What Trump and his Canadian counterparts could achieve if they set aside their differences and apply some common sense is fascinating.
Why can’t Americans and Canadians get along? More specifically, why hasn’t talk about a US-Canadian union ever really caught on?
The two countries have far more in common than might be expected. They share a common language, a common geography, even a common economic landscape. Both are nations of immigrants, particularly Scottish immigrants who in the nineteenth century served as “the shock troops of modernization,” in Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, providing the first echelon of industrial labor for an emerging America — and for a unified Canada.
Given the commonalities, more than one commentator (including media personality and former Canadian citizen Kevin O’Leary) has raised the specter of a U.S.-Canadian economic union, even a North American monetary union, with Canadians retaining their national sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of integration into the much larger, and substantially more tax-free, U.S. economy.
The idea, nevertheless, has gained almost no traction, even with (or perhaps because of) President Trump’s declared effort to get Canadians to think of themselves as the 51st state. Recent polls like the Pew Research Center (July 2025) suggest only about a third of Canadians have a favorable view of the U.S., while Americans generally view Canada as a friendly, even important, ally. Of course, American conservatives tend to see Canada as a haven of “woke” and left-wing politics. Canadians, on the other side, may wonder whether the United States has allowed “rugged individualism” to run riot.
Both stereotypes have some reality behind them. The reason may lie with the way the United States and Canada reflect different sides of the same intellectual movement that was sweeping the English-speaking world at the time of their formation, namely the Scottish Enlightenment. However, as we’ll see, that same movement might also offer the key for drawing the two countries together at last, to embrace their common economic future, and their common destiny.
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