Diane Francis didn’t move to Canada to cause controversy. She crossed the border from her native U.S. with something entirely different in mind: “I immigrated with a draft dodger during the Vietnam War.”
Long after the war was over, she stayed, she gained Canadian citizenship, she raised her children in her adopted country. And then she wrote the book that had her “blacklisted” from some media circles and frozen out from others.
“A lot of Canadians hated the book,” she says, in a video interview from her luxury condominium in Toronto. “They hated the idea that someone would even write the book.” Though it sold well in a number of countries, it was barely reviewed inside Canada: people didn’t want to talk about the elephant in the room, she believes. Francis’s Canadian kids “did not like it,” either.
Then, 12 years later, Donald Trump said Canada should become America’s 51st state. And people started to whisper about whether Francis might have been right all along.
The book in question was The Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. Published in 2013, it wasn’t entirely received as Francis intended.
“It was really a warning,” she tells me. “Okay, get yourself organized, guys. You’ve got a great country — we’ve got a great country here, and you know, frankly, we don’t want their gun laws and we don’t want their lousy healthcare system, their crime rates, blah, blah. So let’s do something about it. Or — and I said this very clearly — they’re gonna make a takeover bid, and they’re gonna gobble us up.”
Francis understands why Canadians would bristle at the suggestion (indeed, a recent study found 94 percent of Canadians are opposed to becoming part of the U.S.). She herself found Trump’s comment about Canada becoming America’s 51st state offensive. But it was clearly just “trash talk,” she says. “It was insulting. But I don’t criticize Trump for that, because frankly — and I’m saying this as an American citizen, and I love the place — they’re very ignorant about other countries.”
Nevertheless, there’s something legitimate there to open a negotiation, she adds. “If I were the prime minister of Canada tomorrow, I’d go down and say: ‘Look, President Trump, totally understand your M.O., I get it. You’re right. I wrote a book about it. We haven’t been pulling our weight. Here’s what we propose. We will double the amount we spend on the military. We will procure everything from pencils to tanks from U.S. suppliers — that will help with the trade deficit. And that’s my pledge.’ For him, that’s a big win.”
“I’d just say, you know, we can’t take a tariff,” she adds, of Trump’s recent threats to impose sweeping 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada. “That’ll cause trouble for you guys too. And so, would you please rethink the tariff if we do those things? And what else would you like us to do? We’ll consider.”
Francis has been saying for a while that the merging of Canada and the U.S. is “inevitable,” and that the best way Canadians can respond to that inevitability is by working seriously on the deal. In one of the thought experiments she put forward in the past, she suggested that promising free healthcare for life would soften the blow for Canadians wary of a fully merged Canada-U.S.
These days, however, she thinks that if Canada and the U.S. did become one country, their political systems would have to remain separated. Although she points out that many northern American states — such as Vermont, Washington, New York, Oregon, or Maine — tend to have laws very similar, or even more progressive, than Canada itself, she accepts that other states have moved further apart from their Canadian neighbors on issues like abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and gun control since she wrote the book. That would mean a less easy, though still workable, union, where politics are devolved.
Considering that it’s already very easy for Americans and Canadians to live and work in each others’ countries, a fully open border wouldn’t be seen as a positive these days, either — by Americans or Canadians. Canada — whose health care system is “far superior,” Francis points out — could become “deluged with health care refugees.” Either the U.S. changes its approach to health care (which she thinks is coming, especially after the outpouring of anger following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York) or the border should have some controls retained around it. That’s likely what Americans want right now, as well, considering the anti-immigration bent of Trump’s second term.
By working to merge in an intelligent and nuanced way, however, the countries could still work together to take advantage of Canada’s vast natural resources, she says. That doesn’t mean the U.S. simply trying to seize Canada’s assets for its own (“I don’t think the Americans realize how much it would cost them. The calculation I made was 17 trillion [dollars]. That’s half a million per person in Canada. That’s a lot of money. And why do it unless you have to? They don’t have to.”).
But it does mean that “Canada could say: ‘Yeah, you know, you’re right about the Arctic, but we have a small population. We’ll build military bases up there to help and you can partner in resource development, but we don’t have any infrastructure up there. So, we’ll do some of that. That’s how it could be structured.” Indeed, Francis is a true pragmatist, who isn’t interested in being dragged into the war of words she sees escalating between American and Canadian politicians right now: “The grandstanding is amusing to me.”
