US media seems to be sanewashing the annexation threats as a "joke", but we take it very seriously up here. Your president has said many times that it's not a joke. Believe him.
Does JD Vance on Greenland count?
Kristi Noem went to a library that straddles the border and repeatedly stepped back and forth, saying "51st state" every time she stepped into Canada: https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/dhs-secretary-kristi...
Elon Musk called Canada "not a country". He deleted it but it was a real tweet: https://x.com/essenviews/status/1894270080206135705
This was in the WSJ on March 24th in an article about Canadian travel:
>"The administration has held firm on its messaging. “Canadians will no longer have to worry about the inconveniences of international travel when they become American citizens as residents of our cherished 51st state,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said."
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/trump-canada-vacation-t...
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An administration official has a new comment more or less on a daily basis about how it's inevitable they'll take us over.
Canadians were always insecure, the recent events just exacerbated it and brought it to the fore. Canadians have to have a hard look at themselves, they overall fare poorly on many fronts: jobs, taxes, housing and (gasp!) healthcare compared to the US. If they fared better they would not feel so threatened/outraged. I'm however pessimistic that they are capable of that level of introspection, because the smartest/wisest Canadians have already left and immigrated to the US. These smart/wise people always knew their country was sub-par despite the delusional rhetoric of superiority that Canadians often indulge in against the US (we have 'free' healthcare!).
For Canada specifically, I would imagine the story of the Canadian woman[1] who was incarcerated without charges for two weeks(!!!) while holding a valid visa would deter a significant number of travelers. As an American, I would not travel to any country where stories like this one were emerging.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
I don't know how the US process works, but long ago when I worked in a foreign country, I was required to leave the country and get my work visa added to my passport upon reentry. Reading that article made me consider that she might have been in a similar situation, only she was incarcerated for two weeks in subhuman conditions due to (at most) a clerical error.
It's really a risk for people who are not US citizens to cross our borders right now.
Since all your ICE holding facilites are privately run, the incentive is to get people into incarceration as soon as possible and to keep them there as long as possible. Before Trump came back, the gloves were on and the capitalists running those prisons only made bank on the darker shades of people, but with Trump back it's time to make money with all the skin colours!
Why do you think this is about a trade dispute?
The US can no longer be trusted. They’ve squandered a century of friendship. For nothing.
"Nothing" for most people, but for those building a fascist state, it's for lots of power and money.
Being a bully, making people pick sides (even for ridiculous things), making people fear your personal police/border force, etc - all part of the dictator playbook.
And really, the not-into-a-corrupt-idiocracy states -- one where lawless will-enslave-people-for-$ garbage like El Salvador and Russia are your besties -- should be openly talking about secession. The right likes to pretend it's unthinkable when the so-called "blue states" broach it, yapping some "indivisible!" line, but Texas has spent every Democrat government with in the open secession planning. Abbott was busy setting up Texas "consulates" of sorts, preparing to be their own little country. All because equal rights and healthcare offend them so. Now there's a grotesquely incompetent group of criminal grifters and clowns talking about abolishing federal courts, completely annihilating the constitution, and openly joking about invading literal allies. Mix in some advertising of their shitcoin crypto and getting rid of the gold stockpile for Bitcoin.
It's your time, blue states. What the hell are you waiting for?
The American idea and patriotism is so profoundly deep in the psyche of almost every American, I can't imagine any kind of post-USA state have any existence without profound catastrophe and violence. Maybe your country did a disservice to future generations by not just letting the southern states just... leave... because the cultural gap between north and south seems to be a source of serious long term and structural problem.
And from watching American discourse from a distance up here, I actually think the US is far less divided than American liberals would like to think. A large polity in the US has swung over to MAGA, more than in 2016. The trend is heading in the wrong direction. For now.
Trump 2016 looked like an accident and a huge but blundering catastrophe. Now it looks far more sinister.
But I mean Texas is as "blue" as New York is "red". Yet Texas is unabashedly, overtly a Republican state. 1/3 of extremely red Arkansas voted Democrat. If it came to shooting, it wouldn't be state vs state, it would be zipcode vs zipcode.
>I actually think the US is far less divided than American liberals would like to think
The US is approaching a 50/50 divide between extremely different political opinions, where each then changes everything to force their view on the other. It is extraordinarily divided. And that was before "MAGA" in the US decided that allies are actually enemies, Russia is a friend, and sending people charged with no crime and with no due process to a random corrupt banana republic -- El Salvador -- that will enslave them for $, and it's just grossly untenable: These are positions that are completely orthogonal to those that America has set for itself during all of modern history. It can't go on. There is no way that the alternate positions are compatible.
Trump still can't break 50% on a vote, I don't think we are messed up so much that MAGA has anywhere near a majority.
That makes me think this is all asinine rhetoric to
(1) squeeze Canada, Europe, and other allies of the trade deficit goodwill for a quick buck. That stuff America used to maintain global soft power and hegemony - cashing it in for a quick buck.
(2) run quick and chaotic pump and dumps where donors get to make enormous alpha on the market volatility (this could seriously just be market manipulation games?), and/or
(3) satisfy the geopolitical powers that may or may not be underwriting Trump, Musk, Gabbard, et al. Saudis, Russians, and Chinese. Several of this gang are politically exposed persons, possibly with exposure or debts to all three groups.
So if Canada were to join as states, it would be something like a Republican Western Canada and a Democratic Eastern Canada. Or some sort of strange split that gives 2+2. Definitely not the existing boundaries, because that'd likely be an 8/2 Democratic/Republican split.
Zero support for any legislation other than Canadian Separation. Be a poison pill.
And that's the non-violent response.
It's also not a coherent proposal at any level, how the hell does all of Quebec join the US, a country which is unilingual English by policy?
I come originally from Alberta, and I have certainly met my share of people whose opinions would not be anywhere close to the centre of American politics.
Broadly the conservative right in Canada tolerates socialized medicare. They'd gladly and instantly throw it under the bus the moment it being politically possible to do it. But for now at least it's still poisonous to make those opinions known.
Former PM Stephen Harper worked for the National Citizens Coalition for a period of time, and that organization was explicitly founded in the late 70s to oppose and try to stop/end public healthcare and the Canada Health Act.
I suspect if you get them in private and off the record, most Conservative leaders would admit to desiring to see change here.
To be clear the US only has a unilingual policy because Trump signed an executive order this year (and I believe even this SCOTUS would strike the order down as unconstitutional if anyone had standing to sue over it).
The US has always been de facto unilingual, but de jure we don't have an official language since Trump has no legal authority to establish that. The "policy" is political and legally empty.
And not anywhere close to what would be tolerable for Canada's francophone population, and especially Quebec which would simply immediately begin separation.
And it's not "soft acceptance of Spanish here and there," all levels of government are legally required to print official documents in whatever languages their community speaks; cities usually have ballots in dozens of languages. This is a constitutional requirement, bolstered by the Voting Rights Act, and Trump has not yet done enough damage to make those legal requirements go away via diktat.
All federally managed things & services, including travel on airlines, airporst etc, fully bilingual. All packaging of goods, across the whole country. Access to legal services, no matter where, bilingual. Highway signs, etc. The list goes on.
Here in Ontario, at least, right to full public school education in French, in the French system, if you come from a Francophone family.
The idea being that even in areas of the country that are not Quebecois or predominantly Francophone there are rights granted because of the French being part of the founding of the nation.
We are not kidding when we say that the American way of life and the Quebec one are incompatible. But this is all moot, the Canadian constitution would require a referendum to decapitate Canada, and that would never get the 50% vote per province that is required. Right now they'd get at most 10%.
The US is de facto unilingual English since its founding. Trump's EO did not change that.
Even that is not really true.
That depends, really. All of Canada? In what pieces and shapes? Alberta, for instance, might become a state, and I'm somewhat certain it could end up red. All of Canada as a single state? That's a little different. If Toronto and Ontario in general are carved up correctly, there's little worry of this backfiring. Hell, maybe they even end up offering Quebec independence... which would certainly make Canadian patriotism dry up quickly in those parts.
President Xi: "we're going to take Hawaii and nuke Texas. JK jk. Or maybe not lol".
That's the timeline where everything turns to glass.
Were it not for the brutal disparity of power, the American ambassador would already be expelled. That's what would happen if this kind of thing were happening between any other two nations.
That is an interesting assumption.
Trump was asked[0] about that and gave a rambling answer about artificial borders, beautiful landmasses, and conservative candidates, without answering the question.
I think the truth is that he doesn't know how the world works, and he has gotten away with being a bs artist failing upwards his whole life.
I am trying to put into words something here, and forgive me if I fail, but this discussion about what internal politics would look like in a hypothetical US that included Canada feels quite disrespectful to me. I think it's because it reads like an attempt to normalize the rhetoric, even when it isn't (based on the rest of your post).
I don't see why you guys can't dislike us for more than one reason. The annexation threat, and then the weird tariff demands that came out of left field, they both seem like good reasons, and you could even treat them as addition.
Where it crosses the line is incidents like this:
https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/provincial-news/article...
e.g. yesterday's 25% auto-tariffs = potentially half a million unionized well-paid Canadians out of a job, in Canada's economic heartland, with no reasonable employment alternatives.
Basically a declaration of economic war.
It's an easy word to say, and the implication that it would be peaceful or non-violent because of economic pressures ignores the fact that Canadians don't want it.
3d option: Being pissed off at orange man threating to break an annex Canada.
In the context of Canada, as an American all I can say is sorry and also thank you for doing everything in your power to resist "our" dictator since our own federal government is abjectly failing.
The second factor is multiple stories this month of non-criminals being treated like terrorists in cells and extrajudicial abuse.
The US now looks like North Korea from the outside.
That’s what “annex” means. It’s not a joke for him. He wants it to be his legacy.
Canada, through the (actually fairly limited!) existing free trade exceptions in NAFTA/USMCA - which, again, Trump agreed to in the past and, in his usually banal hyperlative word salad, described as "beautiful" and "wonderful" and "perfect" and "the best ever" - did not violate an established agreement. And, more importantly, Canada certainly hasn't gone on for months about how the US isn't a real country, shouldn't be entitled to self-governance, and how we're going to leverage our power to annex it. It's hardly "returning the favour".
A sensible discussion can be made on tariffs and why smaller countries may need them to protect against economies of scale but the rest is nonsense that creates anger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
Unfortunately we are dependent on them. Hopefully, this will cause us to start weening ourselves off of a single predatory partner.
Wouldn't U.S. assistance during WWI, WWII, NORAD, Afghanistan, the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other instances of disaster relief count as gestures of friendship?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_r...
"The United States has no closer and no more important friend than Canada ... And when we work together, as the closest of friends should, we only make each other stronger."
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-...
So fighting the Nazis was a favor and not a moral obligation? A war they didn't enter until Nazi-aligned Japan attacked?
> WWI
I believe the US didn't enter until the sinking of the Lusitania.
> Afghanistan
Isn't that a Canadian favor to the US?
> the 2008 financial crisis
Precipitated by American deregulation and excess? What a gift!
I'm not saying the US is entirely bad, but let's not confuse small kindnesses with friendship. The lack of backlash to Trump's comments I think speaks volumes to the condescension that lurked for years. Even the "loving" comments about being America's hat. Or jokes and charicatures about Canadians that would be consider racist about anyone else.
No, America was never Canada's friend. Sometimes an agreeable coworker.
I'm inclined to agree simply because "friend" is too gentle of a term. But, if that's true, then which country has America really been friends with? It seems like if not Canada, then there's none. That may be true, but at least initially surprising.
> America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
I don't know why the media is assenting to this. I had thought they had at least some level of independence from policymakers due to being owned by businesses with distinct interests, but I am having to question that assumption. It is not entirely clear what they know that I don't that explains how this can be carried out.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/472421/canada-britain-favored-r...
The Lusitania was sunk in 1915, the US only entered WWI in 1917, mostly because Germany had recommenced unrestricted submarine warfare and proposed an anti-US alliance to Mexico (the famous Zimmermann telegram).
What happens to you if you're in US and they invade Canada? You'll be an enemy national in the US. How's that going to go for you?
Why take that chance?
Unless those people come back with venture capital funding in their pockets, salaries here will be even more screwed than they already are.