SAINTS PRESERVE US
The Fifty-first Column: A Canadian Thought Experiment
The news cycle in Canada of late has spun into a cyclone. The Liberal government knows its going to have to give up the shop even as a thug from Queens, NY demands protection money. The extortion The Wall Street Journal called “the dumbest trade war ever” is on hold for the length of the warranty on a shoddily made American consumer durable.
The chaos created by the only billionaire in history who bankrupted his own casino resort (if you’re going to stack the deck, it’s at least got to be full), has forced a dormant, complacent Canada to take stock of its very essence. Maybe global affairs should matter more to a middle power. Maybe we should live up to our NATO treaty obligations. Maybe the absence of free trade within our borders is inefficient. Maybe, as a trading nation, we push harder for closer ties with the European Union (a pact is in place – as yet unratified by six or seven members). With eyes wide open, maybe we defrost our relationship with China if only because the enemy of our enemy is our friend.
Shame if the shop happened to catch fire.
Der Trumpenfuhrer says his blustery existential threat, this existential angst and dread he’s generating, could all be swept away simply by Canada agreeing to join the United States of America as its fifty-first state. And to be fair, eliminating the border would, in way, virtually erase the scourge of illegal American guns in this country. I’ve devoted some thought to this worst-case scenario. It’s going to be a bit more complicated than one more star on Old Glory. The odious vulgarian could actually end up fucking himself, his party and his country with unintended consequences. But maybe, just maybe, the felon’s big imperial idea is only half-insane from a north of 49 perspective.
Canada and the United States are wealthy Western democracies with dissimilar political traditions. For my thought experiment I will assume Canada cedes its Westminster system to our neighbour’s republican model. Alaska and Hawaii were the last two states to join the Union. That was 1959. The even number matters here. Legislators at the time, partisan even then, assumed one new member would lean Blue or Democrat and the other Red or Republican. They would cancel each other out in the United States Congress.
The US Congress is like a Montreal duplex, one up and one down. The upper storey is the Senate; every American state has two elected senators. The House of Representatives is the street level unit. There states are represented by their populations, so California will have more congressional districts than Rhode Island or Delaware. Majority margins for either the Democrats or Republicans overall tend to run lean.
Canada’s awfully big, ten provinces and three territories. Unwieldy. Regionalized. Diverse. The melting pot chime of Manifest Destiny never rang true up here. And a fifty-first state, an odd outlier rife with socialists just wouldn’t do. Checks and balances. My thought experiment assumes that Canada’s northern territories would be relegated to the status of Guam or Puerto Rico, or perhaps stitched to Alaska. I’m still left with ten new states (six if Quebec finally achieves independence and the four Atlantic provinces are mashed into one), a nice round partisan number to stitch on the Stars and Stripes. But six or ten new states with an overwhelmingly progressive bent because the Liberal Party of Canada wasn’t dubbed “the natural governing party” for nothing.
Imagine twenty new US senators, maybe fourteen or sixteen of whom will be certified pinkos. Sure, gerrymander former federal ridings into congressional districts, go crazy, make some cuts. There are currently three hundred and thirty-eight seats in Canada’s House of Commons. Slash that to a lower number easily divisible by two. Still, an alarming number of freshly minted Dems and habitual libs suddenly sitting in the House of Representatives. We’d control Congress. Both chambers. And since we’re Americans, why, we could run one of our own, saved by God to be reborn in the USA, for president (not Ted Cruz).
Someone’s knocking at the door. Let us in. We’re going to burn your nice white playhouse down. From the inside this time.
Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but that will change in the coming months.
