Why are younger Canadians more susceptible to Trump and the lure of the 51st state?

by Paul W. Bennett. Originally published on Policy Options
March 24, 2025

(Version française disponible ici)

What started as a joke is no laughing matter now. U.S. President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to impose tariffs on Canadian exports are more than a warning shot across the national bow. They also mask something far more ominous.

The “Make America Great Again” movement has been exposed as a bellicose and surreal new version of American imperialism. Tightening border controls on drugs and migrants may turn out to be little more than appeasement if his real agenda is continental economic dominance and making Canada the 51^st state.

New vulnerabilities are surfacing. While most polls suggest the vast majority of Canadian adults are resolute in resisting any such takeover, the younger generation (18-35) is much more inclined – given certain favourable terms – to join the United States. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be susceptible to Trump and his appeals.

One of the most unacknowledged reasons is the failure of our school systems to teach the current generation about historic Canadian resistance to U.S. threats, incursions and trade sanctions going back to the American Revolution.

Facing Trump’s new and unprecedented threat to our nationality and a potentially devastating trade war, a complete curriculum reset is needed. It’s time to give younger Canadians their national history and a stronger sense of our collective identity and traditions.

Post-national generation

Sixty-five per cent of those aged 18 to 35 who responded to a January 2025 Ipsos poll think “Canada’s future as an independent country is in jeopardy.” Another 31 per cent think it’s just “a matter of time” before the two countries merge and a shocking 43 per cent would “vote for union” if all Canadians were offered full citizenship and a full conversion of all financial assets into U.S. dollars.

Critics of Canadian national leadership in the 10 years under Justin Trudeau see this trend as an unintended outcome of his “post-national” vision, particularly his 2015 proclamation that Canada could be the “first post-national state” because there is “no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

“Post-national” conceptions of Canada influenced federal policy and set the tone for undercutting our national myths, symbols and institutions, and tilting us in the direction of promoting multiple identities, diversity and inclusion.

That movement, often derided now as “woke,” certainly found favour in universities, provincial education ministries and faculties of education. Championing our collective sense of identity and flag waving was tarred with the brush of being based on “settler-colonialism.”

A generation unaware

The result that alarmed Colin MacEachern, a former Halifax high school history educator now teaching in Australia, was the susceptibility of today’s students and their teachers to Trump’s bluster and blandishments.

MacEachern wrote on social media that his students would likely have no comprehension of the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” or the American threat to Canada that was a major factor in nudging us toward Confederation.

It’s also fair to assume they have little or no knowledge of critical events of U.S. pressure on Canada such as the American invasion of Quebec in 1775, the War of 1812, the 1911 election reciprocity debate, the nuclear warheads controversy of the 1960s or American pressure to join the Iraq War in 2003.

Toward the end of his 30-year N.S. career, he wrote on X he was the “only teacher I knew” in Halifax still teaching about Canada’s long historical tradition of resisting American threats, military incursions and trade sanctions.

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The problem of collective memory loss is far from new. Thirty years ago, it was flagged by the late Bob Davis in Whatever Happened to High School History: Burying the Political Memory of Youth Ontario:1945-1995.

Davis wrote that enrolment in history went from 11.4 per cent of all Ontario classes in 1964 to a mere 6.6 per cent in 1982. In addition, history and social studies became afflicted with what he aptly termed the “skills mania.”

The result was depriving students of opportunities to engage with the larger national story and to develop a stronger sense of historical consciousness and collective memory.

Former Toronto history teacher Trilby Kent, author of The Vanishing Past, provided a more recent snapshot. What is sorely lacking today, Kent argued, is a knowledge-building curriculum that produces better-informed young citizens capable of engaging intelligently in public debates.

An untold story

The first Canadian History Report Card, published in June 2009 by the Dominion Institute, found that only four provinces – Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Nova Scotia – required all high school students to take a mandatory Canadian history course. Most provinces and territories simply offered courses in social studies.

Co-authors of the report, Mark Chalifoux and J.D.M. Stewart, delivered a stern message. “As a country, we are letting our students down when it comes to educate them about Canada’s past,” they wrote in 2009 in The Globe and Mail. “ That remains true today.

Teaching Canada’s national story is still all over the map, varying province-to-province. A review of provincial curricula in three different provinces will demonstrate the variations, gaps and irregularities.

Ontario’s social studies curriculum attempts to develop “inquiry-learning” processes and offers Grades 7-8 students a coherent Canadian history continuum from 1712 to 1850 and Grade 10 students from1914 to the present.

While the courses do provide a thematic-chronological overview, there are holes in the continuity because it jumps back and forth addressing contemporary social issues. The one required Canadian history course in Ontario high schools also comes accompanied with broad, generalized outcomes open to various interpretations.

Stewart sees plenty of evidence that senior students have trouble knitting together content from earlier grades and therefore graduate without a sound knowledge of our founding events, core institutions and the historic challenges of sharing a continent with the United States.

Nova Scotia’s Canadian history course, introduced in 2002 as mandatory for all Grade 11 students, has been gradually abandoned in a succession of well-intentioned but splintering changes aimed at responding to the needs of Black and Indigenous students.

Today, in Grade 11, Nova Scotia students can take Canadian history (academic or studies), contemporary Canadian studies, African Nova Scotian studies, Mi’kmaq studies or Gaelic studies.

Our national history, origins and foundations are given short shrift in all variations, given their multi-identities/social studies orientation. It’s entirely possible to completely miss learning about our nation’s road to Confederation and our history of resisting American invasion, annexation and continental economic pressures.

Students in British Columbia are even less prepared because they are without a solid grounding in history or much understanding of the roots of our current national crisis. The latest redesigned B.C. social studies curriculum puts a heavy emphasis on “big ideas” and the “learning process” and a “deeper understanding of concepts,” rather than on subject mastery.

It dismisses history as “the memorizing of isolated facts and information.” History courses in B.C. in Grades 9 and 10 have a clear social justice orientation, emphasizing “discriminatory practices and injustices” to the exclusion of more positive matters.

In B.C., Grade 11 and 12 students need to complete only one social studies course, drawn from a smorgasbord of options, heavily loaded in favour of contemporary global issues, Indigenous studies, genocide studies and social justice.

None of these offerings provide the necessary history to prepare students for the current challenges to our national identity, political sovereignty or economic independence.

Sleepwalking into the future

Students and teachers who came of age in the “post-national” era are ill-prepared to respond to the serious challenges of today. Provincial education ministries, teachers’ colleges and schools have been slow to pick up the signals of the seismic shift and its potential dangers.

Toppling statues, criticizing former prime ministers for not meeting the standards of today, and brushing off calls to rebuild lost traditions has – like it or not – sapped our sense of national purpose.

Without a grounding in our national history and sources of identity, the younger generation is in all likelihood sleepwalking into the future.

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This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.