O Canada, Come Join Us

Despite the fake news media's attempts to convince the world that Glorious Leader-Elect Donald Trump, Convicted Felon, is merely joking when he insists he's going to use "economic force" to make Canadians surrender their country to the United States, think tank conservatives and their New York Times counterparts are all quite convinced that the Glorious Leader-Elect is serious.

As well they should be, because one of the requirements of becoming a Glorious Leader is attacking and occupying foreign lands to quiet the screaming of Glorious Leader's always-wriggling brainworms. Nobody ever became a Glorious Leader by making friends; you assume the role by creating internment camps for designated national enemies and annexing the lands of the designated international ones.

Since the Glorious Leader-Elect has always succeeded in his every task and idea, annexing Canada and making it the 51st United State can be assumed to be a fait accompli. I want to bid a warm welcome to our soon-to-be-newest American citizens! I also want to address any concerns or confusion the soon-to-be-former Canadian population might have; consider this your citizenry onboarding pamphlet.

First, we need to make it clear that the offer on the table is that Canada will become the 51st American state—the noun is singular. Not three states, or five: One. You may be wondering why Canada, a continent-spanning nation with a population of nearly 40 million people, considerably greater than that of every U.S. state except California, would be granted only two United States senators when the combined populations of North and South Dakota get twice as many. The answer is shut up, that's why. American political thinking is an intricate dance of competing theories, objectives, and petty crimes, and while Glorious Leader and his billionaire allies see great potential in acquiring your land and natural resources, former Canadians, what to do with the actual people is not something that has been much thought about.

I will be blunt, Canadians. We American pundits simply don't know much about you. We know that you like maple syrup and have a reputation for being unfailingly polite, which sounds like a good match because Glorious Leader has a fondness for condiments and is easily enraged by sass. Any further details are a bit blurry, because we all watch a lot of television here and don't pay a great deal of attention to countries that aren't our own. We know that you have a town called Moosejaw, because it is very funny. Oh—and we know Glorious Leader's grandfather fled Germany to open a gold-rush era Canadian whorehouse, and if that doesn't prove our two nations to be close siblings I don't know what else might. For Americans, it's like looking into a very cold mirror.

There are some peculiarities about how the United States government functions that may seem strange, when you first become American citizens yourselves. In Canada, the government is made up of a parliament and a prime minister (the Glorious First Lady-Elect is rumored to believe your current prime minister is "very hot," you'll be pleased to know.)

In the United States, the system is subtly different. Bills are passed by Congress after consulting with the Ministry of Lobbying, an unelected group of mostly-Americans hired to know what the best course of action is despite what voters themselves may believe. The President then signs each bill into law.

Upon the president's signature, each congressionally passed new law is then sent to the biggest asshole in the state of Texas, or if that asshole is busy, the second or third biggest asshole in Texas, who then vetoes the law and tells Congress that they no longer have the power to pass any new laws of this type.

You will hear a lot about something called a "Northern District," mainly because the phrase will appear on every new statement of Terms and Conditions you are asked to agree to. Don't let the phrase confuse you: It is actually situated quite south!

Natural Disasters

It is our understanding that the former territories of Canada, much like our own United States, have been suffering from increasingly common and severe natural disasters—mostly in the form of catastrophic new fires caused by [GOD'S INCREASING LOVE FOR YOU]. You may want to be aware of some differences in how America approaches such problems.

In Canada, natural disasters are typically combatted by a partnership of local, regional, and federal governments. Firefighting teams are rushed to the scene; governments provide necessary emergency supplies and help evacuate citizens; long-term recovery assistance is funded by the government so that affected communities can rebuild.

That is not how America does things, and you may find the differences to be awkward at first. In America, local and state officials are responsible for disaster response—for example, to massive new wind-driven fires. The role of the Glorious Leader, of Congress, and of Glorious Leader's nongovernmental hangers-on might in this example instead consist of:

• Telling Americans that the fires were caused because the local fire department hired too many women.

• Claiming the disaster happened because the affected communities refused to rake their forests. If no forests are nearby, the claim may instead be that the fires were due to "diversity efforts."

• Declaring that the fires were intentionally set by immigrants from [randomly chosen Central or South American nation.]

• Mocking the disaster's victims while threatening to withhold recovery aid unless Glorious Leader's designated political enemies agree to a string of demands that may consist of ceding control of any useful natural resources or business markets to Glorious Leader's wealthiest allies.

It may seem an unusual response to a catastrophe, but you needn't worry. America is the greatest country in the world, and therefore it is the correct response.

Health Care

It is our understanding that Canada, like much of the rest of the world, has a universal, government-run system of health insurance. This will have to end. Top American lobbyists have done decades of research and the outcome of each study is always the same: Government-run healthcare is tremendously inefficient at extracting wealth from the populace.

Private insurance systems may be more complex in their design and operation, but that complexity has a purpose. Each tier of such programs are optimized to provide maximal opportunities for wheedling more money out of the sick or injured, funneling it instead to wealthier Americans who better know how to put that money to productive use. There are departments built to reject patient claims in a rigidly automated fashion, typically without the need for any expensive physician review. There are departments designed to search through old patient insurance applications looking for miswritten dates or other technical errors that might allow the company to evade paying the bills of very sick patients by asserting that those patients had been defrauding them all along. There are departments that do intense medical-like research to determine how American laws and regulations might be changed to allow squeezing some patients more than others, and departments tasked with taking down public information about company executives so that angry members of the public do not show up on their doorsteps. And there are departments devoted solely to building good public relations by producing pictures of Generic Smiling People overlaid with phrases that suggest a generic level of human empathy, no matter what all the other departments might be up to.

The Canadian healthcare system is, compared to all of this, primitive and childish. Our wealthiest Americans, the executives at the companies they run, and the editors at the newspapers they own can hardly sleep at night thinking about all the healthcare dollars that are not being efficiently siphoned off and used to boost company stock prices. You are literally making them nauseous.

And I will be even more blunt. Look, the plain facts are that there simply isn't any more wealth to be squeezed out of the American system; short of being allowed to harvest policy owners for parts, the market has been bled completely dry. Putting 40 million former Canadians into the private insurance pools is really the only remaining way to boost corporate revenues at this point, so that's what has to happen.

Quebec

And now we get to the fly in the syrup. Canada, the first thing we're going to have to fix before you get your two senators, profit-seeking health insurance, and richest men in America telling you that wildfires happen because women have too many jobs these days is ... Quebec. What about Quebec? All of it. The whole thing.

It is the American understanding that the people of Quebec speak French, or more specifically something called Québécois French, with little French squiggles on some of the letters. It is allegedly the official language, and Canada: that isn't going to cut it. As Americans, you will be expected to speak American. Knowing other languages is, like being vaccinated, something that exists almost solely among immigrants. While I can promise you our Glorious Leader and his allies will treat the whole of the Canadian population as "immigrants" for at least the first whole century after your territory has been assimilated, America has no patience for people who speak languages other than American and calling some language that isn't American an "official language" is what communists do.

So we're going to be putting a stop to that. Before you can achieve true statehood (just the one, remember) Glorious Leader's aides will first be dispatching National Guards troops to enforce the complete de-Frenchification of Quebec and its citizens. The signs must be removed. The forms must be reprinted. The children, especially, must be re-educated.

It is not just that French is not American. It is because it is French. When your children are being taught "French," it amounts to an unending stream of learning which objects in the world are considered "male" and which are considered "female"—a process that by its very design has young children misgendering objects over and over from a very early age.

Canada, children should not be exposed to a system in which they must remember whether a table is supposed to be a man or a woman. They should not look at a "crayon" and be immediately reminded of male genitalia.

And what of all the times they get such a guess wrong? Is a library masculine, or feminine? If they guess wrong then suddenly your young child is pointing at a transgender library—and that is pornography.

The first step, then, will be laws that recognize the teaching of French as pornographic. Under the plans outlined by Glorious Leader's allies, showing anything in the French language to children will be considered pedophilia and educators who are in possession of French language books will be imprisoned, registered as sex offenders, or both. There will be no transgender libraries. The tables and the chairs and crayons and schools will be sexless, as God intended, and no new almost-Americans will be exposed to perverts who look at any of those things and "wonder" about them.

Fear not, however. This problem can be addressed calmly and quickly. America is already making preparations for large-scale internment camps throughout its southernmost states, and adding camps for Quebec's French-speaking population would add at most 10,000 beds to the number. Simply be cooperative and Glorious Leader can sweep the problem away without issue.

I'm afraid I've closed things out on a somewhat sour note, so let's put that awkwardness behind us and instead remember all the good things, Canada, that will come from becoming the 51st American state. Your sick and your injured will contribute to the profit margins of some of the most successful corporate entities to ever exist. You will never be confused as to why a wildfire has hit a particular region: The answer will always be "diversity." You will be considered the equivalent of half of the North-South Dakota pair, which is fine praise indeed considering one of those two—I always forget which—is home to Mount Rushmore. Your tar sands will never go undeveloped; your forests will ... not be raked, but they will be clearcut, which our top lobbyists assure is an even more effective way of stomping out the dangerous diversity and inclusion that can lead to sparks. Do you have water, up there? We need water, so we'll be borrowing some of that.

There is not a single downside to this plan. That's good, because it doesn't appear that the Glorious Leader-Elect or his allied officials and pundits intend to ask your opinion on any of it. You will, however, get two senators.

Eventually, of course. After your population has gone through the appropriate transitory period. The Supreme Court will determine what the appropriate duration of that transition ought to be, but be prepared for a slight delay. Justices Alito and the others are currently working their way through old letters, diaries, and writs from the 17th century as they attempt to determine the true origins and intents of each and every one of our more modern laws; they are still about two centuries off from the date where your "Canada" was first founded. And they do like to work through these things in order.