According to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Greenland and Canada have everything to gain and nothing to lose from being annexed to the United States.
“Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe,” Vance said at America’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland last week. Denmark, which oversees Greenland’s administration, hasn’t kept Greenland “safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, China and other nations,” he added.
Trump talks as though Canada’s becoming the 51st state would be an economic win-win for both countries.
Leaving these assertions aside, it’s proper to note that the influence exerted by annexed lands is a two-way street.
And that’s why the U.S. should annex — needs to annex — both Greenland and Canada. Let’s start the process without delay.
The principal gain for Americans from making both countries part of the U.S. comes from their social policies. In both countries, they’re better than America’s in many respects. They cover more residents, provide greater benefits and have more support from political leaders across the partisan spectrum.
Let’s take a closer look at what Americans can learn from its putative new territories.
We’ll start with Canada.
Like the United States, Canada provides old-age pensions, though unlike in the U.S. these are partially paid out of general tax revenues. Canadians also can receive unemployment relief and workers’ compensation.
The difference between the effectiveness of the two countries’ government pension programs can be measured by comparing their poverty rates for residents ages 65 and over. In Canada it was 14.5% in 2019-2022, in the U.S. it was 23.1%.
There are several notable differences between the American and Canadian safety nets. One is a child benefit. Canada provides parents as much as $7,787 Canadian (about $5,438 in U.S. currency) per child for children through age 5, and $6,570 Canadian (about $4,600) for children ages 6-17. The benefit phases out for those with incomes over $67,000 (about $47,000).
The U.S. child tax credit is currently $2,000 a year per child and is scheduled to drop to $1,000 in 2026. It phases out for couples earning $400,000.
Perhaps the most significant difference concerns the countries’ government healthcare programs. Canada’s system is a single-payer program, with the government paying for most necessary care; households can buy private plans to cover services that aren’t part of the government system, such as vision and dental services and outpatient prescriptions. But all Canadians are covered by the government program.
American politicians have tied themselves into knots trying to find negative things to say about Canada’s universal single-payer healthcare system.
A sterling example was provided by then-U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who during a 2014 Senate hearing grilled Danielle Martin, a Canadian expert on healthcare policy, about the supposed shortcomings of the Canadian system. Burr homed in on Canadians’ most common complaint about their system: the long waits for some services, largely resulting from a shortage of primary care doctors.
“On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year, do you know?” Burr asked Martin, with a smirk suggesting he had just unshipped a “gotcha.” Martin batted it right back: “I don’t, sir, but I do know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.”
As Martin had said in her prepared statement: “We do not have uninsured or underinsured residents. We do not have different qualities of insurance depending on a person’s employment…. At substantially lower cost than in the U.S., all Canadians have health insurance and need rather than wealth is what drives access to care.”
