The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Will the US and Canada Actually Merge? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Listen, I didn't want to make this video, but too many people asked for it...so here we go. What would a potential merger of the US and Canada look like?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/will-the-us-and-canada-actually-merge

All right. I didn't want to do this video, but too many people on both sides of the border have asked. So, what would a merger of the United States and Canada look like? All right. Let's start with this simple thing. The United States is not going to invade Canada. There is no serious talk about Trump. He hasn't even really joked about it. So let's just put that to the side. Canada has just shy of 40 million people. So if it was to join in a single piece, it would be right up with California is our first or second most populous states. But it has a demographic picture that's kind of a mix.

And so what would be far more likely to happen? Because the idea that a majority of Canadians are going to petition for U.S. membership is a stretch. What would be far more likely to happen is individual provinces of Canada would secede from the Canadian nation and then apply for statehood for the United States. The first two states to watch are the two that are. youngest demographically that are the richest in per capita terms that export the most commodities per capita and are already fairly culturally linked in with the united states and those are alberta and saskatchewan and if you're looking at a map of canada keep in mind that everyone lives in a thin strip along the southern border so you've got british columbia on the pacific you got some mountains

big mountains and then alberta and saskatchewan manitoba the third of the prairie provinces and then you cross something called the canadian shield which is about a thousand kilometers A very rugged terrain, heavily forested, where there's only one road and one rail line before you get to eastern Canada. And in eastern Canada, you've got the population block of Ontario and Quebec, which are the bulk of the country's population, and then fringed around them or something they call the maritime territories, which are provinces, but lightly populated. And basically, I'm overstating this, so apologies, heavily populated by retirees. from my financial point of view, there's not a lot better. Where the money is, is Ontario and Quebec, the two most populous provinces.

British Columbia, which has a big population around Vancouver and serves as the Pacific Gateway, and then Alberta, which is the energy hub. Saskatchewan's kind of a little bit of the energy hub, and then a lot of agriculture, just like Alberta. What would happen is Alberta and Saskatchewan, or Alberta or Saskatchewan, would leave the Canadian nation, which is legal in Canada. You just have to have a plebiscuit. That was affirmed by a 9-0 ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court quite some time ago with regard to Quebecois separatism.

Anyway, the reason that these two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta would leave is largely financial. When Quebec was having all of its fits in the 70s and 80s and early 90s about secession, the deal that was struck was that Ontario, which at the time was the richest and the most populous province, would basically pay Quebec to just stop it. So Quebec has basically been paid for the last few decades to remain part of Canada and not have secession votes. It's gotten more and more expensive because Quebec's birth rate is among the lowest of the major provinces.

Well, it is the lowest of the major provinces. And so the whole provinces has already functionally slid into obsolescence. The problem is in Ontario, the birth rate has been very low for a long time. And if it wasn't for the huge surges of immigration, which have had other complications. Ontario has now aged to the point that if it wasn't for huge surges in immigration, which generate their own problems,

Ontario wouldn't be able to pay to keep Quebec in the country anyway. But it is still aging very rapidly. And of late, Canadians have pushed back against this open-door immigration policy, which isn't been necessary for economic reasons, but now culturally it's kind of hit a breaking point. And everything has slowed significantly. which means that Ontario is now rapidly aging again. And within five years, Alberta will be the province that is expected to pay for Quebec to remain in the country with a little bit of help from Saskatchewan.

The maritime provinces have already aged out. And if the two most populous provinces age out, there is no way that Saskatchewan and Alberta, which collectively have less than 7 million people, can pay for the rest of the Canada to continue to exist unless they just become destitute. That's the financial argument for why you might see secession in the prairie provinces. And that's before you consider that every individual Canadian province trades more with the United States than it does with the rest of Canada. And that is true for none of them more than it is for Alberta. So you'd actually solve a fair number of problems if Alberta applied and Saskatchewan applied for American statehood. Now, the question then is what happens next? Because these are the two richest bits of the country.

And if you split British Columbia off from the rest of the country because now the prairies have gone a different way, it basically devolves into fourth world status very quickly. Its industry is already wildly non-competitive. And basically what has kept BC afloat for the last several years is capital flight coming in most notably from China to be processed in BC and then spread throughout the Canadian economy. That would stop if there was no land connection. The only other business that you really have in BC is, is it serves as the entrepaux for Asian exports coming into Canada. You use the super port in Vancouver, repackage everything onto rail and send it east.

You can't get through Alberta and Saskatchewan. That's not going to work either. So BC looks really awful in that circumstances. And the rest of Canada out east doesn't look great too because basically it's a retired country that looks worse than most European demographics. So if all of these other provinces, either in combination or independently were to ask for statehood.

In the United States, we'd have to do some really hard math as to whether it would be worth it. Picking up a half a dozen states that economically are almost destitute, basically you'd be adding a half a dozen Mississippies. I'm not sure we would be willing to do that. And that's before you consider the politics of it. By the way, the United States does political math. Saskatchewan and Alberta would probably be considered 1990-style Texas Republicans, a little bit more libertarian, socially moderate, economically conservative.

They wouldn't get along with today's MAGA all that well. But the rest of Canada, especially BC and Ontario and Quebec, would be of the Elizabeth Warren branch. of the Democratic Party. And getting that through Congress might be kind of interesting. Now, that said, adding states is not as complicated as amending the Constitution. You want to amend the Constitution. You need two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress, and then three-quarters of the state's legislatures have to ratify it.

You want to add a state, you just need a simple majority. So, you just need a simple majority of Congress. You don't ask the states at all. Then the president signs off. It just looks like a normal bill. So if, if, if, if, if we get to that point, Canada will very quickly become a political flashpoint regardless of what politics looks like in the United States. Because you're talking about potentially adding 10 provinces or 10 states to the United States' system.

That's 20 senators and about the same number of representatives as California has, which I believe is around 50 right now. So a significant shift in the balance of power that would completely refabricate how we have our politics. Now, if that happened in a year, wow, that would be all kinds of explosive because the United States is in the midst of a pretty deep political reorientation by itself. But at any time that you have that sort of disruption, you're going to change the political math by how the country works. And then, and then you get a talk about how things like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which are the three of the four biggest line items in the U.S. budget, get refabricated when you add so many people who are already retired.

It would be a hoot. Don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but if it was going to happen, that's how it would go down.