#TBT: Trump’s ‘Annexation’ of Canada Has Already Begun. Here’s How Energy Alternatives Help Smother It.
Canadians don't want it. Neither do Americans. But Trump keeps talking about it. And nobody is coming to the rescue except all of us. Sierra Club of Canada's Conor Curtis tells us where to start.
Two days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, we passed the mic to Conor Curtis, head of communications at Sierra Club Canada. On Jan, 4 and 7, Curtis produced two podcasts on the threat that Donald Trump is making a serious attempt to annex Canada. With Trump now routinely holding forth about Canada as a 51st state, Curtis’ words bear repeating…updated to reflect the tumultuous month we’ve just been through.
With his return to the White House, Donald Trump’s kidding/not kidding mutterings about annexing Canada have taken over the country’s public conversation, shifting the political calculus at all levels of government and triggering a resurgence of Canadian pride and determination.
Even a month ago, too many Canadians were questioning whether we should even be worried. It’s a good thing that mistake seems to be correcting itself. Because in many ways, getting casual and comfortable with the idea of Canada becoming a 51st state is more dangerous than the formal designation.
For any oligarch, elected ‘king’ , or petty dictator intent on taking over another country, an essential step is to suppress any identity that sets that country apart. We won’t likely see U.S. troops on Canadian soil anytime soon, but Trump’s behaviour right here, right now amounts to a communications and messaging campaign aimed at a takeover of Canada.
What’s more, the basics of the campaign are not hidden, but are actively being discussed publicly.
Behind the scenes at The Mix: This week we’re marking the loss of Tim Radford, one of his generation’s top science journalists and a leading light behind the UK’s Climate News Network before it merged with The Energy Mix in 2021. Tim died this week at age 84, and we’ll miss his voice, his generosity, his meticulous persistence, and the compassion and caring he brought to his masterly coverage and analysis of the climate-nature crises.
In 2019, he told an interviewer with the Australian Broadcasting Company that in science journalism: “You just ask questions. If you can’t ask an intelligent question, ask a stupid one. You still get a good answer. Journalism is an ongoing university course that will last you a lifetime. Our papers are marked not only by the people who gave us the information but by 500,000 other readers as well, so there is an incentive to get on top of the subject.”
Read The Guardian’s obituary for Tim here.
Annexation Comms 101
A communication plan often has messages in sets of two or three because it’s the number of core points any person is likely to be able to remember and internalize. These are then communicated through strategies and tactics in the same way as a military action. Indeed, corporate communications books have a disturbingly high number of dubious quotes from military leaders.
Like any effective tactical communicator, Trump and his allies have stayed on message, with three main talking points. These points are being echoed by a vocal minority of Canadians online and in our—increasingly American-owned—news. The points are that:
• Canada is fundamentally broken, and only Trump’s America or an adoption of its core principles can fix it: This message, often shared by moderate voices that may actually oppose annexation, puts us in a self-critical, submissive position that stops us from recognizing our own strengths and evaluating all the options we have to fight back. It also prevents us from responding proactively with other nations that Trump is targeting.
Most importantly, this message targets longstanding traditions that make us different from the United States, like our pursuit of real inclusion, unique history of environmental advocacy, and more inclusive care for those in need. These traditions, very much a part of the Canadian fabric, are dismissively labeled as ‘woke’ and written off as recent departures from the Canadian way rather than core aspects of our national personality, historically shared by Canadians across the political spectrum.
It’s important to understand that Trump isn’t a “negotiator”. He’s a run-of-the-mill abusive partner, with the same habits and practices that abusers everywhere use to erase their victims’ personalities and keep them under control. We can use some of the same tactics as Trump where necessary, but the more our values become like his, the more we lose sight of our true options for a renewable future, and for a brighter future which can motivate us.
• Canada can only survive Trump and thrive economically by handing over more power to corporations. That’s the line you often hear from the same oil and gas and health care companies that have long worked to undercut Canadians’ ongoing support for regulation of corporate pollution and public health care.
They stand to gain the most from annexation, or effective annexation. They will actively attempt to divide us, not because they’re in on a conspiracy, but because it’s in their financial interest to sow division—to seek profit from every crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—even if they face tariffs in the medium term. Messaging direct from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month, we can assume courtesy of annexation enthusiast Kevin O’Leary, had one province already pitching for an exemption from Trump tariffs for Alberta oil and gas. At the time, this handily threw a unified Canadian response under the bus along the way.
• The U.S. should gradually assume greater control and influence over Canadian policy and issues. This is a strategy for annexing us slowly, like boiling a frog, while threatening us with economic retaliation if we don’t comply. That’s the plan O’Leary blatantly spells out, and you should trust that he means it: the reality TV star, wannabe data centre magnate, and very competent boater imagines an economic union that would “erase the border” based, we can infer from his writing, on the interests of oil and gas corporations.
Canada’s options for going elsewhere for trade, ability to pursue a strategic renewable energy path, or gain political support would be curbed under an economic union, making us even more dependent on a U.S. regime and a U.S.- based fossil fuel industry intent on shifting our policies away from our own national interests.
This plan, O’Leary suggests, is one that some future Canadian government will eventually be open to adopting, a plan Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne said would amount to the same as 51st statehood.
Annexation Talk, Climate Denial Go Hand in Hand
Trump says he intends to use economics to annex Canada. He’s been turning to mainstream media to popularize the notion. And he isn’t just phoning in to Fox News: an “Americanization” takeover was directly floated last month by a seemingly “moderate” voice in the New York Times. The suggested approach looks very much like what we are already seeing play out in real time.
Meanwhile, some news outlets in Canada—increasingly online, and again increasingly U.S.-owned—are amplifying Trump’s mantra that Canada is fundamentally broken and can only be fixed by making us more like the United States: nodding indirectly to privatizing health care and to increasing the police presence to clear out the homeless.
As someone who worked as a manager of community services at a Northern food bank during the COVID pandemic, I witnessed many instances of those with the least means in our society stepping up to do the most good. I can tell you we don’t need more police and more privatized barriers to aid in a crisis. We need mutual aid systems, and we need to reach out to the people around us, homeless included.
These media outlets are taking the real bait behind Trump’s annexation threats: Helping to repeat his messaging campaign for him. Last month’s decision by social media giant Meta to stop moderating content for accuracy isn’t directly connected to Trump’s annexation agenda, but makes it that much easier to carry out.
On both sides of the border, it’s no coincidence that we hear the loudest calls for annexation from those who usually spread climate denial, or that O’Leary has taken a sudden interest in natural gas-powered data centres (a dream of Elon Musk’s). The interests of oil and gas corporations and the interests of Canadians and our national sovereignty are increasingly going in separate directions. Data centres alone, if powered by renewable energy, would not only be better for the environment but would create more Canadian jobs. But if they’re powered by oil and gas, these data centres become sinks into which a lot of that profit will be filtered away, out of the country, to the most wealthy.
This communications-focussed annexation attempt is the focus of a recent two-part episode of Sierra Club of Canada’s The Environment in Canada Podcast. In Part One, I trace the way climate denial, spread by oil and gas corporations, led us to this point, and what we can all do to resist annexation in any form. In Part Two, I answer some questions from Part One. As an organization with a grassroots mandate, that also has a separate sister organization in the U.S,. we are somewhat uniquely aware of how climate denial has spread out on both sides of the border.
No Time for Waiting Around
We do need immediate action against Trump’s annexation threats.
But the win has to come from people power, not corporate power. It needs to come from all of us—individually and collectively—as well as our elected representatives: all of whom I call on to come together and overcome the bystander effect. Here are a few places to start:
• Talk to other people about this issue, especially people in communities that depend on oil and gas for their livelihoods. We need to double down on principles like inclusiveness, environmental protection, and fairness that set us apart from Trump and help reinforce Canada’s distinct identity. That’s our foundation for resisting any hostile power, just as other countries have prevented U.S. annexation by maintaining their own value systems.
• Counter Trump's annexation talk loudly and firmly, because ignoring it won’t make it go away. Social media comes with its own oxygen supply, and most mainstream media are ill-equipped to deal with misinformation campaigns—though independent media options do exist. We can hold our ground by calling out pro-Trump messages online and getting ready for in-person protests and counter-protests. One of the only things that worked against the convoy occupation of Ottawa in 2022 was when local people came out to peacefully oppose the convoy and prevented them from resupplying their presence near Parliament Hill.
• Do whatever you can—at work, in your neighbourhood, or through political advocacy—to help speed the development of renewable energy and employment alternatives that lend themselves to local control better than oil and gas. If we really want to stay independent of China’s rising power while protecting ourselves from U.S. annexation, the “space race” we need to enter is the renewable energy one. And we have everything we need to enter that race and win, here at home, right now.
• Join the counter-campaign to make it clear to Americans where Canadians stand. You can start by reaching out to your friends, relatives, and contacts in the U.S., making it clear that Canadians don’t want to join any other country and asking them to speak out and spread the word against annexation—while emphasizing open-heartedly that our quarrel is with the U.S. administration, not with friends we’ve known and loved for years, decades, or generations.
An Angus Reid poll last month showed fertile ground for the message: two-thirds of U.S. respondents opposed Trump’s tariffs, and the percentage increased once they understood that tariffs would mean higher gas prices. I have met many individual Americans, rich and mostly poor, and I have never sensed in them a desire to actually conquer anyone else—when they’ve supported U.S. conquest, it has been largely because they thought they were fighting wars of liberation or defence. And public opinion in the U.S. has historically mattered in terms of annexation outcomes.
Set up mutual aid networks and make other preparations for what will probably be difficult economic times, regardless of how Trump tries to treat Canada. His plans for America, just on their own, will have negative economic repercussions for us, but Canada is better-placed to endure than the U.S. can. We have more informal networks of support, we’re a less market-centric country, and we have a far lower population to support in a time of crisis. Community is strength, and the monetary economy matters less if you have good, pre-established support networks for food and other essentials.
• Instead of travelling to Washington, DC to beg for mercy, we need to coordinate a joint response with the other countries he has threatened. As former prime minister Jean Chrétien wrote a month ago in the Globe: “Every time that Mr. Trump opens his mouth, he creates new allies for all of us. So let’s get organized! To fight back against a big, powerful bully, you need strength in numbers.”
Ready Or Not, Here He Comes
Whatever Trump does, there almost certainly will be negative impacts. The better prepared we are, the more adaptable we can be. We need a proactive defence of our values, not passive self-reflection on whether or not we should be more American. The people promoting the annexation of Canada are motivated. We have to be twice as motivated to turn it back.
The talk of annexation is not an American invasion, nor even an invasion that appeals to most of Trump’s U.S. supporters, so much as an invasion by a few very wealthy individuals to whom a national boundary no longer appeals. When Trump wants something, he’ll do anything to get it.
I’m not here to define what it means to be Canadian, or to defend past and continuing acts of colonialism. But I know the forward-looking dream of Canada that I grew up with: that Canada was a quilt and not a melting pot.
I grew up with simple ideals that if you were hurt you should receive aid, that our environment should be protected, and that inclusivity was the basis of a strong and free society. We did not idolize billionaires as leaders by default—we expected those with power to be held to the same rules as everyone else.
And those weren’t new concepts: they were the foundation of the national pride I was exposed to as a child in Newfoundland and Labrador and by my relatives in Alberta. They were concepts shared by many, regardless of their politics.
Whatever else you believe, if you believe in those same values, the time has come to defend them like you have nothing to lose. If we don’t fight Trump’s takeover effort now, publicly and peacefully, then we will fight it later in our homes. The “quilt” can smother the idea of annexation—but we all need to get behind it first.
We’ve said a smart communications plan is built around two or three key messages. Let’s try these:
1. Trump’s values threaten everything we love and created these crises. His values only sow division and compliance.
2. Our policies will be fair. Corporations will pull their patriotic weight and they will stand above no one.
3. Our strength is solidarity and our long-held values. So we will look to the future through mutual aid, inclusivity, environmental protection, and renewable progress.
My grandfather survived the Blitz in London, and that history tells me we can counter a communications campaign if we work at it. Media relations, social media, and in-person organizing and protesting all remain vitally important—we needn’t restrict ourselves to one set of tactics, nor do we have to agree on everything as long as we work from a shared set of basic principles. It’s an approach called full spectrum resistance. Literally speaking to everyone you can is vitally important, and here's some more specific advice on how to best do that.
All because, ultimately, nobody is coming to the rescue but you.
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He says the U.S doesn't need ANYTHING Canada has or makes. Yet he also wants to annex the Country or make it a state and intends a takeover. You would only make that intent clear when you really want something, so we know he's lying or speaking out of both sides of his mouth. His communication skills are horrendous. A moron of epic proportions.
The ugliest, most hated American on this planet. Deport him to Mars.