The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•February 26, 2025•9 min

A polite message from Canada to the U.S.

President Donald Trump has said that Canada should be the 51st state... and Canadians? Well, they're furious about it. The nation's former finance minister is calling Trump the biggest threat Canada has faced since World War 2. So today on the show, we dig into what lessons Canada can teach the US, and how the two North American nations are already deeply intertwined. Related episodes: Add to cart: Greenland (Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-indicator-from-planet-money/id1320118593?i=1000684439279) / Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/3hQ53IBt9zYqbnFzXklif0?si=d52b453a6a0d44fa)) Canada's key resource against Trump's potential trade war (Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-indicator-from-planet-money/id1320118593?i=1000686912239) / Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Ir0oBXG1Fs7l7vJOSNS6x?si=e8ec0fb0c12f49b9)) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-26724/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

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Npr.

0:12

It has been an emotional couple of weeks for us Canadians.

0:16

Uh, Robert Smith, I know you were born north of the border, but you've been in the US a while now,

0:22

more than 30 years. But Donald Trump's strange beef with my homeland is bringing out the gentle snow person that was living inside of me not believe that he started out his administration with a 25% tariff on the sweet, sweet country of Canada. Then he suddenly suspends it. Then he said it was going forward. Did I imagine this whole thing? And then Trump started to talk about Canada as the 51st state, which just made me and most other Canadians furious.

0:52

I mean, you're describing denial, anger. It's like you're going through the stages of grief.

0:57

Okay. You know, I have definitely been bargaining, thinking maybe this is a negotiating ploy for something. And I am depressed about the whole thing.

1:06

So are you here today to tell us you've moved to the fifth stage of grief? Are you at acceptance of Canada as the 51st state?

1:14

Hell, no. You can pry the maple leaf flag from my cold, dead hands. Well, I mean, a Canadian's hands are always cold, but you understand, it ain't gonna happen.

1:29

This is Vindicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong, here with grieving and aggrieved canon Robert Smith.

1:36

Today on the show, we flip the Trumpian script. Rather than drop rhetorical bombs, perhaps we should drop some knowledge about how linked our economies already are, because Canada has

1:48

more to offer than cheap oil and rare earths and, you know, poutine. It's tackling all the same economic problems as the US Is. And maybe, just maybe, the Canadians have some things to teach us.

2:05

So, Waylon, I have in my hand a list of awesome jokes about Canada as the 51st state, and I will not be delivering any of them. As I talked with people back in Canada, they told me that this is no time for joking.

2:20

Over the weekend, there was a joint radio call in show on U.S. public radio stations and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The Canadians are politely peeved. I personally think it's highly concerning and reprehensible.

2:34

We're talking about insane aggression here. I think it's despicable, extremely dangerous, and it's reckless. The former finance minister of the country just called Trump the biggest threat to Canada since World War II. You can even feel this among academics, and they rarely get riled up. I called up a Canadian economist, Armin Yelnizian, and was just getting some background to start the interview. What is the temperature right now in Ottawa?

3:02

-23. Centigrade.

3:04

What is this centigrade thing?

3:07

I'm sorry. We are a distinct society, man. Let's cut to the chase. The dream of the 51st state is fantasyland. It will never happen. We do not want to be the 51st state, okay?

3:20

Armin Yelniesyan has worked as a policy advisor for the Canadian government and is now the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. And after she gave me a million cultural reasons why Canada does not want to join the U.S. we moved on to the economic reasons.

3:36

And the big one is that a combined U.S. and Canada would not be richer.

3:41

We'd be exactly the same. We are about as integrated as you could get.

3:46

Which when you think about it, right, the total amount of stuff would stay the same. The companies and the jobs would stay the same. There might be fewer tariffs and traffic jams across the border, but. But that is not a solution to economic problems. Just ask Europe.

3:59

Armin says. What you need to realize is that even though Americans perhaps don't think much about Canada, we are floating in the same boat in the waters of the global economy.

4:10

It really started when we fought together against the Nazis in World War II. We both built these factories to make guns and tanks. And when the war was over, these factories turned to consumer goods, things like cars. US Factories started to get parts from Canadian factories and vice versa.

4:26

Then our economies became intertwined after the two global price shocks in oil in the 1970s with extracting more Canadian crude to feed the refineries in the United States.

4:40

But what really unites Canada and the U.S. economically is that we face the same existential challenge, demographics. Just like the U.S. canada had a baby boom.

4:49

And just like the U.S. those boomers are now retiring. And. And that changes an economy, challenges it. Amin says that the US shouldn't fixate on getting more stuff. Both countries need more workers.

5:02

More people are aging out of the labor market than coming into it. If you don't like immigrants, expect an economic slowdown. If you don't like trade, expect an economic slowdown. You know, if that's the tenor that is coming into all of our conversations in the global north, expect a long term economic decline.

5:25

Now, Canada does not have all the answers for this. The economy will be a huge issue in their upcoming elections. But our means suggest three things that maybe the US could think about that Canada has some lessons on.

5:37

The first is immigration. For a long time, Canada has had one of the most innovative immigration systems in the world. They offered visas based on the points system where potential immigrants ranked based on Education, workers, work experience and language skills.

5:52

It has been one of the sources, one of the great sources of our economic resilience in Canada, she says, has

6:01

been because they're struggling with the immigration rules right now in Canada. They let in a lot of people temporarily after the pandemic started, when they needed more workers, then there was a backlash and they tightened the border.

6:13

We really are the same in some ways.

6:15

But the fact remains that in Canada, about a quarter of its population is foreign born. It's only about 13.

6:23

The second thing Armin says that the US can learn from Canada is its health care system.

6:29

I knew this was coming. Universal healthcare.

6:31

Absolutely. The government of Canada runs healthcare. And yes, people complain about it all the time, but overall, Canadians pay less and live longer than in the US

6:42

Armin says it has another benefit that you might not really think about for private businesses.

6:48

Ask any of your large auto manufacturing companies right now, would they have preferred to have Canadian style healthcare? And they'd say yes in a heartbeat because then they don't have to pay for it. That's one of the reasons why the Canadian auto plants have been so efficient and successful. We're healthier and they don't pay for it.

7:08

So smarter immigration, universal healthcare. And the third thing Armin offers the US as a suggestion, a little something for the matriarchy.

7:17

The fact that for at least the last 20 years, Canadian women have been more in the workforce than the United States, which reverses history since the 1960s. The way we did it is by providing women not only access to great post secondary education where they could develop their human capital, but they could deploy it because they had access to cheap and high quality childcare.

7:43

Cheap, high quality childcare, who would have thought?

7:47

I don't even know what that is. Never heard of it.

7:49

I mean, cheap relative to the United States. Armin says the United States can just steal this idea from Canada.

7:56

Yeah, you could learn from us without absorbing us. You could absorb the lesson without absorbing the country.

8:02

So Canadian. I love it. And I should say that since the Trump threats, I am not the only one feeling more Canadian. And in a sprawling country with two official languages, English and French and so many different cultures, it's sometimes hard to feel like you're one people to feel Canadian. But that's all changed without question.

8:22

This bizarre moment has put a bit of steel in our spine in Canada. And we're starting to talk about how we could be stronger together in a way that I haven't heard in my adult lifetime as an economist. So maybe this is the silver lining to this crazy moment.

8:39

Canadians are already talking about diversifying their trading partners, making more connections with Europe and Asia. And who knows, maybe 50 years from now, Canada, the true north, strong and free, will get a provocative prime minister who starts to talk about the US as the 11th province.

8:58

Well, I think our approach would be. Would you like to join us? Not, we're taking you over.

9:05

Sorry. Not sorry.

9:10

This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Jimmy Keeley. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez. Kicking Cannon, another Canadian edits the show and the indicators are production of npr.

A polite message from Canada to the U.S.

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