Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Canada will 'never be the 51st state,' rebuking U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s latest social media post.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Canada will “never be the 51st state," rebuking U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s latest social media post.
Ford made the remark while appearing on CTV News Toronto’s Toy Mountain segment on Wednesday night.
“Canadians take care of Canadians. We don’t need to be anybody’s 51st state,” Canadian actor and comedian Mike Myers said in a video aired during the segment.
The premier agreed.
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With all the talk about Annexing Greenland, which does not want to be a part of the US at all, I'm reminded of my personal pet peeve, that Puerto Rico has voted to become a State four different times now and there's literally no conversation on making that happen. I bet most of you had no idea they voted again to become a State in November.
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Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.
That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact. NAFTA and USMCA are, at root, a way to make rich people richer by making poorer people poorer. Trump's base hated NAFTA because they (correctly) believed that it was being used to erode wages by chasing cheaper labor and more lax environmental controls in other countries. Neither NAFTA nor USMCA have any stipulations requiring exported goods to be manufactured by unionized workers, or in factories with robust environmental and workplace safety rules.
The point of NAFTA/USMCA is to goose profits by despoiling the environment, maiming workers, stealing their wages, paying them less, all while poisoning the Earth. Trump's "new" NAFTA was just the old NAFTA with some largely cosmetic changes so that Trump's base could be (temporarily) fooled into thinking Trump was righting the historic wrong of NAFTA.
However, there was one part of USMCA that marked a huge departure from NAFTA: the "IP" chapter. USCMA bound Canada and Mexico to implementing brutal new IP laws. For example, Mexico was forced to pass an anti-circumvention law that makes it a crime to tamper with "digital locks." This means that Mexican mechanics can't bypass the locks US car companies use to lock-out third party repair. Mexican farmers can't fix their own tractors. And, of course, Mexican software developers can't make alternative app stores for games consoles and mobile devices – they must sell their software through US Big Tech companies that take 30% of every sale:
Shamefully, Canada had already capitulated to most of these demands. Two Canadian Conservative Party politicians, Tony Clement and James Moore, had sold the country out in 2012, throwing away 6,138 negative responses to a consultation on a new DRM law (on the grounds that they were "babyish" views of "radical extremists"), siding instead with the 54 cranks and industry shills who supported their proposal:
When Canadian politicians are pressed on why these anti-interoperability policies are good for Canada, they'll say that it's a condition of free trade, and the benefits of being able to export Canadian goods to the US without tariffs outweigh the costs of having to pay rents to American companies for consumables (like car parts or printer ink), repair, and software sales.
Sure, when Canadian software authors sell iPhone apps to Canadian customers, the payments take a round trip through Cupertino, California and return 30% short. But Canadian consumers get to buy iPhones without paying tariffs on them, and the oil, timber, and minerals we rip out of the ground can be sent to America without tariffs, either (oh, also, a few things that are still manufactured in Canada can do this, too).
Enter Trump, carrying a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods, which he has vowed to impose on his first day in office. Obviously, this demands a policy response. What should Canada do when Trump tears up his "big, beautiful" trade deal and whacks Canadian exporters? One obvious response is to impose a 25% retaliatory tariff on American exporters:
After all, Canada and the US are one another's mutual largest trading partners. American businesses rely on selling things to Canadians, so a massive tariff on US goods will certainly make some of Trump's business-lobby backers feel pain, and maybe they'll talk some sense into him.
I think this would be a huge mistake. The most potent political lesson of the past four years is that politicians who preside over rising prices – regardless of their role in causing them – will swiftly feel the wrath of their voters. The public is furious about inflation, whether it comes from transient covid supply chain shocks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or cartels using "inflation" as cover for illegal, collusive price-gouging.
Canadians are very reliant on American imports of finished goods. That's another legacy of NAFTA: it crashed Canada's manufacturing sector. Canadian manufacturing companies treated the US as a "nearshore" source of non-union labor and weak environmental and safety rules, and shipped Canadian union jobs to American scabs. Canada's economy is supposedly now all about "services" but what we really export is stuff we tear out of the Earth.
Countries that are organized around resource extraction don't need fancy social safety nets or an educational system capable of producing a high-tech workforce. All you need to extract resources is a hole in the ground surrounded by guns, which explains a lot about shifts to the Canadian political climate since the Mulroney years.
Since Canada is now substantially reorganized as an open-pit mine for American manufacturers, cutting off American imports would drive the prices of everyday good sky-high, and would be political suicide.
But there's another way.
Because, of course, Canada – like any other country – has the capacity to make all kinds of things, including high-tech things. Sure, it's unlikely that Canada will launch another Research in Motion with a Blackberry smart-phone that will put the iPhone and Android in the shade. The mobile duopoly has the market sewn up, and can use predatory pricing, refusal to deal, and other anticompetitive tactics to strangle any competitor in its cradle.
But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That's a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple's 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.
There's no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don't get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.
Canadian companies like Honeybee already make "front-ends" for John Deere tractors – these are the components that turn a tractor into a plow, or a thresher, or another piece of heavy agricultural equipment. Honeybee struggles constantly to get its products to interface with Deere tractors, because Deere uses digital locks to block its products:
https://honeybee.ca/
Canada could produce jailbreaking kits for John Deere tractors, too – not just for Honeybee. Every ag-tech company in the world would benefit from commercially available, professionally supported John Deere jailbreaking kits. So would farmers, because these kits would restore farmers' Right to Repair their own tractors:
Speaking of repair: Canadian companies could jailbreak every make and model of every US automobile, and make independent, constantly updated diagnostic tools that every mechanic in the world could buy for hundreds of dollars, rather than paying the five-figure ransom that car makers charge for their own underpowered, junk versions of these tools.
Jailbreaking cars doesn't stop with repair, either. Cars like the Tesla are basically giant rent-extraction machines. If you want to use all the "features" your Tesla ships with – like access to the full charge on your battery – you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees over the life of the car, and when you sell your car, all that "downloadable content" is clawed back. No one will pay extra to buy your used Tesla just because you spent thousands on manufacturer upgrades, because they're all downgraded when you sign over the pink slip.
But Canadian companies could make jailbreaking kits for Teslas that unlock all the features in the car for a single low price – and again, they could sell these to every Tesla owner in the world.
Elon Musk doesn't invent anything, he just takes credit for other people's ideas, and that's as true of bad ideas as it is for good ones. Musk didn't invent the extractive Tesla rip-off: he stole it from inkjet printer companies like HP, who have used the fact that jailbreaking is illegal to turn printer ink into the most expensive fluid in the world, selling for more than $10,000/gallon.
Canadian companies could sell jailbreaking kits for inkjet printers that disconnect them from "subscription" services and disable the anti-features that check for and reject third party ink. People all over the world would buy these.
What's standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?
Only the IP laws that Canada has agreed to in order to get tariff-free access to American markets. You know, the access that Trump has promised to end in less than a week's time?
Canada should tear up these laws – and not impose tariffs on American goods. That way, Canadians can still buy cheap American goods, and then they can save billions of dollars every year on the consumables, parts, software, and service for those goods.
This is hurting American big business where it hurts – in the ongoing rents it extracts from Canadians through IP laws like Bill C-11 (the law that bans jailbreaking). Canada could become a global high-tech export powerhouse, selling "complementary" goods that disenshittify all the worst practices of US tech monopolists, from car parts to insulin pumps.
It's the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don't go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.
Canada can win this kind of war, even against a country as big and powerful as the USA. After all, we did it once before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CK3EDncjGI
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Trump addressed his recent attacks on Canada in an interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Tuesday.
"You're tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries. Why?" Ingraham asked.
"Only because it's meant to be our 51st state," Trump replied.
The president added that Canada is "one of the nastiest countries to deal with."
Trump also dismissed the fact that his rhetoric seems to be helping the Liberal Party ahead of an upcoming general election in the neighboring country, apparently taking a swipe at Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.
"I don't care," Trump said. "I'd rather deal with a liberal than a conservative."
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Taking another zany plan by the president seriously because he cannot possibly do so.
Matt Ford at TNR:
President Donald Trump suggested earlier this week that Venezuela should be annexed by the United States. He reportedly told Fox News correspondent John Roberts—not to be confused with the chief justice—that he was “seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the 51st state.”
This is a far-fetched idea, to say the least. Venezuela has no interest in voluntarily becoming a U.S. state, as its acting president Delcy Rodriguez told reporters on Monday. “We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” she told reporters, saying that Venezuela was “not a colony, but a free country.”
U.S. forces managed to infiltrate the country and arrest former president Nicolas Maduro earlier this year, which led to Rodriguez’s interim presidency. Trump suggested in January that the U.S. would play some kind of administrative role over the country after capturing Maduro, but no such direct control appears to exist. Venezuela retains every functional attribute of sovereignty.
I would welcome anyone to join the United States, so long as they do so freely, voluntarily, and democratically, and so long as they agree to live under the Constitution and its principles. I would not support the forcible annexation of any country or territory to the United States under any circumstances. If the Trump administration sought to seize any territory by force or coercion, the next Democratic president would be legally and morally obligated to return it to its previous status.
For that reason, it is worth thinking through the legal and constitutional implications of annexing Venezuela, Greenland, or even Canada—especially since they are not favorable to the Trump administration’s other political, social, and cultural priorities. The United States has not annexed a significant portion of foreign territory within living memory. While Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union in 1959, respectively, they had already been organized U.S. territories long before statehood.
It is crucial that Trump specified that Venezuela would become the fifty-first state, not an incorporated territory or some insular possession. (He may be unaware of those options.) Some U.S. acquisitions have not resulted in statehood. After the Spanish-American War, for example, the United States took possession of a medley of former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. None of them have become U.S. states.
The United States had no plans to hold Cuba long-term and the island nation gained formal independence in 1902. The Philippines would only obtain independence in 1946 after decades of colonial rule. Puerto Rico and Guam remain under U.S. control to this day. Though Puerto Rican independence and statehood are often alternatively discussed on the island and in D.C., Congress has taken no steps down either path—and in the case of Puerto Ricans, the matter is the subject of heated internal debate.
Trump’s described outcome—that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela immediately becomes a state—most closely resembles that of Texas, whereby a fully independent nation was admitted to the Union without first being a territory. But it is unclear whether Trump has considered the full implications of statehood for Venezuela. The first and most obvious consequence is political representation. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that roughly 32 million people live in Venezuela, which would make it the second most populous state in the Union behind only California.
For clarity’s sake, let us imagine that Venezuela is formally admitted into the Union on January 1, 2027 by a joint resolution of Congress. At that moment, the U.S. state of Venezuela is instantly eligible for representation in the U.S. Senate. The state government in Caracas could fill these new vacancies through whatever method it prescribes by law until the next election cycle, as authorized by the Seventeenth Amendment.
Donald Trump’s 51st state annexation fetish is now centered on Venezuela.
