, he wrote:

It is a strange transition from the States to Canada. First one imagines that one is in Europe again, and then one thinks one is in a positively retrogressing and decaying country. Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation—the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line — and when the time comes, John Bull will say “Amen” to the matter.

Beachhead of European Feudal Perfidy?

A few things have changed since 1888.

Had the United States swallowed up Canada — still fairly backward at the time Engels was writing — it could be argued that this would have been a progressive advance. And Cutrone is certainly right to celebrate the American revolutionary heritage in contrast to the trendy anti-Americanism that dominates much of today’s left. Many Jacobin contributors have similarly worked to remind the Left of that heritage — how it extends through the righteous victory of the Union over the Confederacy and into the labor, suffrage, and civil rights struggles of the twentieth century.

American revolutionaries, together with those of France, were the catalysts of modern democracy that so many other countries now enjoy. Any picket line today is not separate from the American revolution’s demand for liberty and justice — it is its logical conclusion. Tom Paine was right to say that the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind — not America as a nation but America as that collection of Enlightenment ideals that set it on a course independent from British tyranny.

Yet much of the Left has forgotten this. Over time, it adopted a reflexive anti-Americanism born in the Cold War and resulting from Washington’s crimes in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, and beyond — an antipathy only enhanced by the Black Sites, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, and helicopter gunships of the “war on terror.” But as the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington wrote in Fragments of the Century, “If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right.” The crimes of the Cold War and the war on terror are betrayals of the democratic Enlightenment promise of America rather than its continuation.

Recognizing that democratic revolutionary heritage and its continued relevance today does not require illusions about America’s history after its revolutionary high-water mark nor about where it stands today. And — returning to the case of Canada’s historical development — it does not also require a willful ignorance that some nations have since walked further down the path of democratic Enlightenment than the United States.

It may be true that British North America and its United Empire Loyalists were “the bad guys” in 1776. But Canada did not stand still. The American and French Revolutions were an inspiration to the 1837–38 Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions that ultimately won accountable government. And even by the US Civil War and the days of the Underground Railroad, the phrases “Promised Land” or “Heaven” were code words for Canada — a country that had abolished slavery in 1807.

The accusation that Canada backed the Confederacy is an ignorant slander. It is Britain that played a devious role during the Civil War, and by then, Canada and Britain were far from synonymous. Up to 55,000 Canadian volunteers fought in that war — most of them for the Union.

Macabre Billionaire Symptoms

And so history has continued. Thanks to generations of struggle — by suffragists, trade unions, First Nations, Quebecers, and so many others — Canada has lurched along the path toward democratic Enlightenment. From the 1837–38 rebellions to the Quiet Revolution of the 1950s, which liberated Quebec from the domination of the Catholic Church, built a welfare state, and inspired civil liberties legislation in English Canada, to the broader construction of social democracy, Canada today is objectively further along that path than America. Put another way, Canada lives up to the promise of America better than America does.

It is absurd to speak of Canada today as a beachhead of European feudal perfidy that threatens American democracy.

Meanwhile, America has not stood still either. Socialists rightly recognize the heroic period of bourgeois revolution — in America, France, and Haiti and of liberal rebellions and transformations from Poland and Lithuania to Ireland, Spanish America, and Canada. But from the beginning, liberalism’s emancipatory impulses were in tension with the imperatives of market production. By the late nineteenth century, it had become clear that capitalists would block or reverse liberal advance wherever it interfered with profit maximization.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the role that the United States played in the Cold War, actively suppressing progressive popular movements and toppling socialist or even modest social democratic governments in the Third World. If anything should put paid to any notion that contemporary America represents an extension of the emancipatory impulses of 1776 and 1863, it is this history — to say nothing of the neoliberal, oligarchic corrosion of American democracy of the last four decades. And today, that corrosion has reached an almost surreal level, with the Cronenbergian interpenetration of Trump, Elon Musk, and other multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. As the liberal historian Adam Tooze put it recently in a discussion on the collapse of American hegemony, the rest of the world considers the US political system to be a laughingstock: “It’s followed as a kind of reality game show by the vast majority of the thinking public worldwide.”

Beyond the internationalist principle of noninterference in other democracies — regardless of which party holds power — it was obvious to the democratic left during the Cold War that democratic socialist governments such as that of Chile’s Salvador Allende deserved defense against American (or French or British or other First World) aggression. Not only because that was the democratic choice of their voters but also because such governments advanced the cause of socialism. The greater the global volume of democratic socialist progress, the stronger the position of socialists in countries where the Left remained weaker.

The principle is the same with the existence of trade unions — another expression of socialism. The stronger and more numerous trade unions are, the better the conditions for workers everywhere, even for those yet to unionize.

“The World Needs More Canada”

Canada, with its more emancipatory political economy — achieved through well over a century of progressive struggle — must be defended for the same reasons as any social democratic advance. When Barack Obama told the Canadian House of Commons that “the world needs more Canada,” he was surely just flattering his audience (with the aim of encouraging Ottawa to boost its military spending). But stripped of Obama’s cynical blandishment, the line is objectively true. Just as the world needs more Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway — countries where social struggles have resulted in far greater, more egalitarian human development and thus a broader and deeper generalized freedom than exists in America.

Canada’s social democratic gains set an example of what is possible elsewhere – especially in the United States. Every time Bernie Sanders tells Americans how much cheaper, fairer, and more effective health care is just across the border, he makes this contrast explicit. The numbers speak for themselves:

• Infant mortality: 5 deaths in Canada per thousand live births vs. 5.8 in the United States.
• Life expectancy: 1 years in Canada as of 2022 vs. 74.8 in the United States.
• Obesity rate: 27 percent in Canada vs. 42 percent in the United States.
• Covid-19 deaths per million people: 1,071 in Canada vs. 3,023 in the United States.

Canadians also have more equitable access to education at all levels and at lower cost, and income and wealth in general are more equitably distributed north of the forty-ninth parallel. These differences are not solely the result of progressive legislation or a larger proportion of the economy in public hands, but of a consistently stronger labor movement — the third pillar of social democracy. Thirty percent of Canadian workers are unionized, compared to only about 10 percent of their American brothers and sisters.

The stronger social democracy is in specific locations in the world, the greater the chances of social democracy everywhere. Defending an independent Canada, then, is not an anti-American position — it is a stance that emboldens American progressives in their own struggles against domination.

That said, a certain strain of American leftist — especially since the 2008 global financial crisis — has naively convinced themselves that because the United States performs so poorly on health care, education, inequality, and other socioeconomic metrics, Canada, the Nordics, and the antipodes must be utopias by comparison. Canadians not infrequently cringe at the hosannas we receive from these quarters. Canada may have achieved great things, but the country is no land of milk and honey. We too have suffered from four decades of neoliberal assault and, more recently, a left-liberal managerialism that is condescending, technocratic, and suspicious of ordinary people. And as a consequence, the country is experiencing the rise of hard-right populism too.

Imperfect but Worth Defending

Even when Bernie Sanders rightly touts the advantages of Canada’s health care system, he neglects to mention the billions in Tory cuts and Liberal neglect that have left millions of Canadians without a family doctor, facing an epidemic of clinic closures and emergency room waiting times so long that people sometimes die before they are even seen. A generation-long lack of public housing construction combined with irrational restrictions on building have produced a housing shortage that results in some of the highest housing costs in the developed world.

While economic, gender, and racial inequality are lower than in the United States, the gap in both income and wealth is steadily growing after earlier decades of decline. In particular, indigenous Canadians suffer income disparity, far lower rates of educational attainment, poorer health outcomes, and higher levels of unemployment. In addition to the housing crisis, living costs, especially related to food and transport, are bludgeoning both low-income and middle-income households.

With a few honorable exceptions, much of the New Democratic Party has retreated from the classical social productivism that democratic socialism demands — the use of industrial policy and economic planning to push for a more inclusive, sustainable economy rather than leaving markets to their own devices. In its place is a sort of NGO-centric green-tinged antidevelopment welfarism. And if the country’s social democrats are no longer interested in economic planning, why would parties to their right? Neoliberal antipathy toward planning and green-left fear of abundance allows deindustrialization to fester here as well.

Canada has never enjoyed the same level of protection of freedom of speech that America’s First Amendment provides, and — in a reversal of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s strong commitment to civil liberties — Justin Trudeau’s administration has worked hard to restrict it further. The latest example is the draconian proposed Online Harms bill, which threatens penalties ranging from house arrest and electronic surveillance to life imprisonment for hate speech.

And yet — despite these retreats and contradictions, despite funding cuts and privatizations, despite Trudeau’s woke-neoliberal condescension, managerialism, and censorship, and despite the likely incoming Tory administration of Pierre Poilievre, whose brand of anti-woke marketization promises further decline of state capacity — what remains of Canada’s social democratic gains still represents a real, qualitative advance in human development.

American annexation would threaten all of it.

Neoconservativism Redux

The argument from some contrarian American progressives in support of Trump’s push for the economic annexation of Canada can only be understood as the result of demoralization — the residue of the Millennial left’s defeat in the United States and abroad. From Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK to the collapse of Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos, as well as the rout of left parties across Europe, the hope for a revived, muscular social democracy has faltered. And if the parliamentary road to such a revival has failed, then a retreat to the horizon of the heroic era of liberalism, to the great bourgeois revolutions of America and France, becomes an alluring consolation.

Among these, retreating to the American Revolution is especially seductive. The polity it created still exists — unlike France’s revolution, whose republic is on its fifth iteration (and even that may not be long for this world). America is also plainly the most powerful country on Earth.

The trajectory of Christopher Hitchens’s political ambition is instructive here. A soixante-huitard revolutionary socialist and member of the International Socialists (originally a British Luxemburgist-Trotskyist formation that was as stridently critical of Moscow as it was of Washington), Hitchens had by the 1980s become a Labour Party–supporting democratic socialist. In the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, he remained an arch critic of the Left’s neoliberal drift — particularly of the corruption, hang-’em-high carceral racism, and misogyny of Clintonism. A gifted wordsmith, he mounted his attacks on the Democratic Leadership Council consensus of the time with tremendous, contrarian élan that won him ever more admirers across the Left.

But by then, Hitchens had abandoned all hope of socialism, like so many of his demoralized ’60s-generation peers. He no longer saw the working class as the agent of history; instead, liberal democracy itself — particularly America’s — became the only remaining force for progress, especially when compared to perfidious, sclerotic Europe. After 9/11, this led him to champion George W. Bush’s war on terror, backing not only the invasion of Iraq but also the neoconservatives rationale behind it.

Indeed, Hitchens became more neoconservative than the neocons, advocating for broader democratic transformation of the Middle East than even Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan envisioned. Meanwhile, “Old Europe” — including France, with its revolutionary heritage — demurred from what Hitchens saw as a historic, essential fight. With no prospect of a working class–led democratic socialism triumphing over both Islamist terror and Baathist autocracy, Hitchens came to see America as the sole remaining instrument of liberation. America was the last revolutionary force.

The left-wing endorsement of Trump’s menacing of Canada today follows a similar neoconservative logic to Hitchens’s case for the invasion of Iraq. It likewise retreats to a fantasia of liberal-democratic America as a heroic revolutionary force against autocracy. It does so, however, with even less justification — for Canada is already democratic, while Baathist Iraq was not. Worse still, this view ignores the social democratic advances that make Canada, at present, a more progressive society than America, and thus worthy of defense from annexation.

To state this is not anti-Americanism, nor is it to return to the parochial Canadian left-nationalism of the Waffle. On the contrary, it is a universalist position — one that wishes for America to progress along these lines too. Not merely for Medicare for All to become policy but for social democracy to emerge as a serious force within the American polity, as it has in most other developed nations.

Shop Floor to Think Tank

Recognizing the need to preserve and expand social democracy in Canada and beyond as an urgent task in an increasingly dangerous world provides an alternative to two failing strategies: liberals’ fixation on restoring an anti-populist Clintonian, neoliberal “rules-based international order” led by the American hegemon, and the new right’s American chauvinism with its performative commitments to “worker-focused policy.”

Importantly, this argument rejects the idea that “mere” social democracy is a reactionary compromise or a nationalist retreat — a way of “bailing out the system” rather than advancing toward a deeper, international socialism with far greater economic planning. Instead, it affirms that social democracy is an unavoidable stage in that very struggle.

But this argument does also require a recognition that the official parties of social democracy — both in Canada and around the world — have often been poor stewards of their impressive postwar legacy. Over recent decades, these parties have embraced neoliberal-lite economic policies laced with a condescending, technocratic managerialism. Social democratic parties have shifted away from their historic base of industrial and resource-sector workers and their unions, instead prioritizing urban professionals, public sector employees, and foundation-supported NGOs.

The result has been a precipitous secular decline in support throughout the West. A 2020 study of social democratic electoral results across thirty-one countries over the last one hundred years finds a steady decline in popular support for such parties since the 1980s. If this decline continues at the same rate, social democracy as an electoral phenomenon could cease to exist within the next decade. Meanwhile, leadership within these parties is no longer drawn from workers who have been sent as representatives from the shop floor but instead from professionals who have never held jobs outside of formal politics.

Far-left parties in Europe, despite their rejection of neoliberalism, suffer from an even greater detachment from the working class than the social democrats. Their suite of policies is tailored to the niche priorities of the NGO sector, making them even less representative of workers. Although they experienced a brief flush of success following the global financial crisis, many of these parties have collapsed and risk disappearing from parliaments entirely.

The parliamentary left, then, is intellectually and organizationally exhausted. Canada is no exception. While the NDP remains a powerful force at the provincial level, it has never formed a government federally and has not escaped this wider crisis of social democracy.

A North American Federation

Defending Canada against American aggression requires more than just responding robustly to Trump’s tariffs and reaffirming Canadian independence. It demands a renewed commitment to strengthening social democracy — not just in Canada but in solidarity with those in Mexico currently working to construct their own social democracy, a still fragile endeavor that must also be defended against Trumpian depredations.

This means a revived commitment to social productivism and the working class and a turn away from the metropolitan managerialism so many find condescending and unfair. Concretely, this requires:

• Expanding state capacity to shepherd the economy through industrial policy and develop the productive forces;
• Strengthening and expanding trade unions and cooperatives to democratize the workplace;
• Lowering the cost of living through strategic price controls, regulation, and spending interventions;
• Revitalizing and expanding infrastructure, particularly for the clean energy transition;
• Developing our bounty of natural resources responsibly, ensuring they serve the public good — but absolutely developing them.

Success across these areas would generate substantial revenues for social programs, expand an egalitarian prosperity, provide proof of the superiority of democratic management of the economy, and build the coalition necessary for further democratic control.

At some point, however, development of the productive forces will require a deeper integration of economies across borders — ultimately the integration of smaller states into larger state formations as production becomes increasingly socialized. The kernel of truth to the Trumpian claim that Canada would benefit from American annexation is that Canada’s small population and vast territory limits its development of resources and infrastructure. In a globalized world, capital flight and economic sabotage are constant threats to social programs, progressive taxation, public spending, and ultimately democratic decision-making. The smaller a national economy, the greater are such threats. As humanity develops and our world integrates, we will increasingly confront challenges that demand cross-border action, from pandemics to climate change.

And so somewhere down the road (however much at odds this may appear to be with predictions of a burgeoning multipolar world and ascendency of protectionism and national chauvinism), it may indeed make sense for Canada and America — and ultimately Mexico and the rest of the continent — to integrate into a single political entity. But for this to enhance Canadian social democracy — and social democracy more broadly — it must first emerge as a powerful force in the United States. Indeed, there is probably nothing more important for the liberation of humanity than for social democracy to thrive in America. And for now, that development depends upon the existence of a thriving social democracy in an independent Canada, while Canadian unions work ever more closely with their comrades across the border, with common organizing and bargaining strategies, to exert greater pressure on employers with continental supply chains.

Any future integration, if it is to be democratic, cannot entail the subsumption of Canada, Mexico and others to US control. Instead, it would require the emergence of a new, continental political entity — accountable to its electorates. Trump and his ilk would never accept such an arrangement, which would require the submission of the United States to a higher level of democracy — to say nothing of requiring the recognition of Spanish and French as official languages alongside English.

Rather than the rest of North America becoming vassal subjects of Washington, such a union would mean the United States itself becoming just one province within a North American federation — an idea wholly anathema to MAGA expansionists.

The True North Must Stay Strong and Free

Over time, Canada has transformed itself from a reactionary redoubt of British counter-Enlightenment autocracy into a polity that — despite setbacks, retreats, and the neoliberal managerialism of the last forty years — has become steadily more democratic, egalitarian, and prosperous.

The national story that Canadians are taught in school — of a country built by adventurers, explorers, and navigators, by coureurs des bois and railroad-builders who spanned an implacable but beautiful terrain; of daring First Nations pioneers who peopled the Americas by setting first what is now Canada’s west coast; of a progressive entwining of English and French and indigenous peoples and, later, many other cultures — was never false. It was simply incomplete. The story needed correction, not abandonment.

The Canadian narrative now includes recognition of dark episodes of cultural erasure, of land theft, of inequality, oppression, and exploitation — but also the story of how, through struggle, we have transformed ourselves into a land of solidarity and welcome. Canada is a civic nation, not an ethnic one — where anyone who upholds democratic Enlightenment principles can be part of it, regardless of race, religion, or cultural background. Of course, Canada still has far to go and many more injustices to correct. Building a stronger social democracy remains the best path to doing so.

As the climate warms and the pole melts, a new Great Game is unfolding in the North over control of the Northwest Passage and a colossal bounty of natural resources. Canadians have only recently begun to wake up to the ways in which Chinese and Russian autocracies are infringing our democratic sovereignty in the Arctic — and now, it appears, we are being squeezed from our south as well.

We must stand on guard against them all.

What is the purpose of Canada? Trump’s threats — of annexation, of economic blackmail — force us to confront that question. To misquote Thomas Paine, the cause of Canada is now, in great measure, the cause of all mankind.