Sorry, Mark Carney. America doesn’t need your workshy, defenceless country

 “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country”, declared Mark Carney in his victory speech, after Canada’s general election this week delivered his Liberal Party a plurality of seats in parliament. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us”, Carney continued, promising that Trump’s oft-repeated plans to absorb Canada as America’s 51st state are “never, ever going to happen”.

Trump’s apparent designs on Canada, which appeared to begin with a social media post calling Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau “governor Trudeau”, weighed heavily on the country’s election. The Conservatives still polled their best results since the 1980s, and Carney will have to lead a minority government, but the spectacle of a foreign leader looming so decisively over the elections of a major democracy is Ruritanian to the point of comedy.

Next week’s meeting between Carney and Trump at the White House could well be an awkward affair.

But Canadian statehood might not be such a great idea for our home and native land. Doubling the size of the country is not unknown in the annals of American history. Thomas Jefferson did it in one vast real estate deal in 1803, when he purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France. That was before the rest of the American West came into US ownership via settlement, conquest, annexation, and purchase.

Absorbing Canada would double the amount of territory America would have to defend, however, while only increasing its population by about 12 per cent. Canada’s military contribution would be even smaller. According to the global firepower index, America has almost 20 times the number of active duty servicemen that Canada deploys and spends about 22 times more on its military budget. Canada, long a beneficiary of America’s leading role in both Nato and North American continental defence, ranks roughly on par with Argentina and Algeria.

With extended Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coastlines, and vastly extended proximity to Russian and Chinese forays in those regions, a supersized America would have to stretch its existing resources to stand on guard with relatively little help from its new citizens.

It would also face the financial burden of having to care for them. Canada’s economy is in the doldrums of a long-term economic slump, with cost of living, housing affordability, and opportunities for financial advancement fading for younger Canadians. Election polling suggested that their glowing hearts cared far more about improving their lives and prospects than electing another Liberal government with little to recommend it beyond a jingoistic promise to stand up to Trump.

Since 2010, Canadian growth has languished at European levels, averaging at about 1.6 per cent annually, compared to over 2 per cent for the United States, with nothing even close to US levels of high-tech innovation. Canada’s unemployment rate sits stubbornly at 6.7 per cent, compared to 4.2 per cent for Americans. The mercy mission of taking over Canada’s flagging economy would mean a disproportionately higher number of welfare payments going out to our new fellow citizens, with likely more to come as Canada’s expensive social services are harmonised with American policies and priorities.

For Trump, adding Canada’s politics anywhere outside of staunchly conservative Alberta would also be a disaster. As the election results revealed, Canadian voters skew considerably to the Left of their American counterparts. This is the case even within its Conservative Party, which claims to be a “big tent” accommodating both national populists and so-called “Red Tories”, who – in line with the British rather than the American political concept of “Red” – lean far enough Left on economic and social issues that they would fit more comfortably within the US Democratic Party than among Republicans.

If Canada were to enter the US as one large state, in other words, it would almost certainly elect Democrats or politicians aligned with Democrats to the expanded US Congress. That would mean two more Democratic senators in Washington. Matters would be even worse in the House of Representatives, where at current levels there would be one new congressman for roughly every 780,000 Canadians, or at least 51 new legislators, most if not all of whom would also likely be Democrats or Democrat-aligned. In the tight congressional balance Republicans now face, it would be like adding a second California, whose population is of roughly equal size.

Trump could be having an extended joke that has seriously unnerved America’s northern neighbours. But he may want to limit his expansionist goals to Greenland and Panama.