In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News yesterday, President Donald Trump said he was serious about making Canada the 51st state.
“I think Canada would be much better off being the 51st state,” Trump said. “We lose $200 billion a year with Canada, and I’m not going to let that happen.”
The interview came days after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught on a hot mic saying Trump’s plans to annex Canada are “a real thing.”
Trump has previously entertained ideas about adding Canada to the United States and has jokingly called the prime minister “Gov. Trudeau.”
“I’d like to see Canada become our 51st state,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Feb. 3. “Some people say that would be a long shot. If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that they’d become a state.”
If added to the U.S., Canada would be the most populous state, with 40 million residents, just ahead of California’s 39 million. However, it may be impractical to add another state with such a large land area and population.
A solution would be to add each of Canada’s 10 provinces as separate states. Some provinces, such as Ontario, would likely lean left, while others, such as Alberta, would probably lean right.
Adding the provinces separately could add as many as 20 new senators to the congressional mix. Also, over 10% of U.S. representatives would come from the new Canadian states.
Congressional representation would also be a problem, as two Canadian provinces have smaller populations than all of the U.S. states.
Prince Edward Island, with about 175,000 residents, has less than a third of the population of Wyoming, the U.S.’s smallest state by population. The province would likely need to be added to the U.S. as a part of either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.
It is possible that Trump is trolling Canada with his talk about annexing the country. He may be trying to leverage better trade deals as he did with immigration when he threatened tariffs on Canada, Colombia, and Mexico.
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In those instances, Trump showed that he was perfectly willing to go through with the tariffs before each country reached a compromise with him.
If Trump annexed Canada, it would be, by far, the largest territorial acquisition in U.S. history, more than doubling the country’s current size. It may be a long shot, but with his push to acquire Greenland, Trump appears determined to add the first state to the Union since Hawaii in 1959.