Donald Trump returned to the charge with this idea of integrating Canada into the 50 American states in a press conference on Tuesday, but could this project really be feasible?
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According to a teacher specializing in United States history at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR), the integration of a 51st state “is not that complicated,” but still…
“This is not a story in which we are going to absorb a population as developed as us without the consent of the population. I think that that is the basis of the history of the expansion of the United States, that it did not happen like that,” explains Marise Bachand in an interview on the show The Balance Sheet.
During its creation, Uncle Sam’s country joined many territories to its union, some by purchase, such as Alaska and Louisiana, but others by war.
“From the start, we wanted to annex Canada and that’s why the American revolutionary armies went to Montreal. We burned, we wanted Canadians to embark on the project of the American revolution,” explains the specialist.
However, this idea of annexing Canada, which persisted even after the American War of Independence, was abandoned in the 1870s.
However, the United States continued to add stars to its flag until 1959.
“The constitution of 1787 provides for how a state is integrated into the constitution,” specifies the specialist. First, there are no sub-states, there are no colonies, there are states equal to others so that the population is sufficient, but it is done by, first of all, a decision – a referendum of the population who wants to be annexed – […] and then, that it gives itself a constitution […] which it presents to the Congress which […] vote by majority.”
“It’s not that complicated, but Alaska and Hawaii, it wasn’t that easy to integrate them in 1959, which tells us that politics is still playing in the background of the United States,” she notes.
See the full interview with Marise Bachand in the video above
