Amid repeated pledges by U.S. president-elect Donald Trump to annex Canada, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has jokingly resurrected a decades-old proposal for British Columbia to form Cascadia, an independent nation with the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon and Washington.
She first suggested California join Canada, before mentioning Cascadia.
“You think we want to be the 51st state? Nah. Maybe California would like to be the 11th province. How about it? California, Oregon, Washington,” she said.
“Have we got a deal for you; free health care. Universal free health care. No more one-year-olds who suddenly fall off the Medicaid list and their parents are in the news because they’re trying to do a GoFundMe to get their daughter to a doctor,” May told a Parliament Hill press availability last week.
She also pledged “safer streets,” “strict gun laws” and free abortions, and said if the United States allowed the secession of its West Coast it would “get rid of all these states that always vote democrat.”
The idea of an independent “Cascadia” has been dwelling on the fringes of B.C. politics for decades, with the Cascadia flag being a not-uncommon sight for car bumpers on both sides of the border.
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The basic idea of Cascadia is to calve off B.C., Washington and Oregon to form a super-rich hyper-progressive enviro-state. May didn’t go into detail on the Cascadia movement or its proposed outlines, but said that many “academic papers” had been written on the topic.
Awkwardly, given her health-care pledges, May’s home province of B.C. was just forced to inaugurate a program of sending cancer patients for treatment in Washington State, as wait times had become dangerously high within B.C. hospitals.
But her promises of safer streets and stricter gun laws hold water; despite a recent uptick, the B.C. homicide rate is about half that of Washington or Oregon.
As for guns, Oregon permits both concealed-carry and open-carry of handguns — the latter doesn’t even require a permit. In Canada, the carrying of a handgun anywhere outside of a licensed range is grounds for seizure by the RCMP, and the suspension of the owner’s gun licence.