Canada still has an embassy in Washington, DC. (Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images)Late Monday night, the president-elect posted a curious missive on Truth Social, expressing great pleasure at having dined with “Governor Justin Trudeau” of the “Great State of Canada.” If you find this oddly belittling to the Canadian prime minister—who is, in fact, the elected leader of a sovereign nation—that’s the point.  By now, the Canadian statehood thing has become a running gag. Trump is upset about the US-Canada trade deficit, and about the drugs and migrants that he believes are “pouring in” to the US over the Canadian border. In late November, after some saber-rattling from Trump, Trudeau scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to smooth things over. And during dinner, Trump apparently suggested that if Canada couldn’t fix the trade deficit and secure its border, it should become the 51st state. Fox News reported that this remark caused Trudeau to “laugh nervously.”  Dominic LeBlanc, a Canadian cabinet minister who attended the dinner, was quick to tell the press that the president-elect was “telling jokes” and “teasing us” and that the thing about Canadian statehood was “in no way a serious comment.” But while these jokes might rankle Ottawa, they land a little differently in DC. Why can’t the president-elect threaten us with statehood? We’d love to have two Senators who actually cast votes, or the ability to rewrite our penal code without oversight from meddlesome feds.  With all this puzzling statehood talk, we had some questions: What’s going on above the 49th parallel? Why is Trump being so mean to sweet, earnest Justin Trudeau? Are the US and Canada okay? Here are all your questions, explained. Will Canada become a state before DC? “If you quote me on this all my neighbors will hate me,” said Christopher Sands, director of the Canada Institute at DC’s Wilson Center, “but I actually think Canada is more likely than DC to become a state.” To be clear, he does not think Canadian statehood is imminent; he called the Truth Social post “not a serious threat” and “probably slightly less serious than Trump’s plan to buy Greenland.” He simply thinks Canada is a better candidate for statehood, since DC “is just so small, and it has so much history.”  We emailed the Canadian embassy for comment on this, and—befittingly—they chose to “politely decline.” But say Canada became a state—how would that happen? There are, essentially, two paths.  One is that Canadians could chat among themselves, decide to join the US, draft a state constitution, ratify it, then apply to join the union, which would be subject to approval from Congress. (That might be thorny, since Canada—as was apparently discussed at the Mar-a-Lago dinner—would almost certainly be a blue state. Apparently, Trump’s proposed solution was to gerrymander Canada into two states, one red, one blue. Presumably, Trudeau would be the governor of Blue Canada, since he’s the leader of the Liberal Party. Glad we could clear this one up for you.) The other path is conquest—as in, the US could forcibly annex Canada. “If we conquer a place, we give them a path to territorial status, and then maybe they could become a state,” Sands explained, though he did concede that he “can’t imagine us going to war against Canada. That would be very strange.”  But does Canada want to become the 51st (or 51st and 52nd) state? “I don’t think it does,” Sands said. “I think Canadians have the best of both worlds. They’re able to maintain the benefits of being next to the US without having to pay American taxes or be involved in American wars. It’s hard to say what Canadians would get if they joined the United States—I mean, obviously better defense, but we’re defending them anyway.” So, is Justin Trudeau super mad that Trump is calling him the governor of Canada? According to Sands, the answer is no.  Wait, but isn’t Trump being wildly disrespectful to one of our closest allies? Yes. And to understand what’s going on, please indulge a small digression on bilateral relations between the United States and Canada. We promise this is far less boring than it sounds.  Basically, these two leaders got along fine during Trump’s first term—minus a dust-up at the 2018 G7 where Trump publicly called his Canadian counterpart “meek and mild” and “dishonest and weak.” But after Trump lost power, Trudeau was flagging in the polls and facing a strong challenge from a Conservative MP, so he thought it wise to, as Sands put it, “trash his opponent by tying him to Trump.” Back then, Trump was just a doddering retired man posting to Truth Social from a golf cart, so this seemed like a low-stakes political tactic. But now that Trump has reemerged to become the leader of the free world, Canadians are concerned that there might be some diplomatic repercussions. “Recently, when Trump started talking about 25% tariffs and renegotiating USMCA, I think a lot of Canadians were like, ‘Oh no, this is our worst nightmare,’” Sands said. The mood among the electorate soured, with voters feeling that perhaps it was time to toss Trudeau and install a different leader, one who did not have such bad blood with the Americans. Oh, so Trudeau insulted Trump first? Yes, hence the Mar-a-Lago dinner. Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian opposition leader and possible next prime minister, is currently polling about 20 points ahead of Trudeau. But a key issue for Canadians is which leader is better able to stand up to Trump. “I think Trudeau wanted to show that he could be Daniel walking into the lion’s den and come out alive,” Sands said. “I think he succeeded at that. Yes, he’s getting teased, but Trudeau came out with his head held high.”  So this was a good meeting for Trudeau? Apparently, yes. But Trump made no concrete policy concessions and Trudeau got mocked in pretty humiliating terms. Sure, but the dinner seemed to lower the temperature and set the stage for negotiation. The threat that drew Trudeau down there in the first place (a 25 percent tax on Canadian goods entering the United States, which would be catastrophic to our northerly neighbors) wasn’t floated again. And Trudeau seemed to brush all of it off. He recently told the press that Canadians should not “freak out” about the threatened tariff, since Trump’s impulse is always to “destabilize a negotiating partner.”  And the mockery? Trudeau takes himself very seriously, Sands said, so it probably hurts. But on the other hand, “a little mockery is also attention.” It’s rare for a Canadian prime minister to “enter the pop-culture pantheon” as Trudeau has done. (Could you pick Stephen Harper out of a lineup?) “People make fun of Trudeau a lot,” Sands said, “but at least they know who he is. He’s part of the conversation. Claudia Sheinbaum [of Mexico] isn’t. She’s probably kicking herself right now.” Oh, so the US and Canada are okay?  The US and Canada are basically fine. Trudeau has signaled openness to increased border security, so Trump has stopped talking about tariffs. Diplomacy is functioning, albeit in our bizarre funhouse world where it happens via mockery on the third-rate social media platform that the president-elect personally owns. Canada is not becoming a state. The US does not seem poised to vindictively cripple the Canadian economy. And Trump joking that Justin Trudeau is the governor of the state of Canada is, weirdly, a win for the great white north. The post Will Canada Get Statehood Before DC? first appeared on Washingtonian.