How Canada could take over the United States

Canadians seem polite and friendly. Don’t fall for it!

In addition to musing about purchasing Greenland, President Trump has suggested some kind of United States-Canada consolidation.

The new nation of AmeriCan. Or the United States of Everything North of the Gulf of America.

Perhaps Canada would agree to be annexed, as the Republic of Texas did. Perhaps Canada would have to be conquered. The latter might not be as easy as might sound. Those Mounties are fierce!

Trump’s idea has not met with enthusiasm in the land of Tim Hortons and Hockey Night in Canada. I would bet dollars to donuts, as my Canadian relatives say, our frozen neighbor remains sovereign.

Photo by Jason Hafso on Unsplash

But suppose for a moment the United States and Canada did conjoin.

The result would be the largest country in land area, besting Russia. Yet we’d be underpopulated compared to much of the world – incredible growth potential.

AmeriCan would be a hydrocarbon powerhouse – oil and natural gas sufficient for decades if not centuries. We could export clean natural gas, which Asian and European nations crave, as fast as it could be loaded aboard LNG tankers.

Canada is already increasing LNG exports. Joe Biden spent four years doing everything in his power to block construction of pipelines – which are despised by green dogma, though natural gas pipelines reduce global warming emissions because they allow substitution of relatively clean gas for dirty coal.

As America dithered, Canada built oil and gas pipelines in a frozen frenzy. A just-completed pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver is enabling Canada to sell to the Asian market, evading Trump tariffs, rather than to the United States via the Keystone pipeline Biden cancelled.

The one-two of Biden preventing infrastructure improvement followed by Trump imposing tariffs handed Canada the high cards in global energy markets. Ottawa should say “thank you!”

AmeriCan would be a hydropower powerhouse. Quebec generates a lot of electricity and has hydro potential not yet tapped.

In a world where freshwater supply is stressed in several regions – potentially, stressed across the Ogallala aquifer, essential to the U.S. breadbasket region -- AmeriCan would corner the global freshwater market.

We’d lead the Earth in coastline, which is deceptively important to economic success.

And U.S.-Canada tariffs would end, which would be welcome news to the economy.

All that sounds great, to Yanks at least. But what about the politics?