As the 47th president continues to suggest Canada could become a ‘51st state,’ Holly Baxter speaks to the Canadians who think he might have a point. Long after the war was over, she stayed, she gained Canadian citizenship, she raised her children in her adopted country. And then she wrote the book that had her “blacklisted” from some media circles and frozen out from others.
![[Diane Francis wrote her prescient book 12 years before a U.S.-Canada merger became a mainstream political discussion]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/22/18/Screenshot-2025-01-22-at-1.37.36%E2%80%AFPM.jpg)
“A lot of Canadians hated the book,” she says, in a video interview from her luxury condominium in Toronto. “They hated the idea that someone would even write the book.” Though it sold well in a number of countries, it was barely reviewed inside Canada: people didn’t want to talk about the elephant in the room, she believes. Francis’s Canadian kids “did not like it,” either.
![[Canadian author Don Tapscott has agreed there could be distinct economic advantages for the U.S. and Canada if they were to become one big, happy country]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/17/07/SEI232639251.jpg)
Then, 12 years later, Donald Trump said Canada should become America’s 51st state. And people started to whisper about whether Francis might have been right all along. “It was really a warning,” she tells me. “Okay, get yourself organized, guys. You’ve got a great country — we’ve got a great country here, and you know, frankly, we don’t want their gun laws and we don’t want their lousy healthcare system, their crime rates, blah, blah. So let’s do something about it. Or — and I said this very clearly — they’re gonna make a takeover bid, and they’re gonna gobble us up.”.
Nevertheless, there’s something legitimate there to open a negotiation, she adds. “If I were the prime minister of Canada tomorrow, I’d go down and say: ‘Look, President Trump, totally understand your M.O., I get it. You’re right. I wrote a book about it. We haven’t been pulling our weight. Here’s what we propose. We will double the amount we spend on the military. We will procure everything from pencils to tanks from U.S. suppliers — that will help with the trade deficit. And that’s my pledge.’ For him, that’s a big win.”.
