We want to live in America's 51st state: The Canadians pledging their loyalty to Trump

Telegraph

15-03-2025

On the sunlit porch of a farmhouse in the Canadian province of Alberta, Don Casselman planted his feet, gripped a laminated document and began to read aloud.
'I hereby declare an oath that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all fidelity to any foreign prince,' said the former industrial electrician, facing towards a Star Spangled banner gaffer-taped to a pole.
Around his neck, Mr Casselman had thrown another American flag – and he tugged it carefully into place before pledging his loyalty to the government of the United States.
'I take this obligation freely,' swore the 78-year-old Alberta native, raising his right palm. 'So help me God.'
Like the dozen or so others who had gathered at this snowy bison ranch an hour's walk from the nearest town, Mr Casselman held one overpowering belief: that Canada was doomed and, if Alberta was to save itself, it must break away and become the 51st state of the USA.
After the informal ceremony, the old man's blue eyes glistened. 'I feel very strongly about it,' he said in a thick, choked-up voice. '[The words] go to your heart.'
In his youth, the great-grandfather had constructed power plants in the Arctic Circle; he worried that Canada, with its 63,000-strong military stretched over 10 million km2, now had no way to defend the vast, un-peopled north against incursions by Russia and China.
The answer, to Mr Casselman, was obvious. 'I want President Trump to come and visit us,' he said, referring to the bison ranch-turned-separatist hub that stretched out over the fields into the distance. Perhaps a plan could be hashed out with Danielle Smith, Alberta's conservative premier, for the absorption of Alberta into the United States. 'I want my children to understand what it means to be free.'
It was two weeks before his inauguration that Donald Trump first floated the annexation of Canada. At a press conference on Jan 7, he complained that the US subsidised its northern neighbour through an unbalanced trade relationship; that America's military provided Ottawa's only real protection against foreign adversaries; and that the 230-year-old border established between the US and Canada, then a British colony, was merely 'an artificial line'.
At the time, many observers took the president's 51st state remarks as merely a demonstration of his penchant for trolling. It had all the ingredients: a wild, bellicose riff, with a poe-faced Left-wing target in the shape of Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister. But 'governor' Trudeau, as the president likes to call him, soon learnt to take the threat seriously.
Amid the negotiations over Mr Trump's introduction of a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports, the president's advisors threatened to expel Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance and called for the border to be redrawn. According to the New York Times, Mr Trump repeated the demand to push America's boundary line north in a call with Mr Trudeau on Feb 3. The only way to make the tariff pressure 'totally disappear' was to join the United States, Mr Trump said this week, before adding on Thursday that he was 'sorry,' but 'we have to do this'.
Mark Carney addressed the threat to his nation's sovereignty as soon as his victory was announced in Sunday's election to replace Mr Trudeau as Liberal party leader. 'America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form,' said the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, who formally took over as prime minister on Friday, ahead of a general election due to be held later in the year.
According to the only poll so far conducted on the subject, Mr Carney has the public on side. Some 90 per cent of Canadians reject becoming the 51st state, the Angus Reid institute reported last week. But it is not nothing for 10 per cent of a nation to express an opinion tantamount to treachery, noted Raymond Blake, a history professor at Regina University in the province of Saskatchewan. Mr Trump has tapped into deep, longstanding wells of separatist sentiment in Canada's western provinces. Taken together, the populations of the two most restive regions, Alberta and Saskatchewan, make up almost exactly 10 per cent of the country.
If they made a concerted effort to leave, it could unravel the basis of the Canadian state. 'It's a very serious threat,' Mr Blake said. At a press conference in the Oval Office on Feb 26, Mr Trump acknowledged that his campaign to turn Canada into our 'cherished, beautiful 51st state' could run, first, through Alberta and Saskatchewan. Should Mr Carney pursue the Left-wing, progressive policies of the Trudeau family, which have deepened the alienation in Western Canada, 'there could be trouble ahead,' Mr Blake said.
On the ceiling of BlackJack's bar in Nisku, an industrial estate on the outskirts of Alberta's capital, Edmonton, a stock-car hangs upside down. Photographs of oil-rigs adorn the walls, along with dozens of truck license plates and flags for the Edmonton Oilers, the local ice hockey team. It was not far away, in Leduc, that prospectors struck oil in 1947, jacknifing the fortunes of Alberta and the nation of Canada itself. Today the province is the richest in the country, with a GDP per capita of £56,400 ($73,000). But the truckers and oil workers who frequent BlackJack's share views on the future as dark as the tar that sticks to their overalls.
In the early 1980s, prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, began to redistribute profits from Alberta's oil industry to the rest of the nation, in particular French-speaking Quebec and liberal Ontario. Around $2bn is now collected per year. When Mr Trudeau won power in 2015, he shunned proposals to exploit Canada's oil and gas reserves in pursuit of net zero environmental targets. According to Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party currently neck-and-neck with Mr Carney's Liberals in the polls, the total value of 15 pipelines cancelled between 2015 and 2020 stands at $121 billion.
'I'm thinking of moving with my family to the US,' sighed Chris Hunter, a 40-year-old oil worker, over a pint of beer at the bar. He had spent the day digging a trench for a chemical treatment plant, designed to keep the levels of pollutants within legal limits. Fuelling his desire to emigrate, he said, were the sneering views of liberals in the east who relied on products from the oil industry for their glasses, plastic clothes and electric vehicles.
In a political mis-step compared to Hillary Clinton's 'deplorable' comments, Mr Trudeau said new pipeline projects should be evaluated through the lens of 'gender' and the impact on local communities, implicitly casting oil workers as disruptive, hard-living chauvinists. While Mr Hunter was not an active supporter of secession, he said he would reconsider his decision to leave Alberta if Mr Trump took over. 'He's a businessman,' Mr Hunter said, 'and so am I.'
To many Canadians, talk of joining the United States is simple apostasy. Since Mr Trump began his 51st state campaign, voters have rallied around the flag. The Liberal Party has surged in the polls; Canada's national hockey team sparked several fistfights with Team USA within minutes of face-off last month.
Ahead of the 51st Staters gathering on March 4, the mood was tense. Someone claiming to be a sniper had posted a death threat to organiser Jerry Milford, ringing a red circle around a treeline some 200 yards from the porch of the bison ranch. I'll be waiting there, the message read. Mr Milford's wife stayed in the car all day. 'That was the last person that threatened us,' Mr Milford said, bitterly kicking a deer skull along the icy front lawn. 'They don't know how many bison ranchers have guns.'
Over a lunch of hot-dogs, the separatists shared the beliefs that had steeled them to face public derision. Some mentioned vaccine mandates imposed by the federal government, others the harsh treatment of the 2022 'Freedom Convoy' trucker protest, which snaked from Alberta to the capital.
Comparing the situation to Brexit, James Goransrud, the ranch's cowboy-hat, bolo-tie wearing owner, said: 'I'm happy you Brits got out of that. If you're not happy with something, leave.' Like the million-strong herds of bison that used to roam across the border onto the plains of Montana, Mr Goransrud felt as connected to the American heartland as to Canada. And the political system in the US, he said, was far more appealing to rural, conservative voters like himself.
The Canadian parliament mirrors that of Britain, its colonial ruler until 1867. The upper house is appointed by the ruling party rather than elected by voters. It therefore lacks the 'checks and balances' provided by the US Senate, which empowers two representatives from each state, whether urban and populous or rural and deserted.
Canada's system, Mr Goransrud spat out, had enabled Mr Trudeau to become a 'dictator'. He could ignore the concerns of Albertans, propped up by large vote banks in Ontario and Quebec. Discussing Mr Trudeau's imposition of a carbon tax, he said, bursting out in a bitter laugh: 'It's taxation without representation, and historically that's a problem, right?'
Foremost in his mind, that morning, were the struggles of Alberta's public healthcare system, which is free but beset by long waiting times. Without any access to private medical insurance, his 36-year-old son had flown to Tijuana, Mexico to have X-rays performed on lumps in his throat. 'That's crazy, right?'.
Alberta was better at killing patients than treating them, he cursed, following the legalisation of assisted suicide. As he spoke, a large, black German shepherd jumped out of the window of a nearby car and sprinted under the fence of a pen of shuffling, shaggy-haired juvenile bison. 'They're OK,' Mr Goransrud said, recovering his smile as the beasts scampered to the fringes of their muddy ring. 'Come with me and I'll show you the cows.'
The first surge of separatist feeling in Alberta in the early 1980s led to the election of Gordon Kesler, a secessionist MP, before the movement collapsed into infighting. Today much of the 51st State movement's legwork falls to Peter Downing, a charismatic, blunt-speaking oil worker who christened the so-called 'Wexit' (Western Canada exit) movement in 2019.
By day, Mr Downing is a 'rough-neck', one of thousands of men who yank, twist and clamp 100lb iron levers on drilling rigs around the country. The job is 'miserable, cold, hard, painful and long,' he said, but it 'pays the bills'. Politics he crams into the gaps in a 70-hour work week.
In February, the first billboard calling for Alberta to join the United States appeared on a highway near the town of Bowden. 'Tell Danielle,' it read, beside a picture of the premier with Mr Trump, 'let's join the USA!' It was a sign that Mr Downing, responsible for an earlier eruption of secessionist billboards in 2020, was back in business. 'I always say, if you've got a problem with something,' he said, 'put it on a billboard.'
The purpose is to get under people's skin, added the former policeman, who wore tactical glasses and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words 'Arrest Trudeau' as he sipped coffee at a roadside restaurant in Grand Prairie, an oil town in central Alberta.
'All we're doing is saying we want this, yeah, we accept President Trump's offer,' Mr Downing said, while 18-wheeler trucks roared past on the snow-fringed highway outside the window. 'We want...lower taxes. And we want to never pay another dime to Ottawa through 'equalisation'.'
Describing himself as a 'Christian nationalist', Mr Downing hoped that Mr Trump would also put a stop to large-scale immigration of people from 'third world' cultures. Mr Trudeau had imported such people, he claimed, to prop up the Liberal Party's vote bank.
Moreover, if Mr Trump took power, 'Drill, Baby, Drill' would remove the shackles from Alberta's oil industry, Mr Downing went on, doubling production from around four million barrels per day. Americans would be unlikely to flood north to compete for jobs on rigs, as temperatures swing from -40c in winter to sweltering heat in summer.
In his campaign to turn pro-51st State feeling into a political movement, Mr Downing does not plough an entirely lonely furrow. His website, Americafund.ca, advertises a link to Pathfinders Consulting Ltd, a group he describes as like a 'dark McKinsey'. The name is shared by several anodyne operations and is hard to trace online.
But, from the shadows, it has helped Mr Downing target advertisements announcing Canadian support for the 51st state on phones within the radius of the White House and the Capitol. In 2020, he visited Mar-A-Lago and met with top Republican operatives. While there are no plans, as of now, for a return trip, 'we have connections, back channels and all that kind of stuff,' Mr Downing said. 'But we know what our role is. Our role is just to be able to say that we want this to President Trump.
'To his credit, he's been pouring all the gasoline into the situation. All I did…was light a match.'
In practical terms, it would take the support of Alberta's provincial legislature for secession to truly ignite. Mr Downing said he hoped to pin down Ms Smith, the premier, on whether she wanted to stay part of Canada or not. The leader of the United Conservative Party (UCP) has campaigned on wresting power from the federal government in Ottawa, often sparring with Mr Trudeau.
While other Canadian premiers banded together in the face of Mr Trump's tariff threats, forming a so-called 'Team Canada', Ms Smith flew down to Mar-A-Lago to seek a sweetheart deal from the president. (Alberta provides 56 per cent of all US oil imports, she is fond of pointing out, double the amount of Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Iraq combined.) Some 51st staters sniff a potential tag-team between her and Mr Trump.
But the premier told The Telegraph she was not interested in becoming part of the United States, citing the risk that a Democrat president could reverse Mr Trump's policies. 'Just because there happens to have been a change of view in the last couple of months,' in terms of the White House's approach to the oil industry, 'I don't think that changes the concern that Canadians would have that, you know, four years from now you end up with the same problems.'
In her mind, Ms Smith viewed the likeliest result of the provocative, conservative-coded 51st state movement as a reactionary shift towards the Liberal Party. 'I think it is helping the federal Liberals,' she said, 'which has me very worried, because the federal liberals have been punishing our province for 10 years. And if there's a counter reaction that would allow them to win yet another mandate… I would say that'd be terrible for Alberta.'
On March 1 in the city of Regina in Saskatchewan, a mock-ballot on the question of joining the United States was organised by the Buffalo Party, a local separatist outfit. As protesters shouted 'Never 51' on the streets outside the German Club, Tim Kasprick opened proceedings by singing the Star Spangled Banner at the top of his lungs ('they could surely hear it outside,' he said with a smile.)
For the event, Mr Kasprick donned an American flag polo-shirt and transformed into 'Timothy Trump', a comic evocation of the US president whose aim was to convince the 50 attendees to sign up to the USA. He proffered golden $1,000 notes imprinted with Mr Trump's face. And, to one table, he posed a riddle. 'What connects 4, 9, 66 and 99?' The guests caught on rapidly: these were the shirt numbers of Canada's greatest hockey players, respectively Bobby Orr, Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky. But what united them? 'Once they moved to the United States, they never came back' crowed Timothy Trump.
Packing up at the end of the night and walking out of the German Club through a line of security guards, Mr Kasprick reflected on the results of the ballot. Some 55 per cent of the crowd had voted for Saskatchewan to become the 51st state. Personally, the lawyer was skeptical. But it is a 'pressure-cooker situation,' he said. If Mr Carney won the election and Canada continued its Left-wing shift, one day a referendum would surely be held for real.