Above photo: Political cartoon published in July 1870 depicts Canada as a child, with Great Britain, represented as Mother Britannia, holding out her protective arms. Uncle Sam, representing the United States, stands on the other side, ready to “grab” the child if it falls. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Canadian leaders are falling over themselves to placate the incoming Trump administration.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
US President-elect Donald Trump recently referred to Canada as the “51st State” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its “governor.” While on one level, such ridiculous statements are part and parcel of Trump’s political persona, they reveal something deeper about the role that Canada occupies in the American economy and political imagination. This is an issue that the Canadian Marxist historian Stanley B. Ryerson explored in a pamphlet entitled “Why Be a Doormat?” published by the Labor-Progressive Party in 1948.
“Canadians need complete and permanent union with the US… Since Canada has shown that she cannot fiscally operate in today’s world, and since Britain is fiscally impotent, it is up to the US to act.”
So said the millionaire-owned Life magazine in 1948, amid an earlier upsurge of cynical American interest in the Great White North.
Meanwhile, the New York Herald Tribune stated that Canada “contains natural riches comparable to those which we have been exploiting, and still virtually intact… In exchange for our finished goods, we shall be able to call upon her wealth in pulp and paper stock, in lumber, fur and minerals.”
Ryerson writes from a left-nationalist perspective, quoting the above articles to illustrate his point that Washington has no respect for Canadian sovereignty, and the greatest interest in exploiting Canada’s natural resources.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇨🇦 Donald Trump posts an image of himself with the Canadian flag after telling Prime Minister Trudeau that Canada could join the US as its 51st state if new tariffs cripple its economy. pic.twitter.com/BHVDhLTJLf
— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) December 3, 2024
One can draw parallels to the present. Right now, the Pentagon is directly funding mines on Canadian soil in order to access critical minerals needed to fuel America’s war machine. On top of that, the US government and corporate media (and much of the Canadian press) are relentlessly pressuring Ottawa to increase military spending to reach NATO’s two percent GDP target by 2032.
In the early Cold War, Life warned that “when [US] military strategists look at the top of the world [they] see Canada is the only country between us and Russia.” Presidential advisor John Foster Dulles told a meeting of Canadian elites in Toronto, “You are in a key position… Get busier in Pan-American defense!” All this war fervor was justified with a manufactured frenzy of anti-communism and xenophobia. Sound familiar?
Canadian economic elites have long supported subordination to the US, from the Annexation Manifesto of 1849 to today’s Business Council of Canada, itself a proponent of further militarization. In “Why Be a Doormat?” Ryerson quotes President of the Royal Bank of Canada, S.G. Dobson:
Use of Canada’s resources will relieve strain on US resources… We have many natural resources not found in the US and many which are becoming scarce in that country. Canada is first in the world in the production of nickel, asbestos, platinum, radium and uranium, all of which are minerals of the greatest economic and strategic importance. We are second in the production of gold and zinc, third in copper and fourth in silver and lead.
Today, Canadian provincial and federal leaders are falling over themselves to appeal to Washington as a critical minerals destination. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew recently announced that the province is opening a trade office in the US. “Using this new investment in the United States of America,” Kinew said, “we’re going to ensure that that message that we’re a trusted partner, [and] a safe and secure source of critical minerals for the next generation, is heard loud and clear as we begin to work with the Trump administration 2.0.”
Ryerson asks:
How would you go about grabbing a country from under the feet of its inhabitants—if you happened to be a very big-time gangster? Part of the technique would doubtless be to get all its well-meaning citizens to look in the opposite direction… Then, with their eyes fixed on some distant and mysterious object, they’d never notice what was being filched from them.
Back then, the menace that allegedly threatened ordinary Canadians was “communism.” Now the threat is an amorphous Eastern bloc of “authoritarians” led by Russia and China, which are supposedly infecting the minds of Canadians with propaganda designed to “undermine trust in democratic institutions and exacerbate societal divisions within Canadian society.”
While Ottawa blames Russia for deepening rifts in Canadian society, corporate papers in this country shamelessly declare that popular protest movements are “a threat to Canada” and to “humanity’s values,” and baselessly assert that “everyone agrees” we need to massively increase military spending in the midst of a climate emergency, food insecurity crisis, housing meltdown, health care collapse, and worsening inequality. Meanwhile, journalists who are critical of the state may face public smearing, as veteran Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese did when former government official Chris Alexander accused him of being a “Russian agent” at a parliamentary hearing.
Ryerson writes:
For Wall Street and the Canadian millionaires, the whipped-up anti-Communist and war hysteria serves a double purpose. It ‘justifies’ the gangster methods of US imperialism in Europe (‘vote for free enterprise—or else!’). It covers up the real, profiteering purpose of Wall Street’s worldwide grab for control of markets and investment areas… And at home, it enables the big shots to forestall people’s protest movements, to move towards union-busting and the big business police-state—fascism—before the economic crisis breaks.
Unlike Mexico, which stood up to Trump’s annexationist rhetoric in a strongly worded statement from President Claudia Sheinbaum, Ottawa has gone out of its way to placate the returning president. “[O]ur response in Canada,” says Carlo Dade of the Canada West Foundation, “is just to start throwing stuff on the table and hoping that something will tickle Trump’s fancy.” The same shrinking response will certainly be true of a government under Pierre Poilievre, who owes much of his political fortune to the transnational right-wing movement of which Trump is the champion.
Almost eighty years later, Ryerson’s question remains relevant. Why should Canadians abide a government that bends over backwards to appease the US, an “ally” whose interest in Canada goes not much further than defence spending and natural resources? Why should we abide a system in which our political and economic rulers willingly subjugate themselves to the bully next door?
Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 and the co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy with Yves Engler.