• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, April 8, 2025

According to Canadian pollster Leger, one in five Americans would like their state to secede and join Canada. In contrast, according to the same poll, only one in 10 Canadians would like to see Canada become the 51^st state.

Of course, no one takes either suggestion very seriously, except perhaps the President of the United States. And, given the current state of things, that job title is a little ridiculous. Those states are probably less united than they have been at any time since the American Civil War.

All this talk about borders does make a good Facebook meme, though. You might have seen it  -- under the title “Problem Solved,” there’s a map of North America with the Canadian border redrawn to extend down the East and West Coast to include Washington, Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey and the New England states. Minnesota also gets to become part of the Great White North.

But  even if we took that suggestion seriously, does redrawing borders really solve any problem? Let’s assume that Canada really did become part of the U.S. It would be a “big, beautiful state,” according to Donald Trump. A few people have pointed out that that state, with our 40 million potential voters, would probably vote overwhelmingly against Trump. Again, according to a Leger poll, only about 12% of Canadians support Trump.

While we’re redrawing the map of the world, even oceans can’t get in the way. Here in Canada, we are rushing to realign with Europe and its markets. The idea has even been floated that Canada should join the European Union.  Our new prime minister, Mark Carney, has said we have more in common with Europe and the values found there than we do with our American neighbors to the south.

But again, there’s the faulty logic of Canadians, Americans and Europeans being identified as a cohesive bloc defined by a border. The recent rush of patriotism aside, Canadians rarely speak with one voice. For example, support for Trump runs highest in Alberta, where 23% of the province’s voters support him. He’s least popular in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, where support dips to 8%.

Or let’s hop across the border to the state closest to me, a resident of British Columbia: Washington. If you take the state in aggregate, it is a blue state by almost 20 points. But again, that designation depends on an aggregation of votes within a territory defined by a fairly arbitrary border. If you look at Washington on a county-by-county basis, it’s hardly a cohesive voting bloc. Yes, the urban centers of Seattle and Olympia went heavily for Kamala Harris (74% in King county) but eastern Washington is a very different story. In many counties there, for every voter that chose Harris, three chose Trump.

My point is this: Given the polarization of our society, it’s almost impossible to draw a line anywhere on a map and think that it defines the people within that line in any identifiable way.

Right now, nowhere on earth defines this point more starkly than the U.S. Because of the country’s borders and the political structures that determine who leads the people within those borders, almost two-thirds of Americans’ lives are being determined by a man they didn’t vote for. In fact, a big percentage of those two-thirds are vehemently opposed to their president and his policies. How does that make any sense?

Borders were necessary when our survival was tied to a specific location and its resources. This forced a commonality on those who lived within those boundaries. They ate the same food, drank the same water,  shopped at the same stores, attended the same church -- and their children went to the same schools.

But our digital world has lost much of that commonality. Online, we are defined by how we think, not where we live. This creates a new definition of “tribe” and, by extension, tribal territories. The divides between us are now based on differences in beliefs, not geographical obstacles.

And the gap between our beliefs is getting wider and wider. Borders define something that is becoming less and less real and more and more problematic as the people who live in a state or country find less and less in common with their fellow citizens.  As Scottish journalist James Crawford says in his book, "The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World," the tension is usually felt more acutely on those arbitrary borders: “Wherever there are borders … that’s where you are going to find the most concentrated injustice.”

Given our current political structures based on the foundation of a common territory, we must wonder how to manage the fact that there’s now less cohesion between those living within a border than between ideologically aligned factions spread across the globe. This is particularly true for democracies, where you get a whipsaw backlash between the right and left as the two factions grow further and further apart.

That prognosis is not a good one. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said in their book “How Democracies Die”: “Democracies rarely survive extreme partisanship.”