This Country Goes To Eleven

It's Turks & Caicos time again! That once-a-decade moment when Canadians revive the idea of annexing the Turks & Caicos islands. It's a small archipelago just north of the Dominican Republic.  The Premier of the islands came here on an official visit recently, it triggered talk on the idea again.  Politicians mentioned annexation with varying levels of seriousness, and just when I thought it was subsiding, I see this opinion piece in the local paper.

The idea isn't that crazy: Turks & Caicos is a protectorate of Britain, so there's some connection there. And lots of countries have territory off the mainland.  The U.S. has Guam and others.  Australia has Christmas Island, among others.  New Zealand has the Cook Islands. France and The U.K. have islands all over the world half of which they've probably forgotten.  If Argentina was smart, they'd invade some of them instead of being obsessed with the Falklands.  Oh, and that's another good thing about the Turks & Caicos: they aren't also claimed by a country that needs to distract it's people from the collapsing economy.

The argument for adopting the Turks & Caicos is that it would offer Canadians an easy way to go south. Unlike going to Florida, we could keep our money in the country. And we wouldn't have to risk going to America's craziest state.

The argument against is that it would probably be expensive. The islands aren't well developed, so building the infrastructure for a huge influx of Canadian seniors will be a big undertaking. And upping their services to Canadian standards of health care won't be cheap. And then there's the transfer payments: Turks & Caicos would slot in as the ultimate have-not province.

Personally, I'd like to see Turks & Caicos join. It might be expensive, but we are talking about just 32,000 people. So that would just be like adding another Moose Jaw. Or, it's only about an eighth of the number of people we already let in each year as immigrants.

More importantly, it's the slightly crazy project that I've always thought we as a people need to take on just to get ourselves out of our timid, over-comfortable rut. I would have voted for building our own Dubai-like international metropolis somewhere in the arctic, but adding the Turks & Caicos has way more support.