Trump is not the first American to covet Canada

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/02/2025 (268 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: there is absolutely no reason for U.S. President Donald Trump to levy a 25 per cent tariff on Canada and start a trade war. There is no fentanyl crisis at the U.S.-Canada border and the so-called U.S. trade deficit of $US64.3 billion in goods with Canada is misconstrued fiction.

As for Trump’s musings of Canada becoming the 51st state, that, too, seems absurd, despite warnings by political commentators that we should take the threat seriously.

The fact is that Trump is not the first, nor likely last, American political leader to covet Canada.

Bigger in size, wealthier, and with a much larger population, it seemed to Americans going all the way back to the end of the American Revolution in 1783 that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. occupied all of North America. Former president Thomas Jefferson predicted that it would become a reality at the start of the War of 1812 (1812 to 1815). He told a Philadelphia newspaper editor that “the acquisition of Canada … will be a mere matter of marching.” Except the conflict between the Americans and the British ended in a stalemate.

Thereafter, the U.S. expanded across the continent and south to Mexico, while in 1867 John A. Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation maintained control of the British colonies, Quebec, and with a national railway extended Canada to British Columbia.

During the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), the American unionists in the north were more than a little annoyed that agents of the southern Confederacy found sympathy for their cause among Canadians. Once the war ended and the Union Army was at its peak, annexation of Canada again seemed possible. As a first step, in 1867, a few months before Confederation was celebrated on July 1, the U.S. secretary of state, William H. Seward finalized a deal with the Russian Empire in which the U.S. acquired Alaska for US$7.2 million (about US$148 million today).

Still, that did not lead to a U.S. takeover of Canada. In advice that resonates to the present day, Lord Kimberly, the British colonial secretary, told Sir John Young, Canada’s governor general, in 1870, that, “When you have to deal with a powerful and unreasonable nation such as (the U.S.) … the first requisite is to keep one’s temper.”

Macdonald and his successors heeded those words and, in the decades that followed, the Americans were somewhat more respectful of Canadian sovereignty, though they still harboured the same dream. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I am 60,” Theodore Roosevelt, who became president after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, commented to Sen. Mark Hanna.

Roosevelt, who travelled throughout Canada, liked the country and its citizens, who he viewed as nearly identical to Americans. A believer in eugenics and the racial superiority of white men, Roosevelt felt that Canadians would want to join the U.S. because the U.S. was more advanced as a civilization.

Annexing Canada became a public and contentious issue in 1911 following negotiations for a reciprocity agreement (partial free trade) between Republican president William Howard Taft and Liberal prime minister Wilfrid Laurier. The deal was signed in January 1911 and many U.S. politicians saw it as the first step to America’s acquisition of Canada.

“I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole,” declared Champ Clark, the new Democratic speaker in the House of Representatives. Another congressman added: “Be not deceived. When we go into a country and get control of it, we take it.”

At the time, such jingoistic statements were received in Canada no different than Trump’s menacing comments have been.

And just as Canadians recently booed the U.S. national anthem at NHL games, Canadians in 1911 booed the American flag and insulted Americans visiting Canada. Conservative newspapers ominously warned that “reciprocity was the first step to annexation”; 77 years later, during the federal election of 1988, Liberal party leader John Turner offered the same foreboding assessment about the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement.

In a reversal of the current situation, Canadian businessmen in 1911 — including many Liberal party supporters — refused to give up the protectionist tariffs that supported their enterprises and denounced the reciprocity agreement as an existential threat to Canada’s future. They helped defeat Laurier and his government and killed the agreement, which even Taft privately conceded would eventually have made Canada “an adjunct of the United States.”

Trump’s caustic comments, too, have rallied Canadians to defend the country. As Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said recently in an interview on Fox News: “We are not the 51st state, we are a sovereign independent country. Our leader deserves to be treated with respect and we deserve to be treated with respect and that’s the way we want to proceed.”

It is highly doubtful that such tough and sensible talk will make one iota of difference in dissuading Trump’s grand plan for a greater America. But some things need to be said out loud — as long as you keep your temper.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.