The United States as Canada (A Group Thought Experiment)

[Ariosto]

So this is a concept that I had been working on for some time as my next "big" Project in terms of infoboxes and data-crunching, but I have had to admit to myself that I simply cannot do this project on my own and would need input and aid from our membership. What I had tried to do was run with a conceptualization made by one of our esteemed residents, Thande, where he had tried to translate the various Canadian Provinces into their equivalent groupings of American States, leaving us with the map as you'll see below. As you may be able to tell it isn't a perfect comparison by any means which he admits, but that was in large part due to his calculations being limited within the defined borders of the States (with the 1993 Canadian Election in mind); I in turn tried to run with what he had but wanted to allow for some shifting of Counties from one grouping to another in an effort to try and better represent the Provinces population-wise, as well as working with the base of 1950's Canada rather than 1993. This has rather quickly fallen apart though as, if I'm being honest, I'm not familiar enough with either Canadian or American politics or culture on the local level to discern how best to set things up, and you can't do much without the foundation being there.​

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So, is there anyone else that may be interested in pondering the idea alongside?​

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Alberta is in Bronze, British Columbia is in Red, Manitoba is in Green, Newfoundland is in Orange, New Brunswick is in Purple, Northwest Territories are in Pink, Nova Scotia is in Ocean Blue, Ontario is in …. the Pinkish Red (?), Prince Edward Island is in Lime Green, Quebec is in Turquoise, Saskatchewan is in Yellow, and the Yukon is in Chlorine. ​

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Original discussion thread on the Sea Lion Press forums is (here), with Thande's thoughts on his divisions outlined below.​

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The most obvious place to start is to find a way to make numbers equate between the two countries. I don't mean the absolute population (in which the US obviously has nearly ten times Canada's population) but the relative population between units. Canada currently has 13 provinces and territories, although for reasons that should become clear, I am working with the situation in the early 90s, before Nunavut had split off, so we will call it 12 (and we can always just recombine the numbers for the post-1995 Northwest Territories and Nunavut back into one for later elections). The US has fifty states and one district which has a vote in presidential elections. How to make these equate?

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I could just try different combinations of states that would equate as closely as possible to the relative population share of a province. For example, Quebec in the 1991 census (the one I am using) had 25.3% of Canada's population, so I could just pick the US states that add up to the closest figure I can get for 25.3% of the USA's population. However, that wouldn't be a very good analogy if it was just random states strewn all over the map. These 'provincial analogies' need to be as analogous as possible, which at a bare minimum means they need to be a coherent lump of states. Ideally, that 'lump' should also be culturally comparable between the corresponding province, or rather, it should play a comparable role in US politics as the Canadian prototype does in Canadian politics. When this analogy is sufficiently strong, I have allowed this to introduce more deviation between the strict percentages. This is most obviously apparent in two cases from the decisions I have made: the 'Left Coast' makes up a bigger proportion of the USA than British Columbia does of Canada (California alone is almost identical to BC's share, but WA and OR really don't fit anywhere else); and New England is the obvious analogue to the Maritimes, but whereas the Maritimes make up 8.6% of Canada (or did in 1991), New England made up only 5.3% of the US. So the Maritime provinces are a tad underrepresented, unfortunately, as I couldn't exactly hack off half of upstate New York and add that in. I did consider making Newfoundland Hawaii instead due to the 'joined later' aspect, but that seemed a bit of a stretch. ​

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My reasoning:​

• Alberta: I originally looked at making this a slice of the Plains instead, but Alberta makes up such a relatively huge share of Canada that it got ridiculous, stretching from Montana to Oklahoma and beyond. Instead, well, Texas and Alberta are often compared (conservative, cattle, oil, etc.) so I based it on that and added in Kansas for the agrarian side of things. There is no really direct analogue for the Hispanic aspect to the US Southwest in Canada so I have mostly just ignored that, unless you want to make tenuous Métis comparisons.
• British Columbia: Obviously culturally analogous to the 'Left Coast', hence the whole 'Cascadia' idea--as noted above, this does mean it got slightly overrepresented in the Canadian-US.
• Manitoba: Agrarian Plains farming, mining, and lots of nothing analogous to the northern part of the province. Squeezing Colorado and Utah in are a bit iffy but I don't know where else they'd go.
• Newfoundland & Labrador: Maritime. A bit underrepresented, but not much else one could do. Maine's split and Vermont's independent republic are the closest I could get to NL's late addition to Canada.
• New Brunswick: Again, a bit underrepresented, but a loose fit.
• Northwest Territories: Not really similar geographically, but the significant native element means there is a line that can be drawn.
• Nova Scotia: The most significant part of the Maritimes just as MA is the most significant part of New England. Halifax equals Boston here.
• Ontario: Overly large and complex, dominant, with the big city everyone else in the province loves to hate (Toronto/NYC). Industrial, the traditional centre of power. Obviously the fact that these states wrap around Ontario itself via the Great Lakes means there is some cultural comparison. There isn't really a huge hinterland like Ontario's north, but the fact that population is tilted towards the east coast loosely resembles the concentration in southern Ontario.
• Prince Edward Island: The small island everyone forgets = the other small island everyone forgets.
• Quebec: The South is often the analogy for Quebec chosen in these setups, and one can see why, despite the obvious dissimilarities as well. A history of separatism (er, yes), does its own thing, often ends up being politically dominant on a national level despite being in the minority, gets its own way despite theoretically being on the losing side of history (Wolfe vs Grant). It's not quite the same, in that the South exercised its power mostly through Congress and didn't supply as many Presidents as Quebec has Prime Ministers, but you get the idea. This is also a slightly iffy definition of the South to make the numbers work, and it does have the disadvantage that it implies a connection with Texa/Alberta that doesn't exist in the Canadian prototype. In a broader sense, Ontario-Quebec kind of works as an analogy to how the US became independent as a north and south that had an obvious cultural divide from the start but worked together against a common foe, the former's culture was more successful at expanding into the interior than the latter's and the latter ended up feeling like an embattled minority, the latter is more agrarian and has more of a tendency to romanticise a traditional lifestyle, etc. Note also how the capital also straddles the line between them!
• Saskatchewan: More agrarian Plains stuff, combined with a political culture that is mostly conservative nowadays but historically flirted with radicalism. (Of course, there was a direct exchange of ideas between Saskatchewan and these states in the past).
• Yukon: Another pretty obvious one.

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[saint-tea]

if the south is meant to represent quebec maybe you could put a larger french presence in louisana and missouri

 

[Ariosto]

if the south is meant to represent quebec maybe you could put a larger french presence in louisana and missouri

I've put Thande's original thoughts on how he decided on the divisions above, but it has far more to do with the South being somewhat distinct culturally from the rest of the nation, more so least when compared to any other region. ​

 

[Superman]

Just for fun, I used Thande's borders and tried to adjust the 1993 election results:

Democratic: Bill Clinton (Arkansas)/Al Gore (Tennessee) - 45.79%, 268 EVs
Republican: George H.W. Bush (Texas)/Dan Quayle (Indiana) - 35.95%, 267 EVs
Independent: Ross Perot (Texas)/James Stockdale (California) - 17.55%, 0 EVs

I ignored the NDP since they were small enough and there was no Green Party running in 1992. It wasn't until later that I realized that, as the analogue to the Yukon, Alaska "should" have gone for the NDP.

Obviously a weird map, but I'm not sure whether the primary issue was my methodology or how differently the Canadian provinces vote compared to their "corresponding" groups of American states.

 

[Brady Kj]

[quote:"Thande"] Squeezing Colorado and Utah in are a bit iffy but I don't know where else they'd go. [/quote]
Thande wrote this quote about Manitoba. But the green area of northern plains is Manitoba, while Colorado and Utah are in the yellow area. What did Thande mean to say here?

Also, the borders should be straighter than the US has.

Other than that, fantastically sensible map. Is Hawaii the Northwest Territories?

 

[Ariosto]

Thande wrote this quote about Manitoba. But the green area of northern plains is Manitoba, while Colorado and Utah are in the yellow area. What did Thande mean to say here?

Yes, I seem to have made a mistake there, good eye. ​

Other than that, fantastically sensible map. Is Hawaii the Northwest Territories?

Hawaii is meant to represent the Northwest Territories and Nunavut yes. I'll have to update the initial post so that the States involved in those divisions are better listed.​

 

[Ariosto]

So having found time to continue working on this, I have come up with my own iteration. It is based off the demographics as they stood around 1950, and while there is significant overrepresentation in "Columbia" and "Ontario", I wasn't sure how to solve that issue without just pushing it onto another one of this Proto-Provinces.​

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Spoiler: Map

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British Columbia: (CA, OR, WA)​

Alberta: (ID, NV, UT, AZ, NM, TX)​

Saskatchewan: (MT, WY, NE, KS, CO, OK)​

Manitoba: (ND, SD, MN, IA)​

Quebec: (MO, KY, WV, VA, AR, TN, NC, LA, AL, MS, GA, SC, FL)​

Ontario: (WS, IL, MI, IN, OH, PA, NJ, MD, DE, Downstate NY)​

Maritimes: (Upstate NY, MA, CT, RI, VT, NH, ME)​

Yukon: (AK)​

Northwest/Nunavut: (HI)​

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Try as I might, I struggled to find a decent manner in which to balance the Maritime Provinces demographically without cutting them up each way on a county basis, and for the sake of simplicity I rolled all the Provinces into a singular one which could be taken apart later. The ugliness of the West is also for lack of better alternatives, wanting to establish somewhat sensible boundaries between the Provinces as exists in Canada while keeping to their demographic and geographical targets.​

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From there, I decided to take a look at what the resulting elections would be under this model, using the popular vote of American Presidential Elections, while also apportioning the House of Representatives amongst these new (in this case seven) Provinces. Going to be doing a calculation for 1993 now. ​

 

[Brady Kj]

What advantages does this map have over the original map?

 

[Ariosto]

What advantages does this map have over the original map?

The biggest advantage is that the Maritime Provinces are properly represented in terms of size and the number of Seats, which by and large holds from the 1955 period to 1993 at least. The amalgamation isn't ideal, again, but there wasn't much that could really be done. When I initially attempted to cut up the counties so as to properly represent the Canadian Provinces there was always at least two that were going to be underrepresented, and Newfoundland would have needed to swallow up the larger part of Upstate New York to avoid expansion into Massachusetts. New Brunswick in turn was dividing Connecicut with Nova Scotia, and was also forced to expand into Upstate New York, with Prince Edward taking the Cape, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.​

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It became such a mess to manage, let alone try and run hypotheticals with, that I had to throw in the towel on that front.​

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In the West, the placement of Saskatchewan also allows for some level of political sense in how party strength would flow evenly from East to West, which isn't present when Saskatchewan is situated between Columbia and Alberta which results in an odd corridor.​

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This is not intended to be a final map per se, as I'm concerned as to the size of Manitoba in this model, but I'm not sure yet how best to rectify that given I have Ontario and Quebec about where I want them. ​

 

[Ariosto]

So I just realized that I had the population figures wrong in my calculations …. meaning I have to readjust the Provinces again ….​

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Also sorry for working so slowly at this, been struggling to function normally these past couple weeks.​