Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country by Diane Francis

Author:Diane Francis
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780062325013
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

They Could Become the World’s Economic Superpower

About 89 percent of Canada, an area larger than Australia, is Crown land or is owned by governments and is virtually untouched. The ten provinces own 48 percent of the country, while the federal government owns 41 percent, mostly in the three Arctic territories—the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut. The Yukon is bigger than California; the Northwest Territories are twice the size of Texas. Nunavut, 17 percent of which is owned by the Inuit who live there, is as big as Alaska and Montana combined. Despite such vast territory, the population of Canada’s three northernmost territories is roughly 100,000. Canada has thirteen subnational governments, and twelve are big enough, and rich enough, to be independent nation-states.

In the United States, 60.2 percent of the land is privately owned. The United States federal government, through various departments and agencies, directly owns about 31 percent for use as military bases or testing grounds, for parks and reserves and as Indian reservations. The other 8.7 percent is divided unevenly among the fifty state governments.

Vast public ownership makes exploration and development difficult. The fact is that Canada is already a mining superpower, as is the United States, but Canada’s potential is greater. As estimated by Wayne Goodfellow, in chapter 3, up to $15 trillion worth of metals and minerals could be found—a sum more than ten times the size of Canada’s economy—if governments got their acts together and paved the way so that industry had greater access to these untouched lands. This does not include the potential for oil and natural gas.

In Canada, development in these areas has been neglected because the lands are managed by government bureaucrats, while the United States has exploited its land in a much more effective way, as the private sector has been allowed to drive economic development.

The two countries’ approaches to development diverged after the War of Independence. The Americans repudiated Crown lands and Crown estate and privatized. That never happened in Canada. The British retained the feudal rights and strategically meted out small amounts of land along the U.S. border to war veterans, mercenaries and loyalists who left the U.S. for Canada during and after the American Revolution. This allocation of land was remuneration for the loyalists’ service, but it was strategic as well, as these men would become the shock troops necessary to repel an American invasion after the Revolution, as they did in 1812, when a few thousand U.S. militia invaded Canada. This ribbon of privately owned land along the border is where the country grew and where most Canadians now live.

The high degree of public ownership makes Canada one of the richest countries in the world. For example, the 4.5 million people living in British Columbia may or may not own private property in the southernmost portion of the province, which represents 6 percent of the province’s landmass, but all of them indirectly and collectively own, in the form of provincial Crown lands, the other 94 percent of the province, an area as big as Texas and Colorado combined.

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