Chris Champion is editor of 'The Dorchester Review,' a scholarly magazine devoted to Canadian historyThere should be no surprise at President Trump’s hyperbole about taking over Canada.The prickly replies from Canada’s professorial class and politicians are also quite predictable. Nor is it surprising that many Canadians agree with Trump.We have seen it all before.Americans have boasted about taking over Canada since the 1600s.With nearly 400 years of experience, Canadians should be more than accustomed to carefully managing American mood-swings and grandiose claims. .Some have managed them better than others.In 1690 New England was a fractious hotbed of militant Protestant sectarianism, Quebec a bastion of Roman Catholicism. Massachusetts sent an invasion flotilla of over 30 ships, “quite confident that the cowardly and effete French” and their Canadien proteges “would be no match for their hardy men,” wrote historian René Chartrand. Boston’s goal was “the reducing of Canada unto Their obedience.”The expedition’s commander, Kennebec-born Sir William Phips, was “ignorant, brutal, covetous and violent,” according to contemporary chronicler Sir John Fortescue.Trump’s enemies say the same of him. At the very least, says a Canadian admirer, Frank Buckley, Trump is “an authentic American voice, brash, exuberant, not always polite.”“Trump is, I should have thought, the very picture of what an American is, in the eyes of Canadians,” wrote the Saskatoon-born Trump speechwriter, who is Foundation Professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, in the Spring 2016 edition of The Dorchester Review, “a person who could only be an American.”The President’s 2018 gambit to Justin Trudeau, “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” showed his penchant for testing a person’s mettle.We don’t know what Trudeau said in response. Either he balked and grimaced or he bleated that “that wasn’t us it was the British,” which is the standard “little Canadian” script, only partly-right..CHAMPION: Did Canadians really burn the White House? .I prefer Governor General Frontenac’s riposte 335 years ago: “I have no reply to make to your general other than from the mouths of my cannons and muskets.”The Americans were defeated in 1690 — proof that patriotic stereotypes and derring-do are no substitute for sound intelligence-gathering.The same applied when Thomas Jefferson said in 1812 that the conquest of Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” They torched Niagara and Toronto, but we got them back with the sack of Washington in 1814.It was just like Benjamin Franklin’s mission to Montreal in 1775. The American rebels were surprised when the local Canadien elite spurned their invitation to join them against the British.Poor planning, training, and/or logistics turned America’s invasions of 1690, 1775 and 1812 into Canada’s wars of independence — from the United States.The only successful American military invasion of Canada was that of the Five Nations Iroquois who in 1648-49 attacked and almost wiped out the Huron-Wendat of Georgian Bay. Most Huron who were not tortured and killed (chiefly captive women and children) were forcibly assimilated to replace lost braves.(It is the only type of forced assimilation and cultural genocide in Canadian history, because the residential schools were not.)When it comes to annexationism, Canadians themselves have mused about it just as often as Yankees and talk of “the 51st state” has long been a staple. Some Canadians think we would be better off.Even the great Canadien nationalist, Louis-Joseph Papineau, who fled to the U.S. when violence broke out in 1837, began saying in 1845 that his language and culture would stand a better chance of survival if Lower Canada were part of the United States, very mistakenly pointing to Louisiana as an example.In turn, English Montrealers gravitated towards annexation. Their Annexation Manifesto of 1849 called for “a friendly and peaceful separation from the British connection and a Union upon equitable terms with the great North American confederacy of sovereign states.”Cooler heads prevailed and some of the signatories, like future Prime Minister John J.C. Abbott, supported Confederation in 1867.Many of the first English Canadians were Americans. Hundreds migrated to Quebec from the Thirteen Colonies after 1760. Later over 100,000 loyalists settled in Nova Scotia and Quebec and their descendants became influential.It’s important to recall that however much the loyalists professed allegiance to the Crown, they were fundamentally American, products of a fervent and irascible culture.Later still, a million Americans settled in the Prairie provinces and B.C. Today only 350,000 Canadians claim American ancestry but 18.5% of Canadian citizens (which means over six million) have dual U.S. citizenship. And 71% of Canadians in a 2024 poll have a positive opinion of the United States.Faced with an American takeover today, would Canadians put up a fight?Probably not. I expect most Canadians would not believe our differences with the U.S. are important enough to die or destroy cities for. And people who are anti-American today are largely the same people who believe Canada should not spend much on defence!In short, Canadians would roll over and submit.Of course Canada could never rival the United States as a military power.Canada’s Victorian-era re-founders knew that too. They believed the differences between Canada and the U.S. were important enough to avoid a fight, and even to take an economic hit.Also, Canadian leadership was steeped in what may be called Scots parsimony.From a British perspective, shared by Ottawa, Confederation was a way to preserve Canada as a separate entity without a fight. The key was to appease, not provoke, the United States.In 1871 Sir John A. Macdonald had little choice but to assist in negotiating the Washington Treaty, which gave away some access to Canada’s fishery.Ottawa invested too little in our military to have an independent voice — sadly still true today.Canada was so weak that in 1869 Macdonald needed British troops to quell a tiny rebellion of Métis buffalo hunters led by a man who failed to become either a priest or a lawyer and so became a prophet, Louis Riel.One night during the Washington negotiations, Macdonald was fascinated when the Americans brought an extra guest to dinner, one of the most ferocious commanders of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman, now General in Chief of the U.S. Army.It seems the Americans brought Sherman to intimidate the British delegation into abandoning Canada in exchange for a “permanent peace between the two nations.”Macdonald believed that the Americans were trying to divide and conquer, “to get up a sort of quarrel between the two, and to strengthen that party in England which desires to get rid of the colonies as a burden.”Macdonald understood the Yankees quite well. They “were strung to a very high pitch” by the Alabama and San Juan disputes, and without a deal, he wrote, “the war cloud will hang over England and Canada.”His great accomplishment in 1871 was maintaining a united front between Canada and the British Empire — and thus quieting and appeasing the United States.That peace along the “longest undefended border” has lasted 154 years.The challenge is to have a realistic policy to keep it going.Chris Champion is editor of 'The Dorchester Review,' a scholarly magazine devoted to Canadian history.
