“We’re the Danny DeVito to America’s Arnold Schwarzenegger”: A Canada–US historian on Donald Trump’s 51st-state threats

Norman Hillmer has devoted his career to the unique relationship between Canada and our southern neighbour. Still, nothing could have prepared him for the current state of affairs, with Donald Trump’s hate-on for our country leading to an economic assault and threats that felt empty a few weeks ago—including Trump’s plan to make Canada “the 51st state”—becoming a lot more worrisome. “It is very clear he has Canada in his sights,” says Hillmer, a professor of history and international relations at Carleton University. Here, he explains our current chaos through the lens of history and why Justin Trudeau’s Mean Girls act at the 2019 NATO summit may be coming back to haunt us.

When Trump first started talking about “the 51st state” a few months ago, most people wrote it off as the ramblings of an egomaniacal gasbag. Now you have Trudeau describing the recent tariffs as part of a strategy to collapse Canada’s economy to make it easier to annex. What happened? We did see the public as well as political leaders laugh it off at the beginning, but the seriousness has accumulated. Partly because Trump just keeps coming at us with what seems to be a real vendetta against Canada, and more importantly because he keeps widening the agenda. First it was about fentanyl and the border, then this idea of a trade deficit to justify tariffs. Now, according to a recent New York Times report, he’s telling Justin Trudeau he wants to dismantle the agreements and conventions and treaties that govern the border. Related: How Trump’s whopping 25 per cent tariffs would hit Canadians’ wallets

Could he actually do that? Well, there’s the Canada–US–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), but that also says he can’t hit us with these tariffs, yet he’s doing it anyway in the name of national security. So god knows what he might do with the border using the same justification. I have no idea how you dismantle a border without putting troops on it. Maybe he plans to just edit US maps, the way he did with the Gulf of Mexico. The thing about Trump is that we are in entirely new territory. As a historian of the Canadian–American relationship, I have spent decades studying a dynamic that has been not perfect but largely dependable: two countries, deeply interconnected, running in parallel. There have been conflicts and moments of discord—along will come a Richard Nixon, and he’ll growl and scowl at Canada, or George W. Bush won’t be happy that we didn’t go to Iraq or we weren’t cooperating on missile defence. But, over time and overall, Canada and America have become inseparable. John Ralston Saul called them the siamese twins of North America, who cannot separate and live, and that has always been the way that I teach this subject. But now along comes Trump, and we’re on completely new terrain—more than 150 years of productive relations knocked right off its pins.

What can history teach us about our current quagmire? Certainly American power has bared down on Canada a number of times. At the turn of the century, the Americans messed with us on the Alaska boundary. The idea of Canada as a 51st state didn’t come around until Hawaii and Alaska became states in the late 1950s, but there were annexationists and flare-ups throughout the 19th century, along with fears that if we get too close to the Americans, we’ll just become another state. And then in the 1988 election there was a famous Liberal attack ad where the Canada–US border is wiped out because this guy Brian Mulroney was proposing free trade. What’s funny is that today you see something similar, with a lobby group called Protecting Canada running an anti-Pierre-Poilievre ad showing the border being erased, all in an attempt to tar him with the Trump brush.

Related: What a Pierre Poilievre election win could mean for Toronto

The legacy of NAFTA, and more recently CUSMA, has played a big part in Canadian prosperity. Is there now reason to rethink these agreements? There is no question that NAFTA made Canada rich. It was a grand success, so much so that by the end of the ’90s, Time magazine and Maclean’s were both running covers that basically showed the Canadian and American flags merging. The idea was that there was going to be a borderless North America. The Carnegie Institute for International Peace said it was going to be among the most integrated relationships of any two countries or group of countries in the world, on a par with the European Union. And then 9/11 happened, and American priorities shifted. If you’re applying the wisdom of hindsight to NAFTA, perhaps you could say that we should have paid more attention to the possible pitfalls. John Turner, the Liberal who ran against Mulroney in 1988, said at the time that we were giving away the East–West economy that we’d built up over 100 years, and that doing so would leave us weaker and more vulnerable. It’s hard to not see a direct line between that warning and where we are today. Related: How Torontonians feel about the looming US tariff threat and boycotting American alcohol

Going back to the siamese twin analogy, how important is it that one twin is a lot larger and more powerful than the other? In my class, I joke that Canada is Danny DeVito to America’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. And given that we are Danny DeVito, we have done really well over the years, right up into the 2018 renegotiation of NAFTA during Trump’s first administration. And it’s not like we haven’t tried to enhance economic relationships elsewhere in the world. It’s just that Japan and Europe are both so far away, meanwhile we have Schwarzenegger living in the same house, speaking the same language.

It sounds like you’re saying Canada may have become too invested in a marriage of convenience. I think given what’s happening today we can see how NAFTA may have made us more vulnerable. I’m not speaking economically so much as psychologically. With everything going so well, we got complacent, we stopped spending any money on defence, certainly we never thought about dismantling these trade barriers between provinces.

In terms of defence spending, could Canada ever spend enough to defend itself against the Terminator? It’s more a question of whether we are keeping up our end of the bargain, and I think the answer is we are not. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the last prime minister to spend 2 per cent on defence, which is our obligation as members of NATO, so basically we are members of this club and we haven’t paid our dues. A lot of that has to do with the assumption that America would have our back, and now suddenly that is not where we’re at, so it’s a question of vulnerability. It’s like we were sleepwalking, and now suddenly we’ve woken up and the world is so much more dangerous. It’s not just Russia on the move—America is on the move.

At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on old Canada, because in the past, Schwarzenegger was always a pretty good housemate, and nobody could have anticipated Trump. He’s just a complete monster and entirely unpredictable: he put these tariffs on, and then he took them off. Now he’s talking about Canadian dairy, Canadian banks—not that he knows anything about either, but that doesn’t matter since his only goal is to break things, to cause chaos. So I don’t think we can have any idea about what’s next for tariffs or any other policy-related matters. I think it’s a safe bet that he’s not going to stop the nastiness, whether we have “governor” Poilievre or “governor” Mark Carney. He definitely seems to have Canada in his mind.

Related: Auto expert Flavio Volpe breaks down why tariffs will bring car manufacturing to a screeching halt

Any idea why that is? Trump’s first administration was not without scandal, but Canada mostly escaped his crosshairs. I think you can look at the Toronto Trump Tower, which didn’t work out. And then there was the 2019 NATO summit, where Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson were making fun of Trump behind his back—the big boys humiliated him, and Saturday Night Live did a skit about it. Taking it away from the personal, Canada has things that give us leverage: Alberta beef, Ontario energy, minerals that are so important in the making of new technologies. Canada has the Arctic, which is going to be the playground—or the battleground—of the future, although we have done next to nothing about it. Now the ice is melting and it’s easier to pass through those waters. China is even interested in the Arctic, as is Russia and the US. Suddenly Canada seems nearer to the centre of the world than we’ve ever thought of ourselves.

Right, but aren’t these instruments of leverage also reasons we make a good target for Trump’s annexation fantasies? But how do you do that? The United States is smaller than Canada, and we’re going to become one state? How could that ever work, just in terms of integration? And then look at the electoral consequences of absorbing a democratic state whose citizens would never vote for the Republican leadership. We know from polling that Canadians would have voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris, just as we would have voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.

Can we even assume democratic rights, though? Not so long ago, everything that’s happening today seemed straight out of dystopian fiction. Is some kind of militarized takeover really so far off? With Trump, everything is on the table. That said, he has been adverse to the use of the military in the past: he was the guy who negotiated the deal to get troops out of Afghanistan, even though Joe Biden took the blame. Just in January, he said that he would consider using military force to acquire Panama or Greenland, but that he will use economic force against Canada. I guess we can never say never. It’s bad enough what Trump is doing to America’s international reputation, but to invade Canada, can you imagine? I mean, it’s just unthinkable. We’re talking Russia and Ukraine, just walking into your next door neighbour and doing what? I realize this is a poor choice of words, but that would be really crossing a line. If you were tracking signs that the line could be crossed, what would you be looking out for? I don’t think annexation is the real threat, at least not in terms of geography. Instead, it’s more of an annexing of our minds, and that is also dangerous. Trump is intent on wearing us down, the way he’s wearing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy down with brutal, callous ridicule, and eventually he may normalize the idea that it would be better for Canada to join the United States. There was a poll back in January that showed a disturbing number of young Canadians—43 per cent—said they would vote in favour of Canada joining the US if they were offered full citizenship and had their Canadian assets converted into USD, and I worry what it would mean if Trump continues to shake our resolution and our confidence as Canadians. On the other hand, I think you are seeing other signs that what’s happening could be motivating Canadians to come together: there’s definitely been a rise in patriotism, and we’re having discussions about how we can work together against this common enemy.

You’re saying there may be a silver lining or at least reason to keep the faith? I think we are definitely seeing Trump overstretching: Panama is the 51st state, Gaza is the 51st state, Greenland, Ukraine. It’s just crazy. And then you look at the state of America itself and the way Trump’s behaviour is weakening the country both internationally and domestically. In terms of Canadians and our reaction, I think Trump has made a mistake in reminding us what our country means to us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.