Diane Francis: A geopolitical marriage on the rocks

financialpost.com:

The United States and Canada have gone from being in a mediocre marriage to a bad one. What’s changed is that America no longer has a custodial president; it has a consequential one who wields his country’s power and wants complete control over all partnerships.

Usually when marriages start to fail, the partners seek help. Sometimes, they temporarily split. But in this case, separation is impossible. The United States and Canada are joined at the hip, geographically and economically.

Worse, successive Canadian leaders have been more preoccupied with pandering to Quebec than with growing and strengthening the country economically and militarily. The result is that Canadians now face ruinous 25 per cent tariffs or, potentially, an offer to join the United States.

A merger is anathema to Canada’s elites, but polls show that a growing percentage of younger Canadians may be open to the idea of joining the United States. As a result, Trump smells weakness and has been trash-talking and insulting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the country as a whole.

The only solution for Canada is to negotiate a new bilateral trade arrangement with the Americans. Here’s what should be included:

Implementing these changes would remove the irritants, but I suspect that U.S. President Donald Trump may still want to join the two countries together in order to create a superpower state with more industrial capacity and resources than anywhere else in the world.

But that cannot happen without the approval of Canadians and would require an enormous payout by Washington to Canadians for their over-contribution of resources.

In my 2013 book, “Merger of the Century,” I published a merger model prepared by an investment advisor, which calculated that