Column: On the possibility of Canada disappearing
By Charles Jeanes
End of a state of no very “righteous” origin
“Today people can hardly imagine their social environment without a state. The irony of history is that despite the rise and the fall of ideologies rejecting the state or trying to limit it (anarchism, liberalism, libertarianism, communism), the state has gradually become stronger, particularly in the Twentieth and Twenty First centuries.” — Mallinson and Voynitsky
https://www.e-ir.info/2025/02/04/the-nation-state-an-oxymoronic-relationship/
“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” Trudeau said, concluding that he sees Canada as “the first post-national state.” — Justin Trudeau, to The New York Times, 2015
“For those curious about Alberta’s interest in joining the Land of the Free, you should instead ask, what would hold them back? Alberta’s grievances with Canada are plenty.” — John Dominguez https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2026/02/06/a_plan_for_canada_to_join_the_united_states_1163269.html
A thought-experiment: Canada deceased
Canada is young, but in historical terms, not so young it might not disappear in the next hundred years due to death by natural causes. Stay with me…
https://polsci.institute/international-relations/future-of-nation-state-challenges-perspectives/
Today’s column will necessarily refer readers to other sites and long essays.
A Particular Constellation: modernity, capitalism, population explosion
Canada, in company with all nation-states on the planet that originated from recent colonial settlement established on land where aboriginal populations were living at the time of Christopher Columbus’s famous voyages (to the “New World” or western hemisphere).
Canada only exists because of one very specific, contingent, fortuitous set of circumstances. The colonial empires were:
(1) modern, in a defined sense, i.e. combining several innovative aspects of human social order never before seen among humans;
(2) new colonial states were capitalist when capitalism was birthing and in its infancy only in Europe and nowhere else;
(3) founded when Europe began a long sustained increase in its population, reaching numbers never maintained on European soil hitherto. Europe exported human settlers to colonial lands “to make them productive”.
Colonies achieved independent statehood when colonialism became outmoded; the process began after WWI. America was precociously early in asserting independence in 1775. [ https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/was-the-american-revolution-a-mistake ] Because the US is so near, Canada would be unable to break the colonial habit; passed from UK to US, our dependency endured.
Canada achieved formal independence from the UK in the 1930’s; South American lands freed themselves before us. One new state, Israel, appeared in 1948 and is considered by some (this is a contentious issue) to be colonial/settler. Africa decolonized rapidly after WWII. The USSR was a Russian empire that had to detach its colonial provinces – Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. – after 1991. All these new lands were nation-states.
[ I append more resources for those with a deep curiosity in the political history of the nation-state form of government.
see Appendix I.]
Contingent Origins: Europe’s imperialism, Aboriginal Vulnerability
(“Rights” are not narrative history)
Begin the Canadian story where it is solidly founded: Power. This is not an essay about rights.
The British Empire was a nineteenth-century machinery of power – capitalist economics, scientific technologies of warfare, the telegraph, steamships and railways, political and cultural organization of the most-modern era — and that power was applied to rule a land the British designated “Canada” where the indigenous population could not compete with imperial exercise of control over them. The difference between Europe and aboriginal North America was vast.
It wasn’t war or conquest that established Canada as a federation in 1867 – in a political form called a federal nation-state; both war and conquest preceded this event, and would follow. Full independence for Canada from imperial Britain came generations later. For the indigenous population, there was no independence from either the empire or Canada after 1867.
https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/history-as-tragedy
Human Rights and absence of Justice: what happened in the Past
Canada is a nation-state built on a colonial foundation. Just read that fact — and have no emotional reaction to it, if you can. Rights are the preoccupation of the modern and postmodern mind in Western-derived societies of the 20th and 21st centuries. Rid yourself of that mind and detach the events from your moral judgment. [Please see Appendix II]
We know, from this perspective looking back, that the dismal tale of aboriginal loss and mass death begins when Europeans arrived to live permanently in North America. This had already been occurring in ‘Latin’ America since Spain conquered Mexico and Peru, and sent colonists to this “New Spain.” https://medium.com/@paulrupen/a-brief-summary-of-guns-germs-and-steel-by-jared-diamond-427cb26a3071
To re-cap: A specific history put European civilization in a position to overwhelm other cultures and plant settler colonies upon land Europeans brought under the sovereignty of European states. It happened. It is the Past. It is not a matter for moralizing, in my opinion. This is not a “history” of competing rights, to be judged by some set of values by historians now.
Was the land the colonists settled on “stolen”? I refuse to engage the question as it will take the inquiry into moral territory I am avoiding.
Change, entropy, relativity: these are the hallmarks of History. War and conquest, the taking of property from one population by another and the misery of the dispossessed, are so endemic and commonplace in human history that judging some people as bad and others as good – which a moral perspective on history will invite – is untenable. To want people then to be like you now is like wishing your cat would behave as your dog does.
European, or “Western,” civilization was for an historical moment empowered to write the script of human direction, and Canada – again like so many other places where colonists achieved independent nation-statehood – followed the script. Judging people in the past by moral or juridical or philosophical standards of this year 2026 is an activity of zero interest to the present author. “The Past is a foreign country,” a noted historian-philosopher rightly said.
https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/modernity-reconsidered
Collision of destinies: immigrants build a dream on indigenous nightmare
Immigrants desire to become Canadians, and generally we quite understand their reasons for wanting this change in their life-circumstances. Immigrant lives in Canada can be measured against life in the places immigrants leave, and the contrast is to Canada’s advantage. They are escaping worse lives.
This is not a new thing, seen only in our own times. It was true a century ago, and two centuries before that.
Indigenous humans met the strangers coming from Europe in a variety of ways, from outright hostility – think how Scandinavians were attacked in late-medieval colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland by the natives – to benevolence – as with life-saving interventions for the French suffering scurvy in New France in the 16th century.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
https://www.historica.ca/articles/the-vikings-in-newfoundland/
https://dlab.epfl.ch/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/j/Jacques_Cartier.htm
The tale of horrors for indigenous people has a counter-narrative: desperate European peasantry escaped lives in England or France where poverty and oppression by the noble class who owned all land made life brutally hard. Settlers on colonial land began new lives, and the lives they made were measurably better than what they left behind. Settlers became farmers; their hard labour rewarded them with material gain. They are our ancestors here.
“It’s an ill wind that blows no-one some good” sums up the situation in history. Some people might benefit when others suffer. It’s ugly and it’s indisputable.
Immigrants to Canada from the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy and so on, all enjoyed better lives once they were established in Canada as subjects of the British Crown after 1800. This was the basic Canadian Dream – betterment by geographic cure. No one who dreamed and achieved the dream by coming to Canada was evil in their intent. Evil, however, resulted, for the natives.
The basic indigenous nightmare is the indisputable decline and dissolution of a way of life they chose to live. Their own civilization was almost erased by ours. They are still here. Canada has obligations now to make restitution to them. How that is accomplished, no one can reasonably predict now. But if Canada should cease to exist, as I think it might, the resolutions and restitutions will become the challenge of successor states.
One such successor state could very well be a northern state with an indigenous majority population. That state would possibly lead the world in innovating self-government institutions and a reborn native civilization.
https://chiefs-of-ontario.org/firstnations/
I will repeat myself just once more: our Past has not been about justice, but it is our past. Our future, if Canada survives, might address our injustices.
Coming together: 1867 to 1949
In 1867, four colonies confederated into the Dominion of Canada by permission and legislation of the Imperial Parliament in London. The British North America Act created our state; no one asked the indigenous population; this was not criminal, though it was racialist.
Canada grew from four provinces to seven quite quickly (new provinces added in 1870, ’71, and ’73), purchased a vast territory from a chartered British capitalist corporation (the Hudson’s Bay Co.) and carved more provinces and territories from that bought land. Finally in 1949, the last, latest province, Newfoundland, joined Confederation and our nation was complete.
Canada had just come through a war in 1945 where the most-murderous racialist dogma in history had been our enemy. Our part in the victory over Nazism was not negligible. Canadian democracy, although easily criticized by perfectionists, was recognizably operating; racialist ideas also were at work.
The prevailing concept of native policy was that aboriginals were as children, less grown-up than Europeans, and needing to be wards of government. In Canada, our politicians and bureaucrats, not possessing any pretense to be original thinkers, copied our policy toward indigenous people from what the scientists of Europe and America taught about “race”, and designed the Indian Act of 1876 upon the prejudices of their time. Natives were to be assimilated – that is, made to mature into Europeans. It was a duty to raise the people who were behind us in development, Kipling’s “wild, sullen, lesser breeds”.
https://www.nccih.ca/docs/determinants/FS-Racism2-Racism-Impacts-EN.pdf
One must note an important fact about relations of the settler government to the indigenous peoples: the Federal government, not the provinces, was the authority to make native policy; the Federal state was the successor to the imperial Crown. And provinces must defer to the federal authority in any matter pertaining to natives, such as Aboriginal Title in the constitution.
Plateau: 1867 – 1982
For individuals and families who departed European countries (most of them from northern parts, fewer from Mediterranean lands) the new country where they settled after Confederation was not always an asylum from persecution; such were settlers escaping Tsarist despotism in western Russia or British brutality in Ireland. But Canada almost invariably offered opportunity.
Canadians from England and Scotland indulged bigotry, and did not treat new immigrants as equals. But each immigrant generation got more comfortably established. The Britishness of Canada in 1951, when I was born, was clear.
Britishness was becoming notably diluted in the 1960s and ‘70s as people with different complexions than Europeans have become highly-valued new Canadians since the 1980’s; south Asia – India, Pakistan, and recently some Arab lands – has the advantage of once ‘belonging to’ the British Empire, and people there are often fluent in English. China and Korea have contributed large numbers, particularly to B.C. This creates a multicultural mosaic.
In 1982, Canada’s Constitution Act updated the British North America Act which founded the Confederation in 1867. We now enjoy a Charter of Rights, although one can find many who will claim they can make it better.
https://doubleaspect.blog/2018/09/04/things-i-dislike-about-the-constitution/
https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2008CanLIIDocs538
Canada in 1982 was a very desirable place to live, and that continued to be so throughout the 1990s when for a brief historical moment, the West – Europe, the US, the Anglosphere – felt it had achieved global hegemony when the “Communist Bloc” disintegrated but China was feeble. The glory days of the West are already in our rearview mirror.
But Canada still is a marvelous home to Canadians, and my suggestion that it might come apart might seem without foundation. Let me merely sketch my foreboding about Canada’s disappearance. I have no good feeling about saying it, but my conviction that this state will fragment is based on sound reasons.
Coming Apart: new centrifugal forces, 1983 – 2020
First, Canada has lacked cohesion from the start; there have always been people who can lead the Quebecois to believe in a vision of a better state for them to live in, as a Francophone nation with a unique civilization. We have been unable to lay that belief to rest. It still haunts us as a possibility.
Second, the lucid counter-proposition to Canada, which Quebec represents and makes plausible, is a contagious example. Alberta is going to test it. Whatever the outcome of that particular province’s challenge, other Canadians will try again when articulate and persuasive leaders make a compelling case that appeals to the dissatisfied. Aboriginal people will have vigorous reactions too.
Canada actually has legislation to outline the process for secession: the Clarity Act:
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/clarity-act
Third, indigenous leadership in Canada might well make a bid for a native state freed from Canada and freed from history that put them in a state of others’ design. The possibility that a state with a majority native population might offer better options for aboriginal civilization to flourish, isn’t unrealistic to imagine. https://fngovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Self-Governance_Right_CFNG.pdf
Unravelling: outside pressures for fragmentation
Capitalism is triumphant at this moment in history in an unprecedented way. Its imperatives rule our lives. In China, the Communist Party has compromised with Capital; capitalists of great wealth exist, but the Party regulates them.
Capital must grow. No one can make predictions about how this system will determine the shape of states, but all can agree that capitalism and the nation-state evolved together. https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/between-capitalism-and-the-state-system/
If economics dictate the basis of politics, as Marx said – admittedly, a rather large IF – states might easily lose relevance as capitalism demands that states dissolve, or that some absorb others.
International capital, in transnational corporations, by definition doesn’t require that capital operate from a single state-base. It can be stateless.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557570701680464#d1e857
No Canadian is unaware of what superpower might love to absorb Canada.
https://dominionreview.ca/canada-has-been-fending-off-the-americans-for-more-than-250-years/
Capitalism is driving the bus now. Politics must bend to the will of economics. The land where a State governs matters less than it did, now when Capital has made us all its subjects. I think there’s empirical evidence we’re on a path to a world divided into vast economic blocs; only very few governance structures will operate, because small economies will merge, integrated within the blocs.
Think of George Orwell’s vision in his novel1984 imagining three or four empires. Within the empires, individuals matter only as producer-units in the economy. ‘Big Brother’ is the State, one over empires, not liberal federations.
Meta-Federation: Canada and EU. Canada and global ‘Commonwealth’
As I write this column, many in the chattering classes of our nation – of whom I am obviously a member – are tossing around ideas of Canada joining the European Union. An alternative idea is a kind of ‘middle-power federation’ of major (but not-top-tier) economies – including Australia, a few large richer Latin American states, India, South Korea, rich secular Arab states – should create the counter-balance to economic superpowers (the US, China, the EU). These visions will come to nothing; a novel world evolves, weakening wide democratic federations. One-state economy is an obsolescing notion in Capitalism.
My opinion on this subject would take a book to elaborate but I won’t write it!
https://chomsky.info/20130305/
Justin Trudeau’s postmodern prophecy: the non-national Values-state
“Our modern Canadian identity is no longer based on ethnic, religious, historical, or geographic grounds. Canadians are of every possible colour, culture, and creed, and continue to celebrate and revel in our diversity. We have created instead a national identity that is based on shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity. And while many of the almost one hundred countries I’ve travelled through in my life aspire to those values, Canada is pretty much the only place that defines itself through them. Which is why we’re the only place on earth that is strong not in spite of our differences but because of them.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground [his book, https://writersfestival.org/blog/shaking-hands-and-finding-common-ground-with-justin-trudeau ]
Well. There you have it. Canada is not a nation-state, according to our recent Prime Minister. It is post-national, on a foundation of being multicultural and without a core culture. So — if that can be true — being a post-state, and not being Canada as we know it, is not too much of a stretch. Canada will cease to be what states were, and be something else: ungoverned peoples, or ready for a strong state to absorb them piecemeal, or some improvement on statehood?
Of course, not all are impressed by Justin T’s shallow sloganeering.
https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ljcs/article/id/2347/print/
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2025/01/lament-for-a-post-national-canada/
Trudeau desires that nations become more like us, non-national… that they evolve a Core of Values. But he means values he approves, not the other kind.
Always a protectorate? a state with dependency issues
“Canada has depended on the U.S. economy for years while the Canadian government has done nothing about that,” Hira said. “We have put all our eggs in one basket in terms of the U.S. economy and it’s going to be a long-term and deliberate process if we want to dig ourselves out of that.”
https://www.delta-optimist.com/local-news/canadas-annexation-by-us-unlikely-say-poli-sci-profs-10351750
This is again a mere assertion on my part about Canada, but it seems to me this country has existed for more than a century in a state of abject reliance, dependency, and juvenile subordination to a mighty neighbour, the US. No other states on the globe except Mongolia and some tiny European lands [Luxembourg , Monaco, Andorra etc.] are so dependent. We chose this path.
When Canada fractures into smaller states, the fragment will either join the US by choice, by coercion, or not at all [Quebec and the north will try to stay out] – but the gravity of this great republic, this global node of capitalism, seems to me irresistible for small, weak, Anglophone regions. By 2125, it will happen.
Conclusion: the end of a state is not a tragedy
This column has been about the future, not the present, and the past has been the substance of my argument. Canada can be seen, if one makes the effort, as a single experiment among a multitude across history, trying to erect a human
order from a mass of individuals. Humans live together; such life has order.
Like all human society, it has structure; historically, it experienced cultural construction. “Everything put together falls apart.” [Paul Simon lyric https://www.paulsimon.com/track/everything-put-together-falls-apart-2/]
This truism is not in itself sufficient to eliminate feelings about what happens to one’s beloved work, our country. Knowing Canada, loving what it means to you personally, is part of being human. Love it, and know what it is.
When an experiment such as a nation-state dissolves, the reaction to that might be experienced as less catastrophic if you accept the impermanence of all such experiments. One might feel that Canada deserved a longer existence, that less-worthy societies have endured much longer, or that Canadians are to be judged harshly for the failure of a noble way of life and order of living. https://stevenmintz.substack.com/p/history-as-tragedy
It won’t be me or my readers who witness the fragmentation of Canada, but our children will see the beginnings; great-grandchildren will know it as history.
Historians – my self-identified tribe of past-minded folk – will then have their era for analysis and diagnosis. Now, the task of Canadians as I see it, as we live and make our history, is to write the present in a way that shows historians we valued justice, compassion, equity, and love. But that’s ‘just me, not justin’.
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Appendices
The Nation State
There is a vigorous debate now among political scientists and philosophers about the permanence of this entity called “the nation-state” precisely because of the contingent nature of its origin.
Europe evolved the capitalist nation-state out of a unique historical path.
No one can say with certainty that this is an entity or legal institution which must endure into an indefinite future. There is reason to doubt it will persist, and reason to predict its perennial reality in future still.
[ Here is an entire, long, and free-to-download, book on this subject: https://www.pass.va/content/dam/casinapioiv/pass/pdf-volumi/acta/acta22pass.pdf ]
On History and “crimes against Indigenous Peoples”
“so-called Canada”
I had no intention here of investigating “Justice in History”. History is what happened. The column is not in any way attempting defence, offence, nor judgment of things that happened. It attempted to treat Canada as an object of neutral study. Historians who speak of “the bar of history” bore me.
[for example: “The past will always be judged severely at the bar of history.” https://www.mercatornet.com/irelands-mothers-baby-homes-story-has-a-personal-dimension-this-is-mine]
Therefore, no one can find the phrase “so-called Canada” in this column. I have no patience with people pretending a moral stance on an historical question –about which they are ignorant for the most part. I am supremely unimpressed by comments about Canada as a genocidal state. I feel nothing but amused by statements like this one by Billie Ailish: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4sj0OW_nEVA
Only an ignorant and weak mind would find such a T-shirt slogan profound or meaningful, in my opinion. The person who made it “possesses property” — her own private real estate in the US. This kind of vapid sloganeering has made the ‘woke Left’ laughable to me. Judging past people as moral inferiors is just wrong-headed. We are careful not to judge other cultures. The Past has the same claim to be beyond our likes and dislikes: they did things differently.
Here is the most-notorious racialist poem readers likely know about:
The White Man’s Burden [1899] By Rudyard Kipling
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
(dedicated to the United States taking the Philippines from Spain)
Prophecy as Prophylactic
A prophecy, such as I make here about Canada disappearing, might be a way to avoid the thing feared in future. I frankly hope to be wrong about Canada. https://thewalrus.ca/citizen-saul/ https://www.lawnow.org/truth-and-reconciliation-is-canadas-last-chance-to-get-it-right/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjdNW_l_TD4
