The Maple Exit: A Manifesto for Canadian Statehood

By Jason Tackaberry

Every young Canadian gets offered the same stark deal. Nobody says it out loud, but everybody knows the terms.

Stay, and you get two per cent. Two per cent growth, two per cent raises, and about two per cent of the ambition you started with. You get to be proud of the country, and it gets to be mildly proud of you, as long as you don’t make a fuss.

Except we can’t even do two per cent anymore. The average Canadian produces less today than in 2022, and the Bank of Canada says the best we can manage for the rest of the decade is about one and a half per cent a year. Two per cent used to be the floor we complained about. Now it’s a ceiling we can’t reach. Like Europe, we spent our potential.

That’s option one. Option two is to leave. The CBC will claim you if you ever win something. They’ll just never admit that you had to go.

I had to go to China to have a teaching career. It isn’t about where we go. It’s that we leave home and have to make a new one somewhere else. Nobody should apologize for that. We were told leaving was a personal choice. It wasn’t. It was the only door Canada left open.

Look at who we brag about.

Mark Carney left Edmonton to work for Goldman Sachs in London. Elon Musk, Canadian through his mother, left Kingston to build his companies in America. James Naismith left a farm town outside Ottawa to invent basketball in Massachusetts. Malcolm Gladwell left Elmira, Ontario, to write for the New Yorker. Frank Gehry left Toronto to design in Los Angeles. Ryan Reynolds, the most Canadian man in Hollywood, had to leave Vancouver to get there. Neil Young left Winnipeg in a hearse to make it in Los Angeles. Justin Bieber left Stratford to record in Atlanta. Jim Carrey slept in a van before Los Angeles gave him a career. The list doesn’t end. It just runs out of patience.

That’s a country’s worth of talent, and the country’s contribution was the exit.

But the clearest example is the man running the country. Carney was born in Fort Smith. In the late 1980s, he got an Irish passport. It let Goldman Sachs hire him in London like a European, no sponsor, no queue, and no doubt it helped him make his first millions. That passport built a career in London, Tokyo, and New York, and that career is what got him hired by the Bank of Canada. Later, running the Bank of England, he picked up a British passport too. When he came home to be prime minister, he gave both back, a ladder kicked away and discarded, only after it was climbed.

How did a kid from Edmonton know a second passport was the key to the world? Somebody told him. The door out exists. Only some families know where it is.

Our companies know where it is too. In 2024, with Carney as chair, the board of Brookfield Asset Management unanimously agreed to move its head office from Toronto to New York, to win over American investors. He called it a ‘technical change.’ It was the most honest thing a Canadian board has said in years: the money is in New York.

Whatever you do for a living, it runs through the same feeder pipe, and that pipe has three openings: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. All three cost more to live in than they’ll pay you for at least a decade. And you’re supposed to pay your dues for ten years on that?

In a united country, the same kid could choose Omaha. Phoenix. Houston. Portland. Nashville. Cities where a starter home doesn’t require a co-signer, a miracle, and a dead grandparent.

Economist Trevor Tombe ranked all fifty states and ten provinces by output per person in 2024. Ontario came 48th out of 60. Quebec came 55th. Louisiana beat us. So did forty-two other states.

People call Canada a walled garden. It isn’t. It’s a walled tundra. It’s a bog. Unless you fish lobster, cut softwood, drill oil, or dam a river, it has nothing to offer you. Not a single flower.

Are your dreams bigger than a public service job? Bigger than a pension that finally lets you explore, a corporate spot at the back of the lot, and thirty years of waiting your turn? Then you need the reforms this party was founded to deliver.

This spring, India’s chief justice called his country’s unemployed young people cockroaches. Within a week, a satirical Cockroach Janta Party had more Instagram followers than the ruling party. Ottawa should take note. Canada has plenty of cockroaches of its own.

As for identity, we’d keep hockey, the double-double, and our great national virtue, apologizing for things that aren’t our fault. We’d even keep The Beachcombers, two decades of a tugboat pulling a log. All we’d lose is the arrogance, an identity based on how we spell colour and pronounce Z.

And yes, you can already move to the States. That’s the problem. Only the lucky, the gifted, and the well-connected get to go. I’m proposing we take everybody.

This part is for the immigrants and the expats. We are the same people, facing different directions.

I spent most of my adult life abroad, and one day my own Canadian bank locked me out because I no longer had a Canadian phone number to receive a confirmation code. I was debanked online.

It’s being cut off from your own life by a form letter. You call, and the call centre tells you to visit a branch. The nearest branch is eleven time zones away.

Every immigrant with someone in another country knows some version of this story.

This is what ‘two per cent’ looks like up close. A whole country built for people who never leave, never arrive, and never need anything to work across a border. The system isn’t cruel. It just can’t imagine you.

Immigrants and expats know this better than anyone, because we refused the two per cent box. In a continental union, an international life stops being an edge case. If you came here to build something bigger than where you started, this party is for you.

Joining would reopen both constitutions for the first time in generations. A union would turn our dusty, barren democracy back into the living, beating organ it was always meant to be. America needs that as badly as we do. Its constitution has it stuck too.

America can’t stop fighting about guns and abortion. We can’t stop fighting about Quebec, and every attempt to fix our constitution dies there. A new constitution changes that. As a state, Quebec would run its own language, schools, and culture by right.

States’ rights settle America’s fights. Abortion, guns, and health care don’t need to be national, and a nation doesn’t need agreement on them to be a nation. We’ve spent a hundred and fifty years agreeing on almost nothing but hockey, and we can’t even agree on the team.

Unforced consensus is simply democracy still in the making. Let each state decide, and let the evidence do the arguing. Progress takes time to perfect. We’ve wasted centuries. Surely we have the patience for decades.

For fifty years we’ve tried to stop the brain drain by making Canada more like America, only slower, colder, and with more paperwork and quotas. We even force radio to play us, and the musicians still leave. Talent doesn’t want a smaller version of the big room. It wants the big room.

So stop moving the talent to the border. Move the border to the talent. Six new states and three territories. We wouldn’t be giving up a country. We’d be gaining influence in the most powerful one.

Care about climate change? Canada produces under two per cent of the world’s emissions. Influence in Washington moves the dial on the globe. Trudeau spent our influence chasing the same goal, and Canada still missed its targets.

I’m tired of being provincial. Tired of currying favour with the powerful. Tired of cheering for our best people only after someone else validated them. Tired of the gaslighting: that two per cent is prosperity, and that leaving is a lifestyle choice.

And I’m tired of saying sorry. Our great national virtue turned out to be worthless the day Donald Trump insisted on sincerity and facts.

So here’s the argument, plainly. We can’t grow. Our best people leave. Our banks can’t imagine a life across borders. Our constitution can’t be fixed. And forty million Canadians have less say in Washington than Florida does. Union fixes every one of those.

I don’t want Canada to be the place great people are from. I want it to be the place they never have to leave. The land stays. The lakes stay. Only the border moves.

Then a kid from Stratford or Winnipeg or Fort Smith can aim as high as she likes without packing a bag.