A future for Canada? "Acquiring" Canada and Greenland are very different concepts.
A better understanding of “Canada” is required to understanding ongoing impacts of US doctrines
We have all seen the headlines and related analysis. Many Canadians are looking at what the US government is doing with relation to Venezuela and Greenland, and there is a desire to suggest Canada is next as if Canada is similar in some way to Venezuela or Greenland.
Fortunately, there are some people who are talking about what are effectively false equivalencies being made.
As an example, this article about Greenland.
Even so, polling suggested last year that 56% of the population would vote for an independent Greenland if given the chance. The strained relationship between the Nordic neighbours is exemplified by a forced sterilisation scandal which saw women and girls from the Inuit community – which makes up around 88% of Greenland’s population – being fitted with intrauterine devices without their informed consent by Danish doctors between 1965 and 1991.
A similar colonial/racist/genocidal/etc relationship exists between the peoples of the Innuit Nunigat and other “north of 60” regions claimed to be under the jurisdiction of the distant “south of 49’th” settler-colonial government of Canada.
It makes no more sense to possessively talk about the “Inuit in Canada” than it does to talk about the “Inuit in Denmark”, the “Inuit in the United States”, or the “Inuit of Russia”.
Monroe Doctrine
One of the common problems with Western worldviews is short-term thinking, and the belief that what is true today has been true for a long time (and decades or a human lifespan doesn’t qualify as a long time), and will remain true for a long time or somehow “forever”.
When there is a reference to the Monroe Doctrine, we are talking about a doctrine first initiated (and never really rescinded) in 1823. This is a time after the first British North American civil war in 1775, after the alleged “purchase” of Louisiana around 1803, and after the recent War of 1812. The Monroe Docrine era was initiated before California was violently extracted from Mexico in 1848, before the second British North American civil war in 1861, before the unilateral imposition by the British Government of the modern state of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and before the alleged “purchase” of so-caled Ruperts Land in 1869.
The first British North America Act in 1867 predates any of its current claims to any land north of the 60’th parallel, and only involved weak claims to land some consider part of the very southern parts of Ontario and Quebec (at the time known as the British province of Canada), and the British/Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
For some more point-forms of the relevant history, see:
I have read a few articles discussing this more recent highlighting of preexisting
United States doctrines.
While the Monroe doctrine might have been claimed to be about reducing yet more direct-European colonialism in what Europe claimed was the “Western Hemisphere”, the Donroe doctrine is actually about increasing US colonialism (itself a derivative of an ongoing expression of European/British/Anglosphere settler-colonialism) in this hemisphere.
While Canada may feel like a target of the USA for some, I don’t know if the identity and values of those settler-colonial governments (and their ideological loyalists) are sufficiently different to warrant any actual rebranding.
This is different from the huge differences (identity, values, history, etc) that exist between British North American settler-colonialism (consolidated into USA and Canada) and Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, South America, Greenland or Iceland (if the US claim to Guam is supposed to make any sense, then so does Iceland).
Even if the USA wanted to initiate some rebranding of what some have recently claimed is part of Canada, I’ve not yet been convinced that Canadian loyalists or Canadian institutions would do much to push back. I don’t think the War of 1812 would be continued in the same way it was when it was put on pause.
To look at closely and question US policies and doctrines (and this is not about one leader, or one executive — as the Trump regime is a more open and honest expression of policy that is usually spun with propaganda) also involves questioning the status-quo of the settler-colonial Dominion of Canada.
Similar to how the USA is claimed to have “purchased” Louisiana (involving a region MUCH larger than the state with a similar name) and Alaska from entities that didn’t have legitimate title, Canada is claimed to have “purchased” Rupert’s Land from an entity that also didn’t have title.
Given these unchallenged and unrescinded precedents, how is the USA claiming to want to “acquire” Greenland, Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, Inuvialuit and other parts of what’s left of NWT, Yukon, Venezuela, Alberta, or any other regions of this hemisphere all that different?