OPINION
Canada already is America’s 51st state
And that is thanks to a political elite that did not heed prescient warnings.
Andrew Mitrovica
Al Jazeera columnist
Published On 26 Feb 202526 Feb 2025
Flags wave in the wind near the Ambassador Bridge which connects Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and Detroit, Michigan, the US on February 4, 2025 [Carlos Osorio/Reuters]
For many Canadians, a thrilling ice hockey game turned out to be an exhilarating antidote to an unforgiving winter.
More than that – as a subdued Canadian coach Jon Cooper told reporters after Canada’s best hockey players beat America’s best hockey players in overtime last week – the beleaguered country “needed a win”.
Cooper wasn’t asked nor did he elaborate on why Canada had to prevail.
He didn’t have to.
The reasons were plain to the millions of Canadians who leapt, I reckon, with a mixture of joy and relief when the world’s most gifted hockey player, Connor McDavid, potted the goal that sent his team and a grateful nation into a happy frenzy.
For weeks, a blustering US President Donald Trump has taunted Canada and its prime minister. He has referred to a proud people and land as America’s would-be 51st state and Justin Trudeau as its “governor”.
Trump’s antics and threats have triggered a surge of pride among usually reserved Canadians about their beloved home and worry for its uncertain future.
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And the trash-talking leader of Canada’s “dearest” and “closest” ally has proven that most politicians and corporate-hugging columnists have the foresight of Mr Magoo.
Like the doddering, shortsighted, cartoon character, a host of free-trade-adoring politicos and polemicists refused to see or heed the warnings sounded in the 20th century about the existential risks of tying Canada more tightly into the dominant US economy in the 21st century.
It is a remarkable sight to watch, hear, and read Canada’s myopic “intelligentsia” drape themselves in the Maple Leaf while urging the country to “buy Canadian” and fashion other systemic and structural ways to try, belatedly, to curb its dependency on the United States to stave off becoming – officially – America’s 51st state.
It is a remarkable sight because, since the early 1980s, the reactionary elites have devoted – without hesitation or regret – their considerable powers and influence to backing every calculated step towards Canada morphing, in effect, into America’s 51st state – economically, culturally, militarily, and diplomatically.
The beaming poster boy for this blatant hypocrisy is Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, who, by conviction and temperament, was all for Donald Trump before he was against him.
In a rare moment of sincerity, Ford – the pretend “populist” anointed “Captain Canada” by a gullible and easily impressed establishment press – admitted that he had wanted the havoc-wreaking Trump to return to the White House.
A crystal ball wasn’t necessary to picture that, given the right conditions, a resource-hungry commander-in-chief with hegemonic aspirations would eventually occupy the Oval Office and attract like-minded acolytes in Canada.
In the early 1980s, I was a lowly undergraduate political science student, studying at the University of Toronto.
One of my professors was the late and renowned Canadian political economist, Stephen Clarkson.
Professor Clarkson was a brilliant teacher and thinker who thought and wrote a lot about Canada’s past, present, and the turbulent waters the country was heading into at that pivotal time.
I was among the lucky stable of Clarkson’s research assistants when he embarked on writing a book about the perils that the brewing prospects of a free trade deal between Ottawa and Washington – championed by US President Ronald Reagan – posed to Canada’s sovereignty.
The book published in 1982 and titled, Canada and the Reagan Challenge, was, at once, a sober rebuttal to the legion of giddy continentalists who were convinced that Canada should deepen its already inexorable links to the United States, as well as a flare that raised the alarm about the country’s fast waning ability to exert any tangible measure of independence at home and abroad.
While Clarkson was a nationalist, he was also a realist. He knew that, by virtue of geography and history, Canada and America were bound to one another.
Still, he understood the urgent imperative for Canada to look beyond the immediate horizon to broaden trade in existing and emerging markets outside the United States as a means to diversify its export and import policies and, as a result, reduce America’s gravitational pull.
Clarkson’s prescient cautions were dismissed by a smug gallery of “free-trade” apostles as the anachronistic, anti-American “spleen bursts” of an academically trained ostrich opposed to prosperity.
So, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated a comprehensive free-trade deal with Reagan in 1988 – much of Parliament and the press trumpeted the agreement as a victory of commerce over silly, outdated notions of Canadian autonomy.
The 1988 federal election was fought over the potential consequences for Canada of the Mulroney-Reagan pact.
In a televised debate, then Liberal leader, John Turner, famously challenged Mulroney – who claimed, absurdly, that the deal could be “cancelled” at any time.
“With one signature of a pen,” Turner thundered, “you’ve … thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States because political independence is sure to follow.”
Turner’s chest-thumping performance was just that – a performance. The Liberal Party’s opposition to the Mulroney-brokered free-trade accord was a rhetorical pantomime.
Soon enough, Liberal prime ministers were singing their own fulsome praises of the deal and inviting Mexico to join the continent-wide arrangement consecrated by the smiling, hand-holding “Three Amigos”.
Fast forward to February 2025 and Professor Clarkson’s admonitions and reservations from more than four decades ago have come to fruition.
An emboldened US president appears intent on annexing Canada by economic coercion and, given the policy of almost unfettered integration pursued by a succession of Liberal and Conservative governments – and endorsed by starry-eyed editorial writers – Trump has the levers and leverage to do it.
Suddenly, Clarkson’s critics – inside and outside amnesiac newsrooms and capital cities – are rushing to adopt his “silly, outdated” prescriptions to preserve the nation’s phantom sovereignty and outdo one another as standing on guard for thee – Canada, that is.
Their epiphanies are 40 years too late.
Canada has, by their deliberate design, long been America’s eager, “open for business” vassal.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance
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Andrew Mitrovica
Al Jazeera columnist
Andrew Mitrovica is an Al Jazeera columnist based in Toronto.
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