[adventured]

That's actually amusing, but of course far off the mark.

Iraq has a current price tag of $2 trillion (including benefits owed over time that were caused by the war).

Both wars together are now at around $4 trillion, spanning the last 14 years.

Canada would cost at least 20 times the Iraq war if you count land, financial + household + business assets and natural resources. Canadian households, including real estate, have $5 to $7 trillion in assets (depending on when you calculate due to the currency).

They have ~170 billion barrels of proven oil reserves (it's likely far more than that). Let's go with something reasonable like 150b that is sanely recoverable, but only 100b is economical or environmentally tolerable before the end of the fossil fuel age (but you'd still have to pay for most of it to buy Canada today). That's $4 trillion just in that oil calculation at today's low price. Canada probably has $8 to $10 trillion just in natural resources. Granted, I know it's ridiculous that Iraq was so expensive you could buy maybe 5% of everything in Canada (or 1/3 of all their household assets).

The US certainly could have purchased Greenland for $2 trillion (if such a thing were politically possible today, which it's not). With global warming, not a bad purchase.

[Salgat]

I bet it would be very possible, since your essentially telling every citizen that you will pay the value of everything they own and much more to be a part of a different 1st world nation. Imagine someone telling you that they'd pay you $300,000 to consider your plot of land a part of the U.S. instead of Canada, and you still get to keep everything.

[thrownaway2424]

I wasn't including all of Canadians' refrigerators and riding lawn mowers. Just the real estate (n.b. "real estate" does not include the minerals).