America and Canada are extremely close economically, culturally and politically. The US and Canada are far and away each other’s largest trade partners, accounting for almost 7 times the total trade of Canada’s next largest partner, the EU. 51.9% of foreign owned companies based in Canada are American owned. On top of this, Canada is demographically dwarfed by its southern neighbour, whose population share a common linguistic and cultural base. This demographic gap has prompted the Canadian government to pursue a natalist policy goal of achieving a population of 100 million people by the end of the century, likely a project pursued by Canada’s national bourgeoisie in an effort to prevent themselves from being subsumed by the juggernaut to the south.
Two previous Canadian prime ministers have in the past considered pursuing political union with the US, who would stand to benefit enormously from Canada’s substantial natural resources and strategic position in the North. Annexation of Canada would likewise benefit the American state by eliminating the largest land border in the world, administration of which currently costs the Canadian state 1.5% of its GDP. Moreover, this would finally connect America’s strategically important territory of Alaska to the US’ territorial mainland and thus render continental north America a single contiguous political territory, more easily administered and defended.
With all this in mind, do you think that America is likely to integrate Canada into its territory in the future? If so, long do you suspect it will take for this to occur? What implications would such an enormous development have for the international communist movement?
I feel like the United States has little to gain from such a union that they don’t already have. If anything I would say politically we are moving further away from such a union being desired or possible. For example, it used to be you could travel across the border with only a driver’s license or ID card, however you now require a passport.
The US already has access essentially to whatever resources or labor capabilities Canada has. They are able to push us around politically too, as exemplified by the Meng Wangzhou fiasco. I don’t think it makes much sense economically or politically for them to annex Canada.
I also believe there would be very significant pushback from most of Canada on such a union as well. The last thing people here would want are even less barriers for US capital to swallow up our resources, industries and real estate. The working class would have little to gain and most of the national bourgeoisie would have even less to gain.
In an EU style relationship I’d wager there’d either be millions of “medical tourists” fleeing to Canada nigh immediately and clogging up that bureaucratic nightmare of a healthcare system up even more, the U.S. would demand that Canada privatize its healthcare much more akin to the U.S. standard, or Canada would implement price-gouging for Amerikan citizens.
Yes, unfortunately while Canadians brag about our healthcare, they still complain about it and then vote for people who purposefully cut healthcare funding to manufacture a crisis to convince the population that we need privatization.
It would be an easier fix if we focused funding on our healthcare systems (and education, housing, etc.) rather than prioritizing the oil industry and corpos. But too many Canadians are paranoid about that.