U.S. President Donald Trump has a talent for stirring the pot, and he’s done so in two countries with repeated suggestions that Canada should become the 51st American state. Of course, making Canada one state is hardly fair — each province should get its own star on the flag if we’re going to move in that direction. But there’s no good reason to go down that path at all, given most Canadians’ rejection of the idea, and the havoc it would play with the fraught political balance in the United States. Besides, it’s likely that both Canada and the U.S are too big and too centralized as it is.
What constitutes the “right” size for a country is a question that intrigues scholars. The answer, as you might imagine, is that it depends on what you want. Large countries can work if they’re decentralized and have relatively hands-off governments; smaller ones have greater cohesion and can get away with being more centralized, especially if their populations are relatively homogeneous.
In their 2002 paper The Size of Countries: does it matter?, the late Harvard University economist Alberto Alesina pointed out that, “as countries become larger, diversity of preferences, culture, language, ‘identity’ of their population increases.” That inevitably means people want different and often irreconcilable things from government in terms of laws, policies, and relations between individuals and the state. “As heterogeneity increases, then, more and more individuals or regions will be less satisfied by the central government policies.”
Separately, Mercatus Center economist Arnold Kling observed in 2022 that “the best governed polities tend to be about the size of Switzerland,” which has a population of roughly nine million. Even there, much policy is administered at the canton level under the country’s federal system. Despite America’s problems, he emphasizes, it’s the only halfway decently governed country among the 10 most-populous countries. “The other nine are governed so badly that you should be grateful to be here.”
Alesina repeatedly examined the issue of country size in numerous studies. With Brown University’s Enrico Spolaore he expanded that 2002 paper into the book, The Size of Nations. His work revealed that small countries can thrive so long as they work in comparative harmony with other countries. “In a world of free trade and global markets, even relatively small cultural, linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from forming small and homogeneous political jurisdictions,” Alesina wrote with Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg in a 1997 paper. In the absence of free trade, larger countries benefit from their sizeable internal markets.
Smaller countries with relatively homogeneous populations also are less likely than larger, heterogeneous countries to have big internal disputes over laws and policies. That leads to less political friction and, as it turns out, bigger governments providing more services because people generally agree on what should be provided.
David Leonhardt of The New York Times touched on that subject this week while examining why Denmark’s Social Democrats enjoy success when the political left is in disarray in many western nations. Mette Frederiksen, prime minister of the country of six million, told him: “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come.” Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” Her party has embraced immigration restrictions to keep the country rather homogeneous.
By contrast, countries like the United States and (to an extent) Canada, with populations drawn from diverse immigrant groups, tend to be more individualistic. That’s because people of varying backgrounds want very different things and have difficulty agreeing on a set of top-down programs and policies.
Most progressives won’t want to admit it, but their best shot at implementing cradle-to-grave welfare systems is in small ethno-states.
Obviously, larger countries can function. But more tradeoffs are required. Pointing to Canada and Quebec as an example in 2005, economist David Friedman, then of Santa Clara University, argued that central governments sometimes have to bribe separatists to stay in a country “thus continuing to hold down the cost of public goods while compensating those at the periphery for having to pay for public goods only imperfectly suited to their preferences.”
Kling pointed out that decentralization can help larger states to function much more efficiently, basically simulating some of the advantages of smaller countries. In the case of the U.S. “the Federal government’s role in areas like transportation and public health could be much reduced and far less heavy-handed than it is today.” Many of those federal functions could be transferred to states and localities or left to the preferences of individuals. “One can hope that the government would do a few things well, rather flailing at many problems unsuccessfully.”
So, should Canada become part of a much larger United States of America? According to surveys, overwhelming numbers of Canadians aren’t interested in the idea. An equally sizeable majority of Americans say it should be up to Canadians, and a plurality in the U.S. oppose the idea, anyway. The prospect of whatever Canadians in Congress would do to the tense political climate may have something to do with that. So, the whole scheme is probably dead on arrival, no matter how much Trump likes tweaking Justin Trudeau.
But it’s also a bad idea. If researchers are right, the U.S., at over 340 million people, and Canada, at over 40 million, are already well past the size of easy governance. Years of political polarization, with people sorting themselves by political views and increasingly flirting with political violence, support that point in the case of the United States. Canada seems a bit better glued together — at least until Quebec’s separatist movement heats up again. Joining the two countries together would just create more challenges.
No matter their existing political problems, the U.S. and Canada have already beaten the odds by being stable-ish, relatively well-functioning liberal democracies at their existing size. Combining the two into one super-state would play with fate in ways unlikely to end well. It would likely result in much more internal conflict unless the resulting super-state dramatically decentralized power down to the local level and to individuals. And politicians are rarely eager to surrender authority.
Canada and the U.S. should remain neighbours — friendly, free-trading neighbours.
National Post