Conrad Black: A merger with the U.S. would be a great leap backwards for Canada

[unhappycamper]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/01/18/conrad-black-a-merger-with-the-u-s-would-be-a-great-leap-backwards-for-canada/



Canada is, by every measure, a better-governed country than the U.S. So why would Canadians want to take such a great leap backwards?

Conrad Black: A merger with the U.S. would be a great leap backwards for Canada
Conrad Black | January 18, 2014 | Last Updated: Jan 17 3:04 PM ET

My relations with my National Post colleague Diane Francis have had their ups and downs over three decades or so. We have gotten over some rough patches, including a period of a couple of years when her chief public conversational gambit seemed to be the moral imperative that I be sent to prison. But we had put that behind us well before I was, in fact, to her apparent regret, actually sent to prison, and our relations have been fine for years. She is a very nice person and often an interesting business writer. And I have enjoyed reading her recently published book about a federal union between Canada and the United States, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. I don’t agree with her conclusion, but neither do I recoil with horror at the idea and tremble with patriotic loathing and snarl “annexationist” at her as if it were the ultimate condition of moral turpitude.

~snip~


The United States started with about a million square miles in the 13 Colonies and adjoining territory to the west; added roughly a million more square miles with the Louisiana Purchase by Jefferson from Napoleon in 1803, and over a million more square miles the Americans took from Mexico in 1846. Apart from $10-million dollars for 30,000 square miles around Tucson, Arizona in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, and Alaska, the United States doesn’t pay for territory or populations. It assumes that the people involved are glad to become Americans, and that often has been the case as that country has expanded.
Postmedia News

There was a time when the Diane Francis argument, even one based on a much more modest pay-out, would have made sense to many Canadians. For much of the 1980’s, polls revealed that about 20% of Canadians were favorable to the idea of a federal union with the United States, without any pay-off at all, except, assumedly, parity on the dollar, which was then worth only around 70 cents American. That was in the era when the status of Quebec was uncertain, and Canada was a high tax country reduced, as a national raison d’être, to touting its supposedly more generous welfare programs.

In the intervening years, the independence of Quebec has receded to high improbability, Canadian taxes have moderated, and the Chrétien-Martin-Harper governments, building on Brian Mulroney’s use of the GST, have been fiscally prudent. Meanwhile, the United States, following the greatest, most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world with the non-violent implosion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism, has wallowed in pelagic budgetary and international debt, has debased its currency, and destabilized the world financial system. Unimaginably, the United States has become a paragon of incompetence in many fields, including strategic thinking. Two trillion dollars and thousands of American lives have been spent in Middle Eastern wars that don’t seem to have yielded the U.S. any benefit.

[Xipe Totec]

1. The answer to a question nobody asked. nt