Make Alberta the 51st state

OPINION:

President Trump has made American energy dominance a central pillar of his agenda and has vowed to “unleash American energy” to secure energy affordability, geopolitical stability and economic certainty for the American people.

There is no better, faster or surer way to do this than making the Canadian province of Alberta the 51st American state.

On America’s northern border, separated from Montana by an imaginary international line, sits Alberta. It’s a land where, in 2023, rugged drillers, cementers, truckers and tradesmen produced over 4.3 million barrels of oil per day, with an additional annual total of 1.5 billion barrels for the year ending in 2024. For American Midwesterners who consume most of this oil, this means day-to-day affordability. For refineries on the American Gulf Coast that upgrade and resell Canadian oil on international markets, this means long-term profitability and economic growth. As a noted Texas hedge fund manager once so succinctly put it to me, “Alberta plus Texas beats OPEC.”

Yet one small roadblock remains: Alberta is still confined as a colony within a Canada that no longer bears any resemblance to the steady, benign neighbor upon which America could once rely. In just the first four months of 2025, Canada approved 834,000 temporary resident applications, encompassing study permits, work permits and visitor visas. This is part of an ambitious federal initiative called “The Century Project,” which aims to increase Canada’s population to 100 million people by 2100. Contrast this goal with President Trump’s recent travel ban to the United States of nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

Canada’s permissive immigration environment presents a real and present danger to the United States through the sheer volume of poorly vetted foreigners flooding into it. From Canada, criminal and/or terrorist elements seek access to America. In 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that 87% of terror suspects stopped at a U.S. land border crossing came from Canada, while only 13% came from Mexico. The only way for America to securely control immigration to its northern border is to annex Canada, starting with Alberta, via a peaceful, citizens-initiated referendum on the question of Alberta joining the U.S.

Moreover, Canada suffers from an asymmetric federal structure, with no constitutionally fixed election dates and no semblance of an Electoral College. It’s a setup that grants more weight to votes from left-leaning voters in Eastern Canada. In April, when anti-Trump sentiment was at its height owing to the tariff dispute between the U.S. and the Canadian automotive industry in voter-rich Ontario, these same voters elected a man named Mark Carney as prime minster. Not only do anti-American zealots in Eastern Canada continue to push for a 300% export tariff to the U.S. on Alberta oil and gas, but the man they elected to do it is the same Mark Carney who masterminded the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which was cited by the U.S. House Judicial Committee for massive financial and shareholder coercion against American energy companies, including ExxonMobil. Alberta’s accession to the U.S. would protect energy security, thus ensuring national security.

Finally, if Alberta — Canada’s most conservative province of 4.85 million people — joined America, our sister province of Saskatchewan (1 million people, mineral-rich and also conservative) would soon follow. This would almost certainly ensure that Canada’s westernmost province, British Columbia (liberal with 5.65 million people) would join the U.S. for fear of being economically isolated from the rest of North America. Situated on the Pacific Ocean, British Columbia is the source entry point in North America for the fentanyl precursors, foreign money laundering and Chinese Communist Party-linked organized crime that continues to threaten the American mainland.  

To counter this threat, America should support the will of Western Canadians to join the U.S., thereby ensuring natural American expansion both northward towards the geo-economically sensitive Northwest Passage, and eastward, to additional tran-Atlantic maritime corridors. Influence in Canada is highly coveted by China, Russia, Iran and other foreign adversaries for strategic economic and military reasons. America should get here first.

• Peter Downing is executive director of America Fund (Canadians for the 51st State)