Borders

Listening to basketball podcasts about the Toronto Raptors, and the explosion of popularity of basketball across all of Canada - at least for the moment - brings out the Canadian reporters talking about Canada's little brother status. Canadians resent being an afterthought in the North American discussion, much as New Zealand resents Australia. We are more aware of this in New Hampshire, simply because we encounter Canadians a lot and get the reminder.  A lot of our citizens originally come from Canada, especially Quebec, or their parents/grandparents did. It's a fair complaint. I try to include them in a lot of discussions about the New World or in cultural discussions, because they are simply not that different.  They had similar settlers, with the notable exception of Quebec (though even that is mostly a difference of language.  Genetically, Norman French aren't that far from the English, Scottish, Dutch, and German of early Americans).  Their economy developed in very similar fashion to the Northeast through Midwest of America.

Borders are not entirely accidents, but they are often products of history as much as geography, and small changes could have large consequences. 2000 miles of the border from the Great Lakes to the Pacific runs arbitrarily along the 49th parallel. The New England and New York borders in colonial history were highly dependent on military and treaty events that could have gone either way.  About 90% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the border with America.  Considered one way, it is easy to picture them as feeding off the enormous economic engine of the US. If the border were 100 miles north, Canada would be an attic. It would have no people, no economy, and would be unlikely to even be a country in its own right. The American purchase of Alaska makes it not just a powerful force in the north, but the only force.  What possible Canadian capital would have even the slightest influence on Sitka at that point?

But that door swings both ways.  It is probably more accurate to picture the population of North America as dense in habitable areas that had oceans and rivers for trading, with an artificial boundary running 50-150 miles below the upper limit. We could mentally move the border south in this thought experiment, so that the upper four states of New England, most of New York, Michigan, and some new line including much of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington were part of Canada.  It wouldn't take too many tweaks of history to make that happen.  Northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes are already joined in Joel Garreau's Nine Nations.  It this reimagining they would be a whole, either wholly in Canada or wholly in America.

New topic, springing from the last.  I don't know what happens to Newfoundland.  It's 1948 referendum looks entirely different, if such a thing even approached reality. If some Americans had been more prescient around 1900, observing that the North Atlantic was tactically important, not just full of fish, we would have pursued stronger relations with Newfoundland, and with that, Greenland and Iceland could have come to identify with America rather than Europe - though language would have been a powerful counterforce on that. Consider that the other Scandinavian countries are not so tightly bound to Europe as the continental countries are.  Norway is not in the EU, Iceland wasn't until its economic collapse.  Finland worried more about Russia than Germany in the 20th C and so was never completely on board with either side in the World Wars, and even Denmark was more Atlantacist than anyone but the UK. One can at least imagine an entire arc across the northern Atlantic that splits off the top third of Europe as partner in an American-Canadian confederacy of mutual influence.  Our politics would be different, and so would theirs.