The U.S. Constitution includes
an open invitation for the accession of Canada into the U.S. as a state. The
invitation was made before Canada spread across from the Atlantic to the Pacific
oceans. So, were Canadians to seek statehood in the American union of states
(i.e., the U.S.A.), they would have a good argument for Canada being split in
to a few states rather than just one. This is qualitatively different than a “merger”
between the two countries; the latter ideological conjecture is predicated on a
category mistake. Such a mistake would say, for example, that Singapore and
China are of the same genus politically even though the former is a city-state
and the latter is on the (early modern) empire-scale. Just because both
Singapore and China have foreign policies and are member-countries of the UN
does not mean that a city-state is to be treated more generally as if it were
the same as an empire. By “empire,” I am referring to China itself, rather than
any territories it might have beyond mainland China. The Qing emperor Kangzi
expanded mainland China to include some central Asian kingdoms, thus making
China an empire (of kingdom-level/scale subunits). Similarly, the U.S., as well
as the E.U., are empire-scale/level polities of (kingdom-level) polities,
whereas Canada does not have enough such polities to qualify as being on the
empire-scale, for an empire contains many kingdom-level polities.
The full essay is at "Statehood for Canada."
