Annexing Canada?

 Donald Trump has threatened to annex Canada. Not being interested in history, he is likely unaware that there has been a long line of Americans with similar ambitions, and that those threats have done more than anything to shape Canadians’ sense of our own nationality. Canadians don’t agree on much, but we are almost unanimous in the conviction that we don’t want our country to be a part of the US.

Start with the decade and a half before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. British possessions stretched from New France (now Quebec) down the eastern coast as far as Georgia. New France had been a French colony, but the British had taken control of it and its 60,000 settlers in 1759. There were almost no English speakers in the territory, only British colonial administrators and military personnel. For 15 years the administrators tried to suppress French culture, French laws, French language and the Roman Catholic religion, hoping to transform the settlers into Englishmen. The settlers were not pleased. Meanwhile, to their south, the Thirteen Colonies were becoming increasingly revolutionary. Many of the revolutionaries expected that the French settlers in what would become Quebec would join them in opposing a common oppressor, Britain. Benjamin Franklin spent years trying to unite Quebec with the Thirteen Colonies.

The British countered with an uncharacteristically subtle move. By the Quebec Act of 1774, they reversed their policy of anglicizing the French settlers. They restored the French legal system, and protected the French language and the Catholic religion, all in an attempt to secure the allegiance of the settlers. The ploy worked. The settlers rejected calls to join the new US, and opted to remain a British colony, where they expected that their culture, language and religion would be maintained.

The consequence was that, before a sizable number of English-speaking settlers arrived in what would become Canada, a French-Canadian nation had been established, albeit as a colony. It was based on subsistence agriculture and the fur trade, it was dominated by the Church, it was no longer connected to France, and it had rejected any kind of union with the US.

At this time there were some, not many, French and English speaking residents in what would become Atlantic Canada.

English-speaking settlers soon invaded Canada from the south, not in order to annex it, but to escape the American Revolution. In the newly independent US, they were called Tories, while in the Atlantic region and in what eventually became Ontario, they were called United Empire Loyalists, perhaps 100,000 in all. Some left their old homes voluntarily and some were forced out. In either case, they were politically conservative, loyal to the British Crown and hostile to the revolutionary country to their south.

The American Revolution thus generated two of what would be the most important characteristics of Canada over the next two and a half centuries: a strong sense of nationhood among French Canadians and a society of two cultures, French and English speaking.

Neither the French nor the English speaking settlers in British North America recognized the Indigenous people as legitimate residents. It has not been until recent times that European-Canadians, including historians, have understood that there were in fact three Canadian cultures in those early days, Indigenous along with French and English.

Over the next several generations, Americans in the new republic migrated west from the seaboard in massive numbers, for the most part seeking land. Some of them crossed a boundary which to them was meaningless, carving out new farms in what would later be south-western Ontario. The consequence was that there were now two groups of English-speaking settlers in the colony then called Upper Canada. One group was intensely loyal to the Crown. The other had no particular loyalty, although if pressed most of them would probably have said that they were part of the American nation. This division came to the fore at the time of real military invasions from the south.

The War of 1812, between the US and Britain, was partly a war over naval supremacy on the Atlantic, partly a war over control of the North American interior. American armed forces invaded British-administered territories at several locations of what are now Ontario and Quebec. They were eventually pushed back. The war posed a problem of divided loyalties for the newly arrived settlers from the US. Whose side were they on, the US or Britain? Well, the British were in control of the land where they now lived, so as a condition of keeping their new homes, they were forced into an allegiance to the Crown. The invasion of Canada by the US effectively unified the residents of Upper Canada in opposition. One of the unintended consequences of the American invasions was to create at least a fledging sense of nationality within English Canada. It was just one step in the creation of the Canadian nation, but an important one.

A boundary dispute occurred in the 1840s, on the Pacific coast, thousands of miles west of Upper Canada. Using the slogan “54-40 or Fight,” Americans claimed control of what was then British territory, and is now the province of British Columbia, up to the southern border of Alaska, which at that time was controlled by Russia. The two sides almost came to war, but never did. Eventually they agreed to extend the boundary between the US and British territory to the Pacific Ocean along the 49^th parallel of latitude, where it remains to this day. The importance of this episode for Canada is that it represented the first time that at least some settlers in the east began to imagine a continent-wide country. American aggression, even if only anticipated, helped to create an expansive sense of Canada.

The next threat from the US came after the Civil War (1860-1865). The Union armies emerged victorious from the war, and some American leaders thought this would be a dandy time to annex the territories to their north. It should be easy, they thought, because the British were content to rule the world economically, and were pulling back from military defense of their empire. If the colonies needed defending, it would be the responsibility of the colonists, not Britain.  To help this happen, however, Britain maneuvered its largest North American territories—what would become the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia--into uniting in a single country, Canada, in 1867, for the purpose of defense. Part of the strategy was to choose as a capital for the new country an obscure lumber village named Bytown (later, Ottawa, where I grew up), protected and well removed from the American border. As it happened, the Union armies never did turn north, but the threat that they might was the impetus for Canadian unity and independence or, to use the term they coined, Confederation.

During this period, Canada did suffer from military invasions, although not directed by the US government. The Fenian Raids occurred between 1866 and 1871. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries, newly located in the US. Their goal, farfetched as it now seems, was to take over Canada, and then exchange Canada with the British in return for an independent Ireland. They failed, but in failing provided the new country of Canada with its first opportunity to employ a national military force.

The next century and a half saw no additional threats from the US to annex Canada, until the current bombast from President Trump. This did not mean that Canada was secure, however. The different populations of Canada—in Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and British Columbia—are strung out mostly within 100 miles of the US border, and hardly connected geographically one with the other. Their connections are almost all on north-south axes, pulling them into contact with the US. For example, the Maritime provinces have more natural connections with New England than with the rest of Canada, Windsor Ontario is virtually a suburb of Detroit, and on the west coast, Vancouver and Seattle are almost twins. It has required continuous acts of will and political courage to maintain a country along an east-west axis, and to avoid its various parts dropping into the pockets of the US. How that happened is a large portion of the story of Canada, and I can’t rehearse that history here. But the sum total is that the very existence of Canada results from a determination not to become small and forgotten parts of the US.

It is fair to say that the Canadian nation exists in reaction and in opposition to the US. What that nation consists of is a complicated question. For the early settlers, and for the descendants of the settlers living at the time of Confederation, the answer was simple: the Canadian nation was bi-cultural, perhaps even a pact between French and English speakers. That won’t do today. In the last several generations, Indigenous residents have vociferously asserted their place in the nation. Immigrants from across the world have changed the multicultural nature of the country. It is still the case, however, that all the components of this complex nation are united in a determination to resist absorption by the US.

Why go over this history? Because Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue what he is stepping into by fulminating about making Canada the 51^st state. Canada has a long tradition of resisting such threats, sometimes by armed force. We have no interest in becoming part of the US. Trump may be doing Canadians a favor by stimulating once again our sense of unity and nationhood.

John Isbister

August 21, 2026