Chris Selley: Politicians baited by Trump’s ’51st state’ trolling are ignoring credible threats

It seems ridiculous even to explain this, but America taking over Canada is 100 per cent implausible — with strong, hot gusts to impossible

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Published Jan 09, 2025  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News Channel town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 10, 2024. Photo by Carolyn Kaster /The Associated Press

Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre both responded on Tuesday to president-elect Trump’s most-bonkers-yet suggestion of annexing Canada, using “economic force.” The good news is that Canada’s presumptive next prime minister did better than the lame-swan incumbent.

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Trudeau relied on an old (though valid) talking point: “Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other’s biggest trading and security partner.”

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Poilievre (in a much longer missive) went into more specifics, notably with respect to America’s growing reliance on Canadian energy. And he effectively combined a conciliatory policy message to Trump — “we will rebuild our military and take back control of the border to secure both Canada and the U.S.” — with a positive message to Canadians, namely, that these are good ideas regardless of who’s in the White House.

Both Poilievre and Trudeau began with a show of purported strength against the annexation threat, however, and I’m not sure that was entirely wise.

Trudeau: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”

Poilievre: “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period.”

It’s a lot to ask of a political leader not to push back against a threat of literal annexation. One could argue it’s obligatory. But Trump isn’t any foreign threat; he’s a poop-disturber, first and foremost — a troll, arguably the best the world has ever seen. Watching smart people’s heads explode all over social media, I worry Canada’s political class — politicians, pundits, academics — is in essence feeding the troll: responding to bad-faith arguments from Trump, to his delight, and taking its eyes off the real economic threats the president-elect poses.

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It seems ridiculous even to explain all this, but America ever annexing Canada is 100-per-cent implausible, with strong, hot gusts to impossible. Doing it inside four years is 1,000-per-cent impossible, as Trump might put it.

The “51st state” line, which Trump himself has used, is the biggest tell. We would be the biggest state, with the most Electoral College votes. It would be a bit like bolting another California onto the union, both population-wise and temperamentally. That would be a very odd decision for any Republican president to take in earnest.

Moreover, at his Tuesday press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said he wasn’t considering using military force to take over Canada — which he hasn’t ruled out with respect to his designs on Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone. (In his first farewell address, Trump said he was “proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.” But he didn’t say anything about threatening to start wars!)

The thing is, there is no way to annex Canada except militarily — which the Unites States probably could do easily enough if it tried. Trump has suggested that a critical mass of Canadians actually want to join the union, which for one thing isn’t true (a recent Leger poll found just 13 per cent of Canadians liked the idea) and, for another, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how Canada works. We could vote “yes to joining America” by 90 per cent in a nationwide referendum tomorrow, and 25 years later we would still be bickering internally about how to make it happen.

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Again, this is all so absurdly hypothetical that it seems almost ridiculous to type. But a lot of serious people are taking it seriously, and I don’t think it’s doing us any good.

That said, I’m not sure it’s doing Trump’s agenda any good either. Polls show pride in being Canadian is at a nadir: Just 34 per cent say they’re “very proud” to be Canadian, according to an Angus Reid Institute poll published last month. You would think that might leave us vulnerable to all manner of concessions. But talk of actually being conquered by a foreign power is clearly and rightly more than enough to raise patriotic hackles across the political spectrum. That may not be a bad thing, given the state of Canadian patriotism.

The problem, of course, is that raising hackles and exploding heads is always a significant part of Trump’s agenda, whatever policy might be attached to it. Indulging him is not the right play — especially when there is so much actual misery Trump can bring down on us.

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