It would always have been advantageous to the political left in the U.S.A. but they would have ethical constraints about an outright invasion. I suppose the people to whom I now refer have similar constraints, I am not saying they are amoral or evil types (taking over a country is more or less a bad act unless you can talk yourself into believing it’s for their own good, I suppose). So the process they seem to be engaging in is to set up situations where Canadians will want to join the United States. To do that, our economy has to be crippled. When Canadians in various provinces see that the Canadian economy is now dysfunctional (already some western Canadians perceive the federal government is not on their side) they will want to maintain their former standards of living (which despite what some have posted in this thread are roughly equivalent to those in the U.S.) and will be looking at independence and statehood as possible ways of doing that. Resistance to those concepts is low in western Canada and possibly also Newfoundland which also has a lot of resources including oil and natural gas.
Absorbing a mix of liberals and conservatives similar to that in the Pac NW or New England will not serve long-term goals of the people involved so as some have suggested here, it is likely that only western Canada would be drawn in at first, but then I would guess a change of administration in DC at some future point would give conditions more conducive to allowing in Ontario and eastern Canada (and BC if not already in).
These are of course hypotheticals. It is perhaps more likely that Canada will devolve into several independent states, some still calling themselves Canada. Or, Canada could evolve out of what is basically a shallow economic crisis at present, by replacing American markets for exports, or perhaps American consumers will continue to want the imports at higher prices — it won’t benefit us because the tariff portion will stay in the U.S.A. ... so far it appears that the automotive sector is being hurt mainly by fears of future changes after 2026, softwood lumber is being impacted by new tariffs but our government has planned to pick up the slack of lower demand by accelerating housing construction in Canada, a market that has been growing slower than demand in recent years. The response to Trump so far is that we can just weather the storm by engaging in massive public spending programs for a few years and rely on a backlash against rising prices in America to see either a change in policy, or a change in administration in 2029-32. These are potentially dangerous responses if the government of Canada is wrong and the MAGA high tariff concept settles in as permanent; massive public spending can work for a while but once Canada runs up huge defecits then the government will have to pull back.
There are potentially large markets for Canadian exports in Europe and Asia, that we have never really exploited in total because access to the U.S. market has been relatively unconstrained. Trump paints this as taking advantage, but it is a sector by sector situation, people producing lumber are not in cahoots with the high-tariff dairy product sector, and the automotive sector has evolved in a certain way through free will decisions made in Detroit (and elsewhere) based on skill and productivity. Nobody forced GM or Chrysler to employ thousands of Canadian workers in parts of their complicated schemes, they did so mostly because of quality of output considerations. Free trade agreements in the past standardized all of this and it became the status quo after 1988.
Economics tends to be a reality-driven animal and my theory is that natural economic forces will reshape the former status quo into something similar eventually; the political process will bend to the economic forces rather than vice versa. That being said, the same will apply to relations between economics and globalist green economy theories which are bound to be unworkable long-term. Canada has not totally bought into green economics like some European countries but has shifted towards them. This does not sit well in Alberta or Saskatchewan, or eastern B.C., so those regions are most likely to jump ship especially if the economy here tanks. From that observation I return to original post etc etc.
Thanks.