President Trump offered Canadians the deal of a lifetime — to join the U.S. and be welcomed as equals, as full citizens with all the rights that status entails. Canadian business would have tariff-free access to the world’s largest market. Individual Canadians would instantly be better off by replacing the weak Canadian dollar with the greenback, by getting lower taxes, lower gas costs, lower housing costs, better health care, better everything.
President Trump hasn’t made so generous an offer to anyone else. Yet instead of feeling honored, and responding in a spirit of generosity, most Canadians reacted peevishly and belligerently.
Under the cumbersome Canadian constitution, it is virtually impossible for Canada to join the U.S. in one go. But Trump can acquire Canada piecemeal — and faster than anyone ever imagined — by making the following deals with two provinces instead.
First, Trump should simultaneously invite the rich conservative province of Alberta and the poor liberal province of Newfoundland & Labrador to join the U.S. Since Canada’s Supreme Court already ruled that provinces can leave Canada via a clear referendum, the people of these two provinces would quickly snap up the dream deals that Trump can offer them, especially since so many of them love Americans and have long resented being exploited by Canada’s central provinces.
Newfoundland with its vast resources and strategic Atlantic location near Greenland would become the fourth largest U.S. state — only Alaska, California, and Texas have larger land masses.
Newfoundland, after all, generously hosted 7,000 Americans on 9-11, when dozens of planes crossing the Atlantic were diverted to Newfoundland. During World War II, when Newfoundland had autonomous status as a British colony, it hosted American military bases, leading to post-war trade relations and close personal ties through the thousands of marriages between Newfoundland lasses and American servicemen.
Fear that Newfoundland would join an economic union with the U.S., which would harm Canadian fishing interests, led to an anti-American campaign. Even then, it took two referenda and connivance on the part of the U.K. and Canada before Newfoundlanders reluctantly agreed to join Canada in 1949.
Unlike liberal Newfoundland, which would be a poor blue state if it joined the U.S., conservative Alberta, which has the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves, would be a rich red state. Alberta is so rich that it massively subsidizes the rest of Canada, yet it is also denigrated and resented by many Canadians because its wealth is based on energy resources. Canada has for years punished Alberta by blocking its ability to build energy pipelines and develop its natural resources.
Pressure today from central Canada on Alberta to bear the brunt of retaliating against U.S. tariffs by stopping its energy exports — the lifeblood of Albertans — has led to intense resentment and a revival of Alberta’s latent independence movement.
Alberta and Newfoundland are both primed for an exuberant offer from Trump, making them ready joiners. By simultaneously inviting a red and blue state to join the Union, Trump would be taking a page from President Eisenhower’s playbook, when he invited both Alaska and Hawaii to become states, thus eliminating domestic political opposition by maintaining parity between Republican and Democratic senators.
Once it becomes clear that Alberta is leaving Canada, opposition in the rest of Canada to joining the U.S. will quickly collapse. Quebec, whose separatists lost its 1995 referendum by just 1%, remains in Canada only because it is heavily subsidized by Alberta. With an end to Alberta’s subsidies, Quebec will end its stay inside Canada, anguishing only between becoming independent and taking a deal with the U.S.
The rest of Canada’s provinces — which would become geographically separated from one another by provinces that became states — would suffer no small amount of anguish. They would soon come to understand the need to seek a home under America’s embrace.
All this can be accomplished at warp speed — Alberta’s decision to leave could be evident by Christmas. By July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence — other provinces would realize the futility of making a go of it in a Canadian rump state.
President Trump could then seal the deal and fulfill America’s Manifest Destiny — the two-century-long dream of America spanning the continent, from the Gulf of America in the South to the Arctic Ocean in the North. Trump would leave office with the satisfaction of more than doubling America’s land mass and making America greater than it has ever been.
Lawrence Solomon is a columnist at Canada’s National Post.
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