My relations with my National Post colleague Diane Francis have had their ups and downs over three decades or so. We have gotten over some rough patches, including a period of a couple of years when her chief public conversational gambit seemed to be the moral imperative that I be sent to prison. But we had put that behind us well before I was, in fact, to her apparent regret, actually sent to prison, and our relations have been fine for years.

She is a very nice person and often an interesting business writer. And I have enjoyed reading her recently published book about a federal union between Canada and the United States, “Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country.” I don’t agree with her conclusion, but neither do I recoil with horror at the idea and tremble with patriotic loathing and snarl “annexationist” at her as if it were the ultimate condition of moral turpitude.

I was for a time reviled in those terms by some of the traditional, leftist Canadian nationalists, though I was never an annexationist myself. After many years of fighting the very good fight with the Quebec separatists, I made the point that if Quebec prevailed with “sovereignty association,” and the rest of Canada was sorting out what to do next in national terms, a connection with the United States would be a good deal more appetizing than the fairy tale being peddled to the nationalist voters of Quebec by René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau, and ultimately Lucien Bouchard: essentially a sovereign Quebec still receiving transfer payments from English Canada and basking in the full faith and credit of the Canadian treasury.

Rarely has such a flagrant attempt to sell the concept of consuming a rich cake and still having it before you, got so far with a serious democratic electorate as did the two Quebec independence referendum questions of 1980 and 1995.

Diane Francis makes a good, as she writes, “metric” case for a merger of Canada and the United States, which would put together two G-7 countries (I do not accept the legitimacy of Russia’s presence in the group to make it G-8). Such a merger, as she describes and titles it, would unite two immense national sources of natural resources, one of them the greatest or second greatest consumer of resources and raw materials in the world. In strategic-resource terms, the United States would be a born-again country, acquiring a well-educated, relatively law-abiding addition of up to 34-million people. But it won’t work as a merger, nor on the economic lines Diane sketches out.

Under one of the “merger” options presented in her book, Canada would be paid $16.94 trillion, divided up among all of its citizens on a basis weighted to their individual years of residency in Canada (all Canadians would receive $12,360 for every year they had resided in Canada). It is an interesting idea (and an interesting read): the ultimate monetization of nationality and the reduction to a mere, if unprecedentedly large, commercialization of nationhood. On its face, it illustrates both the sagacity of Canadians in building up a great national asset, and the ravages of inflation (consider that when the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, the price was only $7-million.)

There are three problems with Diane’s merger plan: The Americans won’t pay; the Canadians won’t accept; and you can’t have a partial takeover — i.e. some Canadians selling their interest in the national patrimony to the United States while the others do not. Moreover, Quebec can’t sign onto any such thing or they are buying into fast-track cultural assimilation, like the French-Canadians who moved to New England between the 1840’s and World War I in large numbers (the parents of writer Jack Kerouac, for example).

The French Canadians have been nothing if not tenacious of their culture; they will not get any worthwhile guaranties of the status of French, other than for a very transitional period, from a country that will then be 2% French-speaking, 7% Spanish-speaking, and 91% English-speaking.

The United States started with about a million square miles in the 13 Colonies and adjoining territory to the west; added roughly a million more square miles with the Louisiana Purchase by Jefferson from Napoleon in 1803, and over a million more square miles the Americans took from Mexico in 1846.

Apart from $10-million dollars for 30,000 square miles around Tucson, Arizona in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, and Alaska, the United States doesn’t pay for territory or populations. It assumes that the people involved are glad to become Americans, and that often has been the case as that country has expanded.

There was a time when the Diane Francis argument, even one based on a much more modest pay-out, would have made sense to many Canadians. For much of the 1980’s, polls revealed that about 20% of Canadians were favorable to the idea of a federal union with the United States, without any pay-off at all, except, assumedly, parity on the dollar, which was then worth only around 70 cents American. That was in the era when the status of Quebec was uncertain, and Canada was a high tax country reduced, as a national raison d’être, to touting its supposedly more generous welfare programs.

In the intervening years, the independence of Quebec has receded to high improbability, Canadian taxes have moderated, and the Chrétien-Martin-Harper governments, building on Brian Mulroney’s use of the GST, have been fiscally prudent. Meanwhile, the United States, following the greatest, most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world with the non-violent implosion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism, has wallowed in pelagic budgetary and international debt, has debased its currency, and destabilized the world financial system.

Unimaginably, the United States has become a paragon of incompetence in many fields, including strategic thinking. Two trillion dollars and thousands of American lives have been spent in Middle Eastern wars that don’t seem to have yielded the U.S. any benefit.

Before the astonished eyes of the entire world, Wall Street has been exposed as venal and incompetent, American education has ceased, apart from its very highest echelons, to be competitive, a hundred million Americans receive inferior health care, the entire political system has become a hideously expensive, completely cynical image-making and legislative vote-buying operation deadlocked between special interests; and the justice system, upon which America’s original claim to be a light of freedom and the rule of law unto the nations was based, has become a conveyor-belt into the bloated and corrupt prison system (including me).

Canada is, by every measure, a better-governed country than the United States, and much of this is new in the last 30 years. Not even the multi-trillion-dollar pay-off Diane Francis envisions would be an adequate compensation to Canadians to take such a great leap backwards in good government.

The American deterioration is not irreversible, and Canadians wish that country well. But Canadians should also remember that Canada’s founders were not seeking to cash out with a capital gain. They were seeking a model country of enlightened government, secure and respected in the world. That potential has largely been achieved and should be completed. The full economic benefits will follow, and we will, in fact, retain the cake, and eat the cake, too. Good try, Diane, but no sale.

cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Post.