Jonathan Kay: Diane Francis’ plan to merge Canada and the United States has many, many problems
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Jonathan Kay September 28, 2013
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http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... -problems/
In her new book, National Post columnist Diane Francis makes the case for the U.S. and Canada forming a united North America
FotoliaIn her new book, National Post columnist Diane Francis makes the case for the U.S. and Canada forming a united North America
Watch for excerpts from ‘Merger of the Century’ in the next few days
Veteran National Post columnist Diane Francis has written 10 books. Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country is easily her most ambitious.
Perhaps a little too ambitious, many readers might conclude.
It is also, in a way, her most personal. As an American-born dual citizen, Ms. Francis writes passionately about the many historical and cultural ties that bind her ancestral and adopted countries. Merger of the Century makes the case for erasing the formal distinction between the two entirely. “After all, we’re both melting-pot societies,” she says. So why not turn the whole continent north of the Rio Grande into the world’s biggest pot?
Postmedia News
Postmedia NewsDiane Francis: “If Canada is going to be the target of a creeping takeover from a big player, we may as well manage the process.”
But Merger of the Century is not just a stew of touchy-feely geopolitical metaphors: Ms. Francis is a business writer, and her book is full of numbers.
The most important figures are contained in Chapter 5, entitled “How a Merger Deal Might Be Structured,” in which Ms. Francis tallies up the trillions of dollars worth of land, irrigated crops, oil and gas reserves and gold that Canada would be bringing to merger negotiations. After crunching the numbers, she concludes that under her full-merger model, “every Canadian would be entitled to a lump sum payment [from the United States] of $492,529” (though she adds that older Canadians would get more, and children would get much less).
Also, to ensure continuity with our hallowed universal-health-care ideals, we Canadians would be provided with “fraud-proof health cards, valid anywhere in the 50 states, 10 provinces or three territories. Americans would not be entitled to this benefit.” (The notion that U.S.-born citizens would tolerate living in a society in which they have fewer government-given rights than their Canadian-born neighbours is just one of the many eyebrow-raising assumptions contained in this book.)
In total, the United States would pay Canada about $17-trillion in debt bonds (with payments stretched out over two decades) in exchange for our agreement to merge. For the sake of comparison, the United States public debt currently stands at just $12-trillion. So this variation of Ms. Francis’ merger plan would cause America’s debt-to-GDP ratio to explode from 79% to 179% overnight. She argues that this might be financed, in part, with a massive gas tax (despite the fact that both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly run screaming from such gas-tax proposals in the past).
America is now an increasingly isolationist, inward-looking country where the mere act of raising the debt ceiling casts Washington into a state of paralysis, where state governors can’t scratch together the money to provide mental-health services to dangerous psychotics, and where universal health care is deemed (by much of the country, at least) to be an unaffordable luxury. Putting aside the massive constitutional issues that would attend a merger here at home (we Canadians can’t even reform our Senate, a project this is perhaps one-thousandth as complex as merging with the United States), how on Earth can the voters of our near-bankrupt neighbour be expected to support the cutting of half-million-dollar IOUs to 35-million citizens from (what is currently) another country? If, say, Republican Senator Rand Paul were sitting in on our interview, I ask Ms. Francis, do you really think he would be getting excited about this plan?
She doesn’t miss a beat. “What would appeal to the Republicans is the way this plan would help secure the borders of the continent,” she tells me. “The other thing that would appeal to the GOP would be the job-creation and business opportunities that would come from Canada’s enormous resources. National security and capitalism — those are two things they will always support.”
“As for Democrats,” she adds, “They’d be happy by the prospect of 35-million [Canadian] Democrats becoming voters. There would never be another Republican president again.”
(An obvious follow-up question would be why Senator Paul, or indeed any Republican, would ever support an expansion of U.S. territory guaranteed to freeze them out of the power. But I must confess: I failed to ask it.)
Conrad Black: Toward a theory of Canadian exceptionalism
The United States rose to the heights required to lead the free world to victory against the Nazis; and then, relatively bloodlessly, and without a shot being exchanged between the superpowers, against Soviet Communism. And then, at the moment of its greatest triumph, it suddenly became a purposeless and progressively more silly country. This latter development is aberrant and will not continue. But those of us accustomed to sheltering in the shadow of America, while carping almost inaudibly about its relatively insignificant shortcomings, are going to have to do better. The United States delivered the world from evil. Others, certainly including this country, have done our part, but as the geopolitical cards are reshuffled and national ambitions and aptitudes evolve, we will have to raise our game.
There are limits to what a country of 35-million can do, but it wouldn’t kill Canadians to develop their own brand of exceptionalism. Canada is exceptionally racially tolerant, has been exceptionally careful never to engage in an unjust or unsuccessful war. It has been exceptionally successful at joining forces between the private and public sectors, and should do so again in the field of medical care, and in ownership of the automobile industry and the aerospace industry (so we can finally recover from the disaster of the Avro Arrow cancellation in 1959).
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Ms. Francis concedes that there are regions of both the United States and Canada that may be difficult to assimilate into a single nation — Quebec, in particular. Yet her book is extremely vague on the issue of how the province, whose Francophones already are anxious about the disappearance of their language within a country of 35-million, could be made to go along with a plan that would dilute them in an Anglophone mega-nation 10 times that size.
“Quebec could have commonwealth status [within a new, unified country], like Puerto Rico,” she tells me. “In Puerto Rico, they have the right to immigrate into the United States, and vote in federal elections, and they pay federal taxes … It’s an interesting model. Maybe it’s something Quebec would go for — or maybe even other provinces. I’m not setting down an [iron-clad] model here. I’m really just trying to start a conversation about how this kind of project could be done.”
Much of Merger of the Century is written up like a business plan, with Ms. Francis demonstrating how the benefits of a union outweigh the costs. It’s an analogy that feels clunkier and clunkier as the chapters march on. Corporations exist to make money. But nations exist principally to give expression to some guiding ethno-religious identity or creed. In Canada’s case, much of its identity can be traced to an almost neurotic fear of being subsumed within the United States. The most militant manifestations of this anti-American spirit have been on the wane since Barack Obama came to office. But it still seems odd to think that even a sizeable minority of Canadians could be convinced to give up our flag, our monarchist traditions, the legal supremacy of Parliament, and our seat at the UN in favour of a cash payout from Uncle Sam.
And then there are the nuts-and-bolts issues — like guns. There’s no way Americans will give up their Second Amendment rights merely to gain access to a bunch of potash and bitumen. In a merged country, Americans presumably would be free to tote their beloved weapons from one end of the continent to the other. Is that something Canadians would put up with? Wouldn’t any incipient merger become politically unviable the first time some nutcase from Arizona headed north and shot up a Canadian Tire?
“Well, remember that there already are something like 3-million Canadians living in the United States,” Ms. Francis tells me. “And clearly the presence of so many guns there isn’t a disincentive for them.”
“And remember, there are many great safe places to live in the United States — like Manhattan, where I have my home — which are great. You just have to avoid the places where sociological conditions are deteriorating, which is where the teen gangs and guns are concentrated. And remember that we have the same sort of socioeconomic problem in Canada — on [native] reserves. Innocent people get killed in both countries.”
Many other questions abound. Would Quebec beach-goers in Maine have a right to a trial in French if they’re caught shoplifting at the local Cumberland Farms? And what about America’s insane war on drugs: How would ski bums at Whistler tolerate the sight of SWAT teams and sniffer dogs descending on their pot parties? Ms. Francis’ faith in the fundamental sameness of Americans and Canadians is touching. But the fact is that the two countries are divided by real and important differences in culture, politics and even Christian religiosity. Merging our two legal systems alone would seem to be an impossibility.
Plus, what would happen to the CFL? Would we still be permitted to play with three downs?
‘We’ve been dating heavily for generations. So now let’s talk about common law — or even go all the way and get married’
Moreover, trends in public opinion, especially here in Canada, would seem to go against the grain of Ms. Francis’ thesis. A decade ago, many Canadians were envious of America’s more-vibrant economy, and there was much talk of a “brain drain.” But since the 2008 financial crisis in particular, such talk largely has evaporated, as per-capita GDP levels have equalized between the two nations.
When I raise such concerns, Ms. Francis warns me that I am missing the big picture. In her book, she argues that a “new cold war” is being fought between the U.S.-led west and the Chinese-led east — a war that “divides the world into players who are open and those who are secretive.”
She believes that the increasing Chinese ownership of Canadian resource companies shows that we’re losing this struggle. (Indeed, much of the book is dedicated to raising awareness of Chinese “economic aggression” within Canada’s borders.) And unless we Canadians embrace a full-fledged union with the United States, she argues, we are destined to become “neo-colonial” vassals of Beijing, and victims of Russian gunboat diplomacy in the Arctic Ocean. In a dystopian scenario sketched out by military historian Jack Granatstein in the book’s first chapter, readers are presented with the dubious prospect of whole flotillas of “dope smugglers” and terrorists being ferried through our Arctic waters by Chinese ships.
On the day of our interview, there was fresh news that Ukraine had inked a deal with a Chinese company to lease a full 5% of its land mass to Chinese agricultural operations. When I ask Ms. Francis if this is the type of “neo-colonialist” scenario she fears might play out in Canada, she nods solemnly.
“Canadians aren’t talking about this threat,” she says. “We have a Prime Minister who has been taking some steps [in the Arctic], yes. But then you have the four opposition leaders. Three are from Quebec and that’s what they talk about. And then there’s [the Green Party’s Elizabeth May] from B.C. who wants to turn the country into a giant park. Meanwhile, the world is hungry for our resources. If we don’t develop them [with American help], it might all be taken away from us.”
“The bottom line,” Ms. Francis adds, “is that in this world, you need to be a big player. If Canada is going to be the target of a creeping takeover from a big player, we may as well manage the process, instead of being victimized. That’s what the book is about. For Canada and the United States, one plus one is going to equal four. We’ve been dating heavily for generations. So now let’s talk about common law — or even go all the way and get married.”
— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
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