President Trump’s references to Canada as the 51st state of the United States has resulted in much hand-wringing and pontificating, and threats back and forth across the border. All of which is unnecessary.

Pundits have ignored how Trump’s claims have created an opening that we in Maine would be foolish to miss. That is, the opportunity Maine now has to join Canada and become the 11th Canadian province, a new addition to the Atlantic provinces.

Such a merger would be easy. We’re already culturally part of Quebec province, because of the Quebecois immigrants who came to work in the mills in Bangor, Waterville, Lewiston and Augusta. French is the second language of Maine and taught in many of our schools. Old Orchard Beach has a Canadian workforce in the summer, and many of us journey to Montreal and Quebec City to visit Europe without having to take trans-Atlantic flights.

The change will instantly make Mainers’ health care more affordable, reduce poverty and the wealth gap, give us easy access to poutine and reduce our collective angst. No longer will we have to be angry at our government, or at a political party that has decided it doesn’t actually like Americans or America and will enable any sort of behavior as long as the country is “unwoke”; in other words, asleep, or dead.

So I humbly appeal to Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, and hope my fellow Mainers will join me in this appeal. Please, take Maine. After all, such a divorce has happened before. We used to be part of Massachusetts but separated in 1820 and nothing too dreadful took place as a result. In fact, we gained by losing all those unnecessary letters in “Massachusetts.”

Too many Americans talk of leaving the United States to get away from what it has turned into. But that involves uprooting, breaking bonds, selling property, and changing mailing addresses. Instead, what we should do is simply join another country, stay where we are, swap flags, learn a little French, and voila! All set.

If it turns out Vermont and New Hampshire want to join us in this move, all the better. Then, along with the rest of Canada, we can pretty much monopolize the international maple syrup market and make the rest of the world do our bidding, or no waffles.

Trump has talked about redrawing the boundary between Canada and the U.S. and this time I think he’s on to something. The new border would run south along the current New Hampshire-Maine border, to the Piscataquis bridge, where there would be a border crossing station; that’s it. Everything to our north and east would no longer be “Northern Maine” but our fellow Canadians.

Canadians are famously polite, too, so perhaps with their influence,e we will see fewer angry bumper stickers and less political hypocrisy (hope dies last). And no longer will we have to strain for the high notes in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” True, we’ll probably have to give up Patriots’ Day, which was one of the fun, quirky things that separated us from the rest of the nation. But now we’ll actually be separated from the rest of the nation.

The only downside is that we’ll have to go through customs in order to attend a Red Sox game. Sometimes you just have to make sacrifices.