Annexation has always haunted Canada The ghosts of 1911 are not far away

The alarm over Trump’s musings has lacked historical perspective. The journalist Andrew Coyne called him “utterly insane”, writing almost tearfully about how “the basic assumption of Canadian history, that we would always have a stable, democratic ally to our south, is over”. Yet as Laurier’s fate illustrates, this is just wrong. Canadians have always worried about the American threat to the autonomy and even sovereignty of their nation. Until recently, its politicians saw the States not as a friendly big brother but an unruly giant with a scary hunger for resources. These fears provoked debates that were always and sometimes usefully introspective: about what Canada is and how it might need to change.

Some Canadians demanded “annexation” before their nation even existed. In 1849, leading merchants in Montreal, then the capital of the province of Canada, formed an Annexation Association. They argued that Britain’s North American colonies could never put on population or become prosperous until they could crack the tariff walls protecting the huge American market. And the only viable way to do that, they said, was to request political union with the United States.

After Montreal’s Parliament buildings were burnt down by rioters, British officials soothed these discontents by negotiating a trade agreement, but annexation would return in the aftermath of the American Civil War — this time as a menace rather than a promise. American statesmen threatened to annex the North American territories in compensation for British support for the defeated South. Although this did not come to fruition, the prospect of invasion lingered for decades afterwards.

Fear of the United States was therefore a vital spur to nation-building. John A. Macdonald, the Tory and Anglophile Prime Minister of the province of Canada, championed its confederation with other colonies in 1867 to strengthen them all against the States. The new Dominion of Canada bought the vast western territories of the Hudson Bay Company, and turned them into provinces. Macdonald planned a Canadian Pacific Railway to link Vancouver and Montreal, encouraging goods and people to flow from east to west rather than north to south. And although Canada still struggled to attract immigrants and bled people to the States, Macdonald won a final electoral victory in 1891 by denouncing the Liberals’ response to these problems — a US trade agreement, no less — as tantamount to treason.

Canada might have been much more populous and prosperous in 1911 than at Confederation, but Laurier’s proposals revived neuralgia about American intentions. President Taft wrote to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt — a sentimental annexationist — that they would turn Canada into an “adjunct to the United States”. The leaking of his letter provoked outrage. Trumpish gaffes, not least the House Speaker’s remarks about wanting to see Stars and Stripes at the North Pole, reminded Canadians of their moral objections to becoming Americans. Kipling snapped that if Canada wanted to harmonise its economy with the United States, then it would also have to dramatically up its murder rate — a quip that retains its sting in the age of mass shootings.

Laurier’s defeat in 1911 made freer trade with America toxic for decades. During the Second World War, Prime Minister Mackenzie King drew Canada into an unprecedented degree of military and industrial cooperation with the United States. Yet his youthful memories of Laurier’s rout held him back from a comprehensive free trade agreement. After all, FDR once confided in him that he wouldn’t mind owning Canada. Not until 1988 did a Canadian Prime Minister sign a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.

The differences between 1911 and now underline Canada’s current predicament. It was already evident in Laurier’s time that Canada could not count on Britain to overawe the United States. In 1903, the British even sided with the Americans in dismissing Canada’s efforts to lay claim to vital waterways in Alaska. Yet the Conservatives could still draw an emotive contrast between two futures: American annexation or security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Second World War destroyed that contrast by transferring ultimate responsibility for protecting Canada’s territorial sovereignty from the States, where it has remained. It vanished altogether by the Sixties, along with the Empire. Trudeau loyalists jokingly invoke the year 1812 — when British forces burned down the White House — but it is they who need the history lesson. Justin’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau tried to find a third option to Americanisation or insecure isolation by drumming up trade with Europe and Japan, but his efforts did not amount to much. When Trudeau’s successor Brian Mulroney inked his Free Trade Agreement in 1988 with Ronald Reagan, he tied Canada to a continentalist strategy, which assumed an identity of outlook with the United States.

Because annexation has always been a partisan topic, it suits many Canadians to present Trump’s threats as a damning judgment on Trudeau, which a speedy change of personnel could fix. Freeland, who aspires to replace him, has hinted as much. Her resignation letter coincided with the launch of her biography, which presents her as a steely realist who can deal as handily with Trump as with the Kremlin. Canadians to Freeland’s Right are much freer with their contempt. David Frum, a Canadian speechwriter for George Bush who has reinvented himself as a Never Trumper centrist, argues that Trudeau’s performative angst about Canada’s colonial record was a fatal declaration of weakness: Trump shares with “ultra-progressives” the “same project of Canadian annihilation”.

Yet Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives are set to win the looming federal election, will find it no easier to exorcise fears of annexation. John Diefenbaker in the early Sixties was the last Conservative Prime Minister to engage in rousing displays of anti-American nationalism. The Conservatives have since become the voice of Western Canada’s fossil fuel industry, whose customer is the United States. Stephen Harper, the last Conservative to hold office before Trudeau, pressed “ethical” Canadian oil on the Americans while echoing their foreign policy. His protégé Poilievre has been stumped for ideas in this crisis, beyond reminding Americans of their consumption of Canadian fossil fuels — which Trump resents as a form of subsidy — and talking of building up the military, which all parties have agreed to run down for decades.

Perhaps though the events of 1911 should though remind Canadians not to panic: about American demagogues or themselves. Laurier’s biographer Oscar Skelton cattily observed that if Kipling could sell thousands of poetry books to Americans, then a Saskatchewan farmer ought to be able to sell them “a beef”. He celebrated “humbler and more unconscious diplomats”: the scores of Canadians and Americans already quietly doing business with each other. Then and since, political rhetoric has obscured but never changed the geographic logic for the inexorable convergence of the Canadian and American economies. Even Laurier’s opponents in 1911 did not rely on fear alone as an argument. The joy of being or remaining British was that it made for dynamic but orderly social and economic progress. They made the point by speaking on platforms decorated with maps of Canada’s impressive railway network. For all Kipling’s talk of “soul”, the moral of 1911 was the need to keep strengthening state capacity and to remove internal barriers to trade. The same may be true today.

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Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion from Vancouver, British Columbia and the author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (2021). He is currently writing a book about the Edwardians and the gods.

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