In 1973, the best-selling novel in Canada was called Ultimatum.
It opens with Prime Minister Robert Porter — a name almost too on the nose — taking a phone call from a furious American president, who’s upset about Canada limiting American access to natural gas.
“The United States has paid for its discovery, and by rights we own the stuff. We must have it, and must have it fast,” the president says.
In the end, Canada refuses to oblige, and the president announces on television that the government of Canada “is hereby dissolved,” and provinces will join the union. The novel ends with the president’s announcement that U.S. troops are landing in Canada’s airports and ordering Canadian soldiers to lay down their arms.
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The sequel, Exxoneration, features the fighting and, hilariously, the Soviet Union objecting to U.S. expansionism and sending nuclear submarines to support Canuck forces. (“This Prime Minister of ours is one tough son-of-a-bitch. His instructions to me are very simple. There is no goddamn way the Americans are going to take over Canada without one hell of a fight!” bellows Canada’s chief of defence staff.)
In fact, the theme of American invasion to get at our natural resources is a recurring one. In We Stand on Guard, a science fiction comic book published in 2015, the Americans — complete with futuristic war robots, since the series is set in the early 2100s — have invaded Canada for its water. When a young woman is informed by an American robot that she’s in unauthorized territory, it does so in both French and English.
“Your French sucks,” she says, staring down the business end of a crossbow.
The woman is rescued by a gang of resistance fighters. “Who are you guys, anyway?” she asks. “I thought the C.A.F. all got wiped out week one.”
Of course, the prospect of a Canadian invasion of Canada has also been wholeheartedly lampooned: In the 1995 film Canadian Bacon, John Candy, inspired by anti-Canadian propaganda on American television, gets caught up in a scheme to invade. Four years later, in the South Park universe, American parents incensed by lewd Canadian comedy get the U.S. government to declare war on Canada. (The musical number, Blame Canada, won an Academy Award.)
It’s ripe fodder for comedy. The serious stuff seems almost overwrought, even as the U.S. President-elect keeps making headlines — Canadians being suckers whenever we’re mentioned abroad — for talking about Canada as the 51st state. On Christmas Day, Donald Trump used his Truth Social platform to complain about Canadian taxation and refer to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.” In another post, Trump said he had told former hockey great Wayne Gretzky to run for prime minister, saying the job title would soon be “the Governor of Canada.”
As Andrew Potter writes in the introduction to George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Canadians have the “enduring conviction that the country is doomed.”
“Confederation has always seemed like a rather rickety, precarious endeavour, perpetually on the verge of fragmenting into a handful of region-states or surrendering to outright absorption or annexation by the United States,” Potter writes.
There was a time when the Canada-U.S. relationship and the possibility of annexation was deadly serious, at least in part because the United States has actually invaded Canada — or at least the land that would become Canada — on a couple occasions.
“Fear of America has been a big driver of nationalism,” said Asa McKercher, a historian at St. Francis Xavier University, in an interview.
As far back as the Revolutionary War, American rebels made it as far north as Montreal and Quebec City before being turned back, having gambled — and lost — on the premise that Quebecers would happily take up arms against their British overlords and join the Americans. In fact, the original Articles of Confederation in the United States had pre-approved Quebec for membership in the new country.
When the United States worked up its nerve to invade Canada again, this time in 1812, it was an endeavour that Thomas Jefferson, the former U.S. president, believed would be a “mere matter of marching” northwards and seizing Quebec. Of course, it didn’t pan out that way.
“A call to arms rang throughout the country, echoing from lake to river, and piercing the inmost recesses of the forest,” writes W.A. Foster, an essayist and co-founder of the Canada First movement. “How must the pulses of the young men have throbbed as they grasped the trusty rifle.”
In the end, the British torched the White House in 1814, a fact that every Canadian schoolchild ends up learning, and the Canadian territories remained outside the Americans’ grasp, while both sides continue to claim victory — or at least not defeat — to this day.
Canada wouldn’t see another American invasion again, but there were several instances that highlighted British North America’s vulnerability — and at times the United Kingdom and the United States came perilously close to war. And all this happened as writers and speakers advocated further union with the United States, often viewing it as the only possible outcome. For example, Quebec journalist Louis-Antoine Dessaulles argued, according to a collection of lectures published in 1851, that “there is no sane man who does not admit the inevitability of our merger with the United States.”
Indeed, the American revolutionary spirit, even if it didn’t manifest itself again as invasion, certainly inspired some local revolutionary fervour. When William Lyon Mackenzie led the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837, he issued a declaration of independence, obviously informed by the Americans’ own declaration. That uprising failed, and Mackenzie and his supporters decamped to Navy Island on the Niagara River and declared an independent Republic of Canada. It was bombarded into submission and Mackenzie fled to Buffalo, where he was arrested and sentenced to 18 months behind bars and a $10 fine. Decades later, Louis Riel, the Métis leader of the Red River Rebellion, sought support from U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant in his fight against the Canadian government.
“This sort of idea of separating parts of Canada off is really, really old,” says Benjamin Hoy, a historian at the University of Saskatchewan.
Between 1838 and 1839, Americans and Canadians came close to fighting over forestry rights between New Brunswick and Maine. The Pork and Beans War never reached a boil, even though the U.S. Congress authorized the mobilization of 50,000 fighting men in the event the British invaded. Similarly farcical conflicts occurred sporadically, their premises reading like a bad joke: the Pig War of 1859 resulted in a naval showdown after an American farmer shot a pig owned by an Irishman that was eating his potatoes on San Juan Island.
Throughout all of this drama, there was diplomatic tension on the west coast over where exactly the border was between British North America and the United States. At the time, Russia still controlled Alaska, and Oregon County (as the Americans called it) or the Columbia District (the British moniker) was subject to a lengthy border dispute. At various points, the Spanish and French also laid claim to the territory.
At any rate, by the time James Polk became U.S. president on an expansionist platform in 1845 — he led the U.S. into the Mexican-American War and annexed Texas — the borders demarcating British from American territory became a bit of a problem. The Americans wanted the border to be at 54 degrees and 40 minutes latitude, which would have given them control over the entire western seaboard, until butting up against Russian Alaska. The slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight” became popular during the Polk presidency, as did the phrase “manifest destiny,” championed most famously by John O’Sullivan, an essayist and future Confederate propagandist who believed the Americans had a God-given right and duty to expand republicanism to Mexico, Canada and California.
In 1846, though, the two negotiating parties settled on the 49th parallel as the northern U.S. border; the United States, already fighting Mexico, wasn’t especially keen on fighting a northern war and, despite its eventual decline over the next century, Britain was still among the most powerful nations in the world and an unappealing enemy.
Fifteen years later, when the breakaway Confederacy was fighting the Union, European powers — and many Canadians — supported the Confederacy. In 1861, Britain sent extra troops to Canada in case the Union opened a northern front, following the seizure of an American ship, the Trent, by a Union naval vessel, off the coast of Cuba. Late in the war, Confederate president Jefferson Davis sent Jacob Thompson to Canada, where, in Montreal and Toronto, he established a secret service presence to mount raids across the border into the Union. One such, the St. Albans raid in 1864, saw a score of Confederates rob banks in St. Albans, Vermont, leaving one townsperson dead and the settlement ablaze. They fled across the border and were arrested, but it prompted considerable outrage in the northern states.
The Chicago Tribune demanded the U.S. invade and “take Canada by the throat and throttle her as a St. Bernard would a poodle pup.”
That, obviously, never happened.
And three years later, Canada officially became a country.
“It’s clear after the American Civil War … that at that point, Britain can’t stop the United States and Britain — that’s sort of one of the justifications for Confederation — as Britain sort of realizes it doesn’t want to station the number of troops that would be needed,” says Hoy. “The United States at about the same point, realizes that it gets what it wants, access to natural resources, cultural influence, a stable ally, but it’s honestly just easier to get all of the things it wants without trying to annex a country.”
Even so, the paranoia — or the hope, in some cases — that Canada might be swallowed up by her larger neighbour persisted. Even as Canadian politicians debated Confederation, there were those, especially in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, who favoured joining the United States instead.
“So far as the Americans are concerned, Canada is absolute mistress of her own destiny, while she is welcome to cast in her lot with the Republic,” writes Goldwin Smith, a prolific writer, who felt Canada joining up with the United States was practically inevitable, in Canada and the Canadian Question, published in 1891.
By this point, says Hoy, the fear of the United States taking Canada by force had largely died away, to be replaced with fears of a broader cultural or economic digestion.
“As soon as that sort of fear of American military annexation dies down, there is this sense of commonality, of brotherhood, of cultural similarity, of working towards a set of goals,” says Hoy.
Of course, that led to an entirely different sense of paranoia. Sure, it was unlikely that the U.S. military was going to storm the border and take Canada by force, but by way of economic and cultural imperialism.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Canadians abandoned its fear of an American invasion, evidenced not only by its pop culture, but also by the fact that in the interwar period, the United States developed potential invasion plans — including using poison gas on Halifax — in the event of a war with the British Empire. Lt.-Col. James “Buster” Sutherland Brown, Canada’s director of military operations and intelligence, proposed in 1921 his own plan for invading the United States — including the reclamation of Canada, which was technically conquered in the War of 1812 — by way of five invasions, which would seize Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, Albany and Maine.
Still, for the past century, economics have provided ample fodder for paranoia.
In Lament for a Nation, published in 1965, George Grant writes that the “only threat to nationalism was from the South,” and that Canada, since 1960, was little more than “a northern extension of the continental economy,” with Canadian elites looking “across the border for its final authority in both politics and culture.”
“When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country,” writes Grant.
In 1988, Canada found itself gripped by a debate over free trade with the United States. A Liberal attack ad shows two diplomats, one American, one Canadian, in a shadowy meeting. The American says there’s one line getting in the way — and the video shows a pencil eraser furiously scrubbing out the 49th parallel.
“Just how much are we giving away in the Mulroney free trade deal?” the ad says.
Realistically, there is no serious, modern movement to join the United States. There are some in the Alberta separatist movement, for example, who fantasize about becoming the 51st state, but they have neither widespread political nor popular support. Even in national polling, only 13 per cent of Canadians say they would support a union with the Americans, although on the prairies that enthusiasm ratchets up to nearly one-fifth support.
A lack of popular support, though, doesn’t mean the argument hasn’t been made. Nor, for that matter, that there hasn’t been the steady integration of the continent, for example, through the continental border-security plan endorsed by former prime minister Stephen Harper and former president Barack Obama in 2011. In her 2013 book Merger of the Century, National Post columnist Diane Francis argued that Canada and the United States needed to merge, in the face of the economic threats of foreign-power state capitalism, a leaky northern border and declining economic performance. A merger, she argued, would give Canada access to the unrivalled entrepreneurial spirit of the United States and give Americans access to Canada’s natural resources.
“Ideally, if Canada and the United States combined, they would be able to cherry-pick the best policies and practices from each economy and adopt what works best for both. For instance, Canada’s banking and regulatory system would be a good match with the American work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit,” Francis writes.
In the concluding pages of Lament for a Nation, Grant writes in a way that echoes eerily in 2024, a time when a significant gap has emerged in economic performance between the United States and Canada, with Canada’s dollar trading at painful lows. It is, in Grant’s case, obviously a lament — not a proposal for the future, as Francis’s book may be described.
“In its simplest form, continentalism is the view of those who do not see what all the fuss is about,” Grant writes. “The forty-ninth parallel results in a lower standard of living for the majority to the north of it. … The disadvantages in being a branch-plant satellite rather than in having full membership in the Republic will become obvious. As the facts of our society substantiate continentalism, more people will explicitly espouse it.”
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