OTTAWA—Every day, just before sunset, 33-year-old Ryan Hemsley heads to Clover Point, a scenic stretch along the southern coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. When the weather is clear, he can look across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and see the Olympic Mountains in Washington State.
“Subconsciously, there’s something that keeps bringing me here every day,” Hemsley told me. Watching the Seattle ferry return to the U.S., his thoughts drift to an unlikely fantasy.
“How can I be a stowaway so I can be an American?” he said.
Hemsley insists he has no intention of crossing the border illegally. But when president-elect Donald Trump recently referred to the “great state of Canada,” while trolling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor,” and claiming that “many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st state,” it struck a nerve.
Canada’s top officials universally said Trump was joking. Hemsley, on the other hand, saw potential. Recently, he said, his country has become stagnant, a place where ambition dies and potential is squandered. Despite earning a decent living as a car salesman, he can’t afford to buy a house or plan for a future.
“You wake up and survive,” he said. “There’s no opportunity for growth. You occasionally go out for dinner with friends, have a good night, but then you go home, sleep, and do it all over again.”
“As much as I love Canada,” he said, “Canada becoming the 51st state of the United States would rejuvenate me.”
For Canadians like Hemsley, Trump’s remarks have reignited a centuries-old debate, stretching at least as far back as Calixa Lavallée, the French Canadian composer who wrote the music for “O Canada,” fought in the American Civil War, and thought Quebec should be part of the United States. A recent poll found that 13 percent of Canadians favor becoming America’s 51st state. Among supporters of the country’s Conservative Party, that number rises to 21 percent. In the western province of Alberta, support stands at 19 percent. Those figures are far from a majority, but how many Americans would even consider becoming Canadian? It’s almost unthinkable.
I spoke to a dozen Canadians who said they were ready to pay fealty to Uncle Sam. Barbara Murphy, 75, who lives on a farm in Milton, Ontario, and runs a pottery business, was one of them.
“I wouldn’t fight for Canada because no one fights for it. Canadians are a kept people,” Murphy told me. “They have no idea who they are.”
Murphy agrees with Trudeau, who famously said that Canada is the world’s first “post-national state,” with no “core identity.”
“We don’t celebrate our culture like the Americans because we’re embarrassed by it,” she added.
Combine that sentiment with dissatisfaction over the national economy and you can see why some Canucks would prefer to be U.S. citizens. Average income per person in Canada is 73 percent of the U.S. level, and the country’s economy has been largely flat for a decade. Despite recent worries about inflation, the U.S. economy, in contrast, has been growing steadily for 15 years except for 2020, when much of the country shut down at the height of the pandemic.
“My grandchildren would have far more opportunities than they do in this country. My 16-year-old grandson can’t even get an entry-level job at a Tim Hortons,” Murphy told me, referring to Canada’s ubiquitous coffee chain.
Many Canadian malcontents also expressed dissatisfaction with the outsize role of their country’s government. The federal government is Canada’s largest employer and accounts for 40 percent of the economy. In the U.S., government spending has accounted for about a quarter of the gross domestic product since 1900, although it exploded during the pandemic, reaching a high of 47 percent in 2020.
“It’s almost as if what the government wants is for people to be totally dependent upon them in every facet of their lives,” LisaMarie Nicholson, 56, who recently retired from a job as an executive assistant for a major bank, told me. “They want to be able to give you the handout so you don’t feel that you can take care of yourself. They want to be able to control the medical system so that you are at their mercy when you’re not well. They want to be able to tell you what to do and when to do it and how to do it. And there’s a big component of this country who wants that.”
Taylor Simone, 32, a film and television professional from Vancouver, who makes ends meet working as a server and manager at a restaurant, agrees. “If Canada were to become the 51st state, I wouldn’t protest it too much,” she told me. “If I had the economic ability to buy a house in Canada, I would never have come to this point.”
Noah Meyer-Delouya, 27, who is originally from Ottawa, and moved to New York this year to work for a start-up as an accountant, seconded that. “Canada right now is like a super-old dog that can’t walk,” he told me. “You want to put it out of its misery because it’s functioning so poorly in so many ways. Canada would be better off currently as the 51st state and I say that with a lot of sadness and disappointment.”
Like many Jewish Canadians, Meyer-Delouya believes that antisemitism is worse in Canada than in the U.S. Despite the small size of the Jewish community in Canada, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism found a 670 percent increase in antisemitic incidents there since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. “The Jewish community is more embedded in the fabric of American society,” Meyer-Delouya said. “I just automatically feel safer being in the U.S.”
Meanwhile, Kori Anstey, 48, from Temiskaming Shores, Ontario, said she felt “terrified” in 2022 when the government cracked down on truckers in Ottawa protesting Covid vaccine requirements. Her husband was unvaccinated and lost his job at a construction company as a result. “The authoritarianism that crept in has taken over. Canadians are afraid to speak up. Becoming the 51st state would mean we would at least get the First Amendment because free speech is ultimate freedom for me,” she said.
Nicholson said her husband, who had worked for the city of Toronto for 20 years, was fired after he refused to take a Covid vaccine. Afterward, they moved to Lethbridge, Alberta, hoping it would be a place with fewer restrictions and closer in ethos to the U.S.
“I didn’t always like Americans,” Nicholson admitted to me. “We were taught to think Americans were rude and obnoxious and full of themselves. But now my thinking has completely changed, because what I see down there when I spend time there is that there is a real pride about being an American. They have pride in who they are and what they stand for, and they really do believe in freedom, and they’re willing to stand up and die for that.
“What is Canada anymore? Can anybody define it for me?” she asked.
Both the U.S. and Canada were once British colonies. But while the U.S. was born through revolution, Canada began its road toward independence through an act of British Parliament in 1867. Not a single shot was fired. Since then, Canada has prioritized “peace, order, and good government” (a phrase from the country’s founding document) rather than the American credo of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And many of the people I spoke with longed for a Canada that is less polite and more proactive, more ambitious, and less constrained. “The Americans are revolutionary people. They fought for their freedoms. They will tear shit down if it’s bad and build it back up. We don’t. We patch, patch, patch,” Murphy told me.
Even Stockwell Day—who served as minister of public safety in the cabinet of Stephen Harper, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister until he was defeated by Trudeau’s Liberal Party in 2015—understands why his compatriots want to defect.
Day, who was invited to Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, told me he’s heard “chatter” from sources in Washington, D.C., that Trump might offer native-born Canadians a crack at American citizenship, and he thinks such an offer would have a lot of takers. “People are tired. They are despairing that the political scene might not change significantly enough that the long-term prospect of staying in Canada looks positive,” he said.
Trump’s comments even seem to have given the independence movement in Quebec a new impetus. While the separatists’ preferred alternative is a fully independent nation of Quebec, some haven’t ruled out a merger with the U.S.
Philippe Boileau, 59, a chemist and consulting scientist who lives in Thetford Mines, Quebec, is a committed separatist with deep roots in the movement. When I asked him why citizens of French-speaking Quebec would want to be absorbed into the United States, he told me he wanted to “be rid of the Anglo supremacists in English-speaking Canada.”
“States in the U.S. have much more power than provinces within Canada,” Boileau added.
When I spoke to Ryan Hemsley on the phone, he texted me a photo from Clover Point. It was a little too cloudy for a clear picture of the setting sun.
“I’ve lost all hope for Canada,” he said, getting emotional. “If Trump were to say you’ve got 24 hours of amnesty, whoever gets here, gets here, I’m telling you, I’m not even bringing my car. I’m swimming across.”
