Premier Brad Wall is interested in adding Turks and Caicos to ‘Saskatchewarm’

If Canada doesn't want Turks and Caicos, Saskatchewan is ready to step in.

Premier Brad Wall boldly suggested redrawing the borders of the prairie province to include the collection of tropical islands.

He even suggested a name change - turning Saskatchewan into "Saskatchewarm."

"So much for 'hard to pronounce, easy to draw' as our unofficial motto," Wall quipped in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

The comments came after Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird shot down the latest rumours that Canada might consider annexing Turks and Caicos and add it as either our eleventh province or fourth territory.

Turks and Caicos Premier Rufus Ewing was in Ottawa earlier this week to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss building stronger ties between the two countries.

Ewing did not closer the door on the idea of joining Canada. Baird said, however, that the were "not in the business" of annexing Caribbean islands.

"That’s not something that we’re exploring. We’re not looking at any sort of formal association with the islands,” Baird told the Globe and Mail.

The dream of adding Turks and Caicos to the list of Canadian provinces has been around for years. Decades, actually. The idea first came up in 1917, when prime minister Robert Borden proposed connecting the two countries.

A failed NDP bid to annex the islands was tabled in 1974. Most recently, Conservative MP Peter Goldring has made it a pet project. He met with Rufus Ewing, the premier of Turks and Caico, last year to discuss the benefits of the idea, namely growth in trade and tourism.

Goldring most recently suggested that "Canada really needs a Hawaii," which sort of begs the question: What's in it for the Hawaii in this analogy?

Turks and Caicos is a tiny British territory, consisting of about 30,000 residents and 40 islands – though the population only lives on eight of the islands. It's primarily industry is tourism (Premier Ewing does double-duty as the minister of tourism) and it's major trade partner is Canada.

According to the Ottawa Citizen, Canada is its second-largest source of tourists and has the greatest number of foreign investments in the country. Turks and Caicos is seeking "more formal relations" with Canada, hence the visit to Ottawa, though that more likely would come in the form of relaxed border regulations or smoother trade regulations.

Hey, if the federal government doesn't want to go down that road, maybe Wall is right, maybe the premiers should take up the challenge.

That last tweet came from Robert Ghiz, the Premier of Prince Edward Island.

So that's two premiers. We just need the eight others to join the cause and we might actually make this happen. We could split those 40 Caribbean islands up equally, and give each province their own slice of Hawaii.

With the permission of Turks and Caicos, of course.

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