Mailbag: Alternate Canada

Plus moral decline, strip clubs, and liquor licenses

Well, “Liberation Day” has arrived and it sucks, but Trump’s taste for terrible trade policy may be American democracy’s best hope, so I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

In less mixed feelings, Susan Crawford won handily in Wisconsin. I know there’s some effort on Political Science BlueSky to cast doubt on the conclusion that low-propensity voters now lean Republican. But we saw very clearly in this week’s special elections that Democrats ran strongest ahead of Harris in the Florida House race that was barely contested, second-strongest in an R+30 seat that attracted a surprising amount of financial interest and attention, and weakest in Wisconsin, where turnout was freakishly high for an off-year election and tons of money was spent. Still, turnout was well-below a presidential election year, and Crawford won.

So I think the basic facts are clear: This cuts against a kind of progressive romanticism, but broadly speaking, it is good to have the more-engaged coalition that is more likely to vote.

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Thomas Lamoureux: Alternative history: how would the population distribution and urban centres of Canada be different had the country been absorbed into the US in the 19th century? Would cities in the Northern plains like Calgary and Edmonton still have grown to their current size if folks were free to move to more temperate climes? Alternatively, might the population of what is now Canada not be higher, benefiting from the relatively more open immigration policies of the US during most of its history?

Most people don’t know this but before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, there was basically no barrier to migration from Canada into the United States of America. From 1860 to 1900, Canada had net negative immigration, with most of the outflows bound for the United States. In the twentieth century, Canada began to have net positive migration because so many people were moving there from Europe. Nonetheless, Bruno Ramirez’s Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900-1930 says that almost a million Canadians moved south during his period.

Long story short, I don’t think unification of the two countries would have dramatically altered the historic pattern of settlement and urbanization, basically because there was a ton of migration anyway.

Where things would be different is in the much more recent history. Canada has significant internal migration from the economically depressed Atlantic provinces to energy-rich Alberta. Calgary and Edmonton would still grow for energy-related reasons, but the pattern would be different. For starters, some people from economically depressed parts of the United States would be moving to Alberta. But lots of people who in the real world move there from Atlantic Canada would instead move to the US Sunbelt, where the weather is warmer. So on net, Alberta would probably have a somewhat smaller population, and Atlantic Canada might be significantly depopulated.

The interesting question to me is sort of, wither Toronto?

In Canada’s 1951 Census, Toronto had 1.2 million residents, and in 2021 the population was 2.8 million. Compare that to the closest American cities:

• Buffalo went from 580,000 in 1950 to 280,000 in 2020.

• Detroit went from 1.8 million in 1950 to 640,000 in 2020.

• Cleveland went from 900,000 in 1950 to 370,000 in 2020.

• Chicago went from 3.6 million in 1950 to 2.7 million in 2020.

Which is just to say that Toronto has fared dramatically better than the American cities of the Great Lakes region. I think it’s plausible that if the countries had been unified, it would be on a more Chicago-esque trajectory, being pulled downward despite considerable strength by the generally sinking fate of the region and people’s basic aversion to cold weather.

Robert Frodeman: Do you have, or have you seen a good account that explains the decline in political morals in the US over the last 20 years? Actions that would have ended any other politician's career leave Trump untouched. For instance, could it be tied to the creation of the internet, in the sense that it promulgated sexual license (eg, Pornhub) as well as unvetted information? Or perhaps as a reaction to the failed attempt to impeach Clinton?

I do think that Bill Clinton’s ability to rally Democrats to his side after he was caught doing something legitimately bad plays a role in this story.

But I think it largely comes down to the decline of religion.