The Case for a U.S. – Canadian Union

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.

The ongoing kerfuffle over Greenland and Canada’s new trade deal and declared “strategic partnership” with China may pose fresh obstacles to a US-Canada rapprochement. But before Canada decides to turn its back on the United States and opts to become another Chinese client state like Pakistan or California, it’s worth considering how we got here — and how we might find our way free. At one level, both countries came together as sovereign nations, grounded in the principles of self-government and the rule of law derived from their shared British heritage, and evolved into democracies based on that same model.

Yet, Canada’s union rests on very different principles from those that governed the American constitutional settlement of 1787. Canada itself grew out of a series of large-scale public enterprises, rather than individual states or communities. From the start, it followed a top-down centralized model for governance. It began with the Hudson’s Bay Company itself, in its heyday, the biggest corporate landowner in the world, governing more than 3 million square miles — the size of present-day Brazil or India. Then, in the nineteenth century, the Canadian Pacific Railroad was created specifically to develop and unify the post-colonial nation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  

By contrast, the United States was built on the principle of individual self-interest, with a corresponding limited need for government. The difference is reflected in the two countries’ constitutions. The US Constitution carefully enumerated the specific powers of the federal government, while leaving everything else to the states and individuals. Canada’s 1867 constitution, on the other hand, gave the provinces certain powers, while reserving the rest to Ottawa.  And while the Bill of Rights is fundamental to the American Constitution, Canadians did not see the need for one until 1960. The operative assumption was, and still is, that government knows best and won’t overstep its bounds because its agents understand that they are there to protect and advance human progress and liberty.

This assumption — so foreign to the American political tradition — reflects one of the most powerful and influential thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and a giant figure in the intellectual shaping of Canada, namely the University of Edinburgh’s Dugald Stewart. From his post as Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1785 until his death in 1822, Stewart was a mentor to two British prime ministers and to an armful of members of Parliament. He taught a First Lord of the Admiralty (Lord Minto) and a Lord Chancellor (Henry Brougham). In addition to his interest in moral philosophy and mathematics, it was Dugald Stewart who argued that Adam Smith’s political economy (and no one did more to popularize Smith’s ideas than Stewart) could be turned into an exact science, and organized and systematized, to yield not just a deeper understanding of the direction of economies and societies, but as an exact science for advancing both.

In Stewart’s formulation, the legislator is like the physicist in his lab or the inventor in his workshop. He must be free to apply rational principles to shape matter, including human matter, in ways that facilitate human happiness. And a government overseen by these wise legislators, imbued with Smith’s free market principles, becomes the primary means by which to carry out that civilizing task. For Stewart and his students and disciples, in other words, government is an indispensable resource for guiding social and economic progress. By contrast, his predecessors David Hume and Adam Smith were more skeptical of what government can accomplish in terms of advancing that happiness. Judging by the recent history of mercantilism and government-enforced religious orthodoxies, they saw government as more often an obstacle than otherwise, to advancing prosperity and liberty.

This bifurcation in the Scottish school’s view of the proper relationship between government, economy, and society had profound consequences.

It was Hume and Smith who became the most popular Scottish thinkers for the Founding Fathers generation, especially Jefferson and Madison, while Stewart’s influence in Canada spread through its universities. For example, Dalhousie University was founded in 1818, to be an exact model of the University of Edinburgh in Stewart’s heyday. The same was true with McGill University and King’s College, which eventually became the University of Toronto.

Yet there was another Scottish thinker who had an enormous impact on education in both the United States and Canada, and was a particular hero to Dugald Stewart. This was the University of Aberdeen’s Thomas Reid, the father of the philosophy of common sense, i.e., the rational understanding of the world which every human being shares, and which allows them to make judgements about right and wrong, true and false, and what serves the common good and what doesn’t. The twin fathers of American pragmatism, for example, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, both drew their inspiration from Reid’s common sense philosophy.  And Stewart saw his own philosophy, including his understanding of human nature, as a fusion of the ideas of Reid and Adam Smith.

Therefore, one can argue, it’s going to be on that same pragmatic, common sense basis that some kind of shared principles for US-Canada cooperation can be found. Above all, it requires recognizing that, whatever the differences between the origins and political cultures of the US and Canada, a US-Canada economic condominium will strongly advance the fortunes of both and even form the basis of a North American superstate that brings economic security to the entire hemisphere.  Here, as always, it’s the business community of both countries that tends to be the main repository of common sense, and that should recognize that the possibilities are staggering.

The most obvious is in the energy sector. Between them, the United States and Canada produce roughly 30 percent of the world’s natural gas and 25 percent of the world’s oil. A North American energy bloc (one that might eventually include Mexico) promoting LNG exports across the Atlantic and Pacific and cross-border pipelines like the still-suspended XL Pipeline, would dominate global markets as never before, while also reshaping the overall geopolitical landscape of energy production.  While restoring Venezuela’s oil industry to peak efficiency will take years and hundreds of billions of dollars, a U.S.- Canada energy consortium can take shape much sooner.

The second possibility is in strategic mineral extraction and refining.  Once again, any mineral extraction plan centered on American possession of Greenland or deals with Ukraine will take years — even decades — to yield results. By contrast, Canada is already a major producer of gold, iron, nickel, and copper. It’s also involved in important projects to extract its rich reserves in rare earth elements such as cobalt, graphite, vanadium, and lithium (Canada currently has the sixth largest lithium reserves in the world, and the sixth or seventh largest reserves in cobalt).

While China has sought to dominate supply chains for these critical minerals, a vigorous U.S.-Canada consortium could displace China as a major supplier to global markets. Indeed, Canadian companies could help revive the United States’ mining industry, which ceded global leadership to countries such as China, Canada, and Australia thanks to outsourcing and over-regulation (the United States even closed its Bureau of Mines in 1996). Working together, the American and Canadian mining sectors can also establish clean and environmentally safe standards for the extraction of all these materials.

The third area is AI and quantum technology. While the US is clearly the global leader in AI and machine learning, according to Deloitte’s 2023 AI report, Canada ranks third among G7 countries in total funding per capita for generative AI companies and first in AI publications per capita. At the same time, Canada has emerged as a leading center for the research and development of quantum technologies, including quantum computing. The University of Calgary in Alberta, the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, and Sherbrooke University in Quebec are among the world leaders in quantum technology.

When we put the entire scenario together, we can envision what futurist Herman Kahn would term a U.S.-Canada “superstate,” one that will dominate the fate of the Western Hemisphere as well as global markets — and one much more significant for the future than any trade deal with China. What Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith might think of what their intellectual heirs have wrought is fascinating to think about. What Trump and his Canadian counterparts could achieve if they can set aside their differences and apply some common sense is even more fascinating.

Arthur Herman is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute. The Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller How The Scots Invented the Modern World, His newest book, Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump, will be released by Center Street in April.