This conversation is uncomfortable. But it is overdue.

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Sovereignty, Borders, and the Questions We Avoid at Our Own Risk
There are questions many societies instinctively avoid,not because they lack merit, but because they unsettle inherited assumptions. Sovereignty in North America is one of those questions.
I’m not opposed to asking it plainly:
What does sovereignty actually mean in today’s Canada?
The Canada/U.S. border was not drawn by Indigenous peoples.
It was imposed over nations that already had laws, territories, trade networks, and treaty relationships that long predate the modern state.
Those treaties still matter. They are not symbolic. They are living agreements.
But intellectual honesty requires us to hold more than one truth at the same time.
Sovereignty in Theory vs. Sovereignty in Practice
Roughly 76% of Canada’s trade is with the United States. Our economies are deeply integrated. Our energy systems, supply chains, defence posture, and even regulatory standards are increasingly aligned, often asymmetrically.
That raises legitimate governance questions:
Are we fully sovereign in practice, or functionally constrained by dependency?
If critical decisions are shaped elsewhere, what does independence actually mean?
And why does so much land remain legally titled as Crown land, ultimately held in the name of a foreign monarch?
These are not anti-Canadian questions.
They are statecraft questions.
Avoiding them doesn’t protect sovereignty. It obscures how power actually operates.
Integration Is Already Here. The Question Is Who Sets the Terms
Some analysts, including Peter Zeihan, have explored scenarios of deeper continental integration up to and including hypothetical U.S. statehood, not as advocacy, but as geopolitical thought experiments.
The point is not that such outcomes are inevitable or desirable.
The point is this: integration is already occurring, quietly and unevenly, without public consent or strategic clarity.
Trade, energy corridors, military cooperation, Arctic security, and infrastructure planning increasingly operate on continental logic, while political narratives still pretend we live in neatly sealed national containers.
That mismatch matters.
Indigenous Rights Are Not a Side Issue. They Are Central
Any serious discussion about sovereignty in this land must begin and end with Indigenous nations.
Treaties were not made with provinces.
They were not made with corporations.
They were not made with the Crown as abstraction.
They were made nation to nation.
Indigenous rights are not negotiable add-ons to future models of governance. They are foundational. Any vision of Canada’s future, whether continued independence, deeper continental integration, or something entirely new, must honour treaties as living legal relationships, not historical artifacts.
Anything less is illegitimate.
The Real Risk: Drifting Without Choosing
Experts such as Fen Osler Hampson and Bob Rae have warned that the true danger is not invasion or annexation.
It is downgrading.
A future where Canada remains nominally independent but functionally reduced to:
a resource supplier,
an Arctic access corridor,
an energy and minerals appendage,
…while strategic decisions are increasingly made elsewhere.
That is not sovereignty.
That is managed dependency.
The Questions We Actually Need to Ask
So the real question isn’t:
“Should Canada become a U.S. state?”
That framing is a distraction.
The harder, more honest questions are:
Who decides our future?
Who controls land, water, and resources?
How are Indigenous nations respected; legally and materially,
in any model?
Are we choosing a path, or drifting into one by default?
Silence is not neutrality.
Silence is surrender by omission.
Leadership Requires Maturity, Not Comfort
Leadership today is not about slogans, panic, or performative nationalism.
It’s about:
holding multiple truths at once,
asking difficult questions without fear,
and refusing to let borders, institutions, or power structures remain unquestioned simply because they are familiar.
This conversation is uncomfortable.
But it is overdue.
And avoiding it does not preserve sovereignty.
It only ensures that decisions continue to be made without consent, clarity, or accountability.

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