Allan:
"How can the United States and Canada merge to form one greater nation?"
They can’t. Not ever.
Martin Fowler, being from North Carolina, you may not be familiar with the fact that Canada is a long set of compromises so that English-speakers and French speakers could share a polity. The citizens of the United States would never make those compromises, such as official bilingualism in English and French, and so that’s a non-starter.
Second, you may not know the difference in our cultures, expressed in part by very different laws, is felt very deeply by Canadians. There’s no chance that we’d accept being absorbed by a much larger population with (in our opinion) regressive laws on guns, mass incarceration, private prisons, a health insurance system that leaves millions of people without health care, the death penalty, restrictive abortion laws, and so on.
Beyond the laws, Canadians see the United States as a country with deep social problems that we do not share, though we have problems enough of our own. To name one, mass killings by white supremacists aren’t a recurring feature of Canadian life.
Finally, there are political culture, history, and identity. Many of those English-speakers whom you imagine as potential Americans are descendants of residents of the thirteen colonies who left their lands and homes rather than become Americans. They rejected your reality and substituted their own. That’s our founding myth.
There have been two wars in which the militias of what is now Canada fought off American armies set on annexation. Much of Canadian history is one strategy after another to make sure that Canada keeps visibly separate from the United States.
Because we are not, and do not want to be American.
Ask yourself, would you be willing to become Canadian? Have a parliament and a monarch and a government in Ottawa and the Canadian constitution and Supreme Court? Give up your national anthem?
No, I didn’t think you would. Why would you expect Canadians to do the equivalent?
Garret Jones
