The first part of the Wikipedia entry is misleading, as Borden’s plan was to annex the entire British West Indies, not merely the Turks and Caicos. Borden viewed Canada as a junior partner in the British Empire – or, as he put it in a resolution to the Imperial Ministers’ Conference during the war, “autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth.”

Canada, in the view of supporters of West Indian annexation, had made a greater contribution to the British war effort than the other Dominions of the Empire. Yet, because they were located close to German colonies, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand had all been promised territorial concessions at the end of the war. To balance things out, the thinking went, Canada was entitled to jurisdiction over the West Indies. (The Canadians also made claims to Greenland, St. Pierre et Miquelon, and part of the Alaska panhandle.)

The Atlantic provinces had longstanding trade ties with the West Indies, and one Nova Scotian in particular, Harry J. Crowe, made the case that the annexation of the Caribbean islands would entice Newfoundland to join Confederation – a perennial goal of many Canadians – since it would be hard to resist the pull of a commercial union. Crowe made his case to the Canadian government, which in turn drafted a confidential memorandum through External Affairs in February 1917.

The case for annexation was based on three principles:

1. Annexation would provide a check to the power of the United States, particularly since the Americans had been flexing their muscles in the Caribbean since the Spanish-American War of 1898.

2. Annexation would give Canada access to tropical produce, while offering a ready market for Canadian flour, fish, lumber and manufactured goods; as the report put it, for commerce to thrive it must “follow lines of longitude rather than of latitude.” Canadian firms – particularly banks – already had substantial investments in the Caribbean, and some form of annexation would expand these existing economic ties.

3. Advances in communication had made distance less of a barrier; it was quicker and cheaper to ship goods from Halifax to Jamaica than from Halifax to Winnipeg.

The main drawback to the plan, in the view of its supporters, was racial: or, as it was termed at the time, “the negro problem.” It was considered to be “out of the question” to allow Caribbean islands entry into Confederation as equal partners, nor was it conceivable to offer the vote to “a population not yet ready for it,” as one newspaper put it. On the other hand, the acquisition of islands with dark-skinned subject people was considered an opportunity for Canadians to prove their fitness for imperial rule. “The responsibilities of governing subject races,” Borden remarked in June 1916, “would probably exercise a broadening influence upon our people as the Dominion thus constituted would closely resemble in its problems and its duties the Empire as a whole.”

Following this logic, Canadian officials made this case both in London and in the West Indies, winning the leukwarm support a handful of white Jamaicans.

Ultimately, though, while the plan received a sympathetic hearing among some members of the Imperial Cabinet, it foundered on opposition both at home and abroad. Lord Curzon expressed skepticism because the territorial concessions were to be taken from the British Empire, rather than foreign territory. Meanwhile, the arrival of black West Indian soldiers in Canada during the war stirred up racial animosity while also cultivating a sense of nationalism among West Indians themselves. By the time of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Borden’s plan was essentially a dead letter.

Source: Paul Pears Hastings, “Dreams of a Tropical Canada: Race, Nation, and Canadian Aspirations in the Caribbean Basin, 1883-1919” PhD thesis, Duke University, 2010.