In the wake of the presidential election, the Democratic Chair of the New York State Senate Finance Committee Liz Kreuger proposed the idea of New York, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts seceding into Canada to flee Donald Trump’s presidential reign.
Kreuger previously made a similar statement back in September before the election had even taken place. She wanted to have the block of blue states become a part of Canada to avoid the red that would seep through the nation.
The main reason for this was the possibility of cuts in federal funding. New York gives the government about $362 billion in tax revenue, but only gets about $85 billion back in federal funding according to Politico.
Also according to Politico, most of that money goes toward Medicaid spending. With how much they’re paying with taxes, they should be getting a substantially larger amount back. They already have to deal with being called “the Big Apple,” never mind lower federal funding.
Even with the already low amount of federal funding, there’s a possibility of it being lowered further because of Trump’s calls for a crackdown on immigration and the assurance of mass deportations. This threatens all of the sanctuary states’ federal funding.
The lowering in federal funding isn’t impossible, but very unlikely. What’s really impossible is trying to get four of the 50 states of America to become a southern province of Canada. The 46 states of America doesn’t have as much of a ring as 50, either.
According to the United States Census Bureau and some quick math, that’s almost 31 million people (as of 2023) between all four of the states. The population of Canada (as of June 2023) is close to 40 million, according to Statistics Canada. That’s almost doubling the population of the country just by adding on another province.
Even with that amount of people, a lot more have had thoughts of fleeing the country after Trump’s presidential win. On Nov. 5 and 6, election day and the day after, the search “moving to canada” peaked on Google Trends. Other similar Google searches, such as “how to legally move to canada,” “moving to canada requirements” and “moving to canada from U.S.” also were detected to be at their highest search volumes during that time period. These searches were from generally progressive states, such as Vermont and New Hampshire.
It appears not many people have taken Kreuger’s statements seriously, I would think from their improbability. Even though New York is mostly a Democratic state, 44% of the population voted for Trump, which is the closest the state has been to voting Republican according to The New York Post.
If this state somehow became a part of Canada, I’m sure that percent would not be happy, just like any of the other states mentioned to be a part of this plan. Although these states are democratic, there are percentages of the states’ populations that aren’t, which is another detrimental factor in this statement.
Surely this is more of a joke than an actual statement, but Kreuger herself didn’t completely dismiss the idea.
“I thought I would suggest to Canada that instead of us all trying to illegally cross the border at night without them noticing, which is pretty hard because there’s a lot of us, that they should instead agree to let us be the southeast province, a new province of Canada,” Krueger stated.
Even though not everyone is happy about Trump winning the election, proposing to take four states away from the USA isn’t the best solution. Surely this statement isn’t to be taken seriously, but if we somehow become the 46 states of America, I will be too surprised to comprehend the fact.
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
hayley@kscequinox.com
