A merger with the U.S. would be a great leap backwards for Canada

My relations with my National Post colleague Diane Francis have had their ups and downs over three decades or so. We have gotten over some rough patches, including a period of a couple of years when her chief public conversational gambit seemed to be the moral imperative that I be sent to prison. But we had put that behind us well before I was, in fact, to her apparent regret, actually sent to prison, and our relations have been fine for years. She is a very nice person and often an interesting business writer. And I have enjoyed reading her recently published book about a federal union between Canada and the United States, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. I don't agree with her conclusion, but neither do I recoil with horror at the idea and tremble with patriotic loathing and snarl "annexationist" at her as if it were the ultimate condition of moral turpitude.

I was for a time reviled in those terms by some of the traditional, leftist Canadian nationalists, though I was never an annexationist myself. After many years of fighting the very good fight with the Quebec separatists, I made the point that if Quebec prevailed with "sovereignty association," and the rest of Canada was sorting out what to do next in national terms, a connection with the United States would be a good deal more appetizing than the fairy tale being peddled to the nationalist voters of Quebec by René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and ultimately Lucien Bouchard: essentially a sovereign Quebec still receiving transfer payments from English Canada and basking in the full faith and credit of the Canadian treasury. Rarely has such a flagrant attempt to sell the concept of consuming a rich cake and still having it before you, got so far with a serious democratic electorate as did the two Quebec independence referendum questions of 1980 and 1995.

Diane Francis makes a good, as she writes, "metric" case for a merger of Canada and the United States, which would put together two G-7 countries (I do not accept the legitimacy of Russia's presence in the group to make it G-8). Such a merger, as she describes and titles it, would unite two immense national sources of natural resources, one of them the greatest or second greatest consumer of resources and raw materials in the world. In strategic-resource terms, the United States would be a born-again country, acquiring a well-educated, relatively law-abiding addition of up to 34-million people. But it won't work as a merger, nor on the economic lines Diane sketches out.

Under one of the "merger" options presented in her book, Canada would be paid $16.94 trillion, divided up among all of its citizens on a basis weighted to their individual years of residency in Canada (all Canadians would receive $12,360 for every year they had resided in Canada). It is an interesting idea (and an interesting read): the ultimate monetization of nationality and the reduction to a mere, if unprecedentedly large, commercialization of nationhood. On its face, it illustrates both the sagacity of Canadians in building up a great national asset, and the ravages of inflation (consider that when the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, the price was only $7-million.)

There are three problems with Diane's merger plan: The Americans won't pay; the Canadians won't accept; and you can't have a partial takeover — i.e. some Canadians selling their interest in the national patrimony to the United States while the others do not. Moreover, Quebec can't sign onto any such thing or they are buying into fast-track cultural assimilation, like the French-Canadians who moved to New England between the 1840's and World War I in large numbers (the parents of writer Jack Kerouac, for example). The French Canadians have been nothing if not tenacious of their culture; they will not get any worthwhile guaranties of the status of French, other than for a very transitional period, from a country that will then be 2% French-speaking, 7% Spanish-speaking, and 91% English-speaking.

The United States started with about a million square miles in the 13 Colonies and adjoining territory to the west; added roughly a million more square miles with the Louisiana Purchase by Jefferson from Napoleon in 1803, and over a million more square miles the Americans took from Mexico in 1846. Apart from $10-million dollars for 30,000 square miles around Tucson, Arizona in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, and Alaska, the United States doesn't pay for territory or populations. It assumes that the people involved are glad to become Americans, and that often has been the case as that country has expanded.

© 2024 Conrad Black