Trump’s Aggression Against Canada Is Boosting Liberal Party’s Election Chances

If a political analyst had said a year ago that the U.S. would soon make a serious play to annex Canada and absorb it as the 51st state, that analyst would have been laughed off the stage. Canada and the U.S. have been close allies and trading partners for so long that it’s impossible to imagine one taking an adversarial stance against the other.

Fast forward to 2025, and the unimaginable has become real. On a near daily basis, Donald Trump threatens to rain down new tariffs on Canadian goods. Trump has sought to justify the tariffs with nebulous claims about Canada not being serious about stopping the flow of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants into the U.S. — even as outlets like Forbes point out that according to the most recent statistics available, more undocumented people have been crossing from the United States into Canada than in the opposite direction, and “the data does not support the claim that Canada is a primary source of the drug entering the U.S.”

Meanwhile, Trump, Elon Musk and their cheerleaders have been explicitly calling for annexation. Canada, Trump has declared, will suffer extreme economic pressure unless it agrees to cede its sovereignty and be absorbed by its more powerful neighbor to the south.

Behind the scenes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told political and business leaders that the threat is real, and in mid-February Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey returned from a visit to D.C. and declared the annexation plans were “chilling.”

So commonplace have these outlandish claims become that serious media outlets such as the AP are now running long analyses about what the process would look like if Canada were indeed to be “admitted” — or, more accurately, coerced — into the Union.

Meanwhile, Trump has begun implementing his threat to impose a punitive tariff regime.

The most immediate cost of the North American tariff wars that Trump has unleashed is inflation. During the election campaign, as he sought to tap into voter anger about post-COVID price spikes, the candidate was quick to dismiss critics’ assertions that tariffs simply raise prices on the purchasers of goods hit with these new taxes. Now, as president, he is implicitly acknowledging the inflation risk is real, and he talks about the short-term pain that U.S. consumers might have to bear as tariff walls go up around the country. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, since the math is simple: Basic goods will start to cost more as producers and retailers pass along the costs of tariffs to consumers.

The tariff wars will, ultimately, hurt most everyone. They will force consumers on both sides of the border to pay more for the goods they buy, and they will devastate border economies that rely on a constant, and seamless, flow of goods from one country to the next. But, because Canada’s economy is smaller than the U.S.’s and its businesses are more reliant on U.S. purchasers than U.S. businesses are on Canadians, it’s likely that Canada will suffer disproportionately. The Bank of Canada has estimated that 25 percent tariffs could slash the country’s GDP by 4 percent, representing one of the biggest shocks to the economic system in the last 100 years. And the Public Policy Forum of Canada has suggested it could push unemployment well north of 7 percent.

If Trump is serious about bludgeoning Canada economically until its leaders cry uncle and ask to join the United States, a recession would be the least of the problems for Canadian residents. On a host of issues, Canada has thus far managed to avoid the collapse into extreme inequality and oligarchy now plaguing the United States — the Bank of Canada tracks this divergence in inequality data between the two countries to the 1980s. Canada currently has a far more comprehensive social safety net, but if Canada is absorbed into the U.S., Canadians would stand to lose that.

A growing number of Canadians believe the Liberal Party will fight Trump more effectively than would their conservative rivals.

Most immediately, Canada has a universal health care system that costs far less per person to run than the U.S. system and generates longer life expectancy for residents. As my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, recently wrote, for many Canadians the health care issue alone makes annexation literally a matter of life and death. Canadians have a life expectancy roughly four years longer than that of U.S. residents, and this despite the fact that Canada spends roughly half as much on health care per capita as does its southern neighbor.

The differences don’t stop with health care, however. In Canada, new parents, both biological and adoptive, can take close to a year of paid parental leave, receiving on average roughly half of what the salary would have been, with additional benefits available, at a reduced rate of pay, for another several months; in the U.S. employers are only legally required to provide 12 weeks of parental leave — and it is unpaid. And, with the gutting of pretty much every workplace regulatory agency, it’s likely that even this pittance of a benefit will cease to be policed and enforced under the Trump administration.

In Canada, a new employee is entitled to two weeks paid vacation time per year, with it rising to three weeks after five years with the company and four weeks after 10. In the United States, by contrast, federal law doesn’t guarantee workers a single day of paid vacation. It is left up to the states to dictate this part of labor law.

That’s at least in part because Canadian unions are far stronger than U.S. unions, with less than 1 in 10 U.S. workers belonging to a trade union compared to more than 25 percent of Canadian workers, according to data from the Atlantic Council.

At the backend of careers, Canadian workers also have a jump on their U.S. counterparts. The retirement age in Canada is 65; in the U.S. it is 67.

Canada has more than 40 million people. Its political system is a parliamentary one, and its 10 federal provinces and three territories each have considerable autonomy to make their own laws. Under Trump’s proposal, the whole country would simply become a single state — a mega-state, like California, that would be dramatically underrepresented politically and have none of the regional protections that its provinces currently enjoy.

If Trump were remotely serious about a union of equals, at the very least he would be offering each province statehood. (On average, the population of those provinces would each still be bigger than that of many U.S. states.) But, of course, he won’t do that, because those 20 Canadian senators and roughly 55 members of the House of Representatives would fundamentally shift U.S. politics in a more progressive direction, thus undermining his far right project.

When one looks at the nuts and bolts of this proposal, it’s all about absorbing a resource-rich country into the U.S. in a way that neutralizes Canadian political power and priorities and ensures U.S. businesses have unfettered access to Canadian resources. It would strip Canadians of their vaunted social safety net protections, in particular around health care access, and would impose U.S. rules on everything from gun ownership to environmental policy. In other words, it would deprive Canada of its best institutions and replace them with many of the U.S.’s worst. That adds up to classic imperial extraction politics, and it would, in all but name, turn Canada into a colony of the U.S., albeit one with token representation in the U.S. senate.

No surprise, Canadians aren’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm at such a prospect. Between 70 and 90 percent of Canadians tell pollsters they are adamantly opposed to the idea. The issue is now center stage in the upcoming elections.

While a couple months ago the Liberal Party was trailing the Conservatives by as much as 30 points, now, in the wake of Trump’s extraordinary comments, it seems possible that the Liberals could actually eke out a win in the upcoming elections.

The reason is straightforward: A growing number of Canadians believe the Liberal Party will fight Trump more effectively than would their conservative rivals led by the populist Pierre Poilievre. Poilievre’s party is still ahead, but it’s clear the election will now be competitive rather than the blowout predicted not so long ago, and that the momentum has shifted in favor of the Liberals.

Meanwhile, at NBA and NHL games in Canada involving teams from the two countries, crowds have recently been booing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Under the guise of “Making America Great Again,” Trump’s bullying power grabs are instead steadily turning global audiences against the United States.