Even here, among the sparsely populated lakes and thickly forested hills of the Laurentians, it is hard for an American not to feel the anger and incredulity President Trump has stoked with his tariffs, talk of a 51st state and offhand insults.
Much of that may be lost on Americans buffeted by the ceaseless rush of crises and clashes generated by the president’s agenda. But up here, in what used to be the most friendly neighbor a country could possibly ask for, the rage is tangible.
Advertisers compete with claims that their products are “proudly Canadian.” YouTube, news media and newsletters vigilantly follow the latest indignation. Polls track plummeting positive attitudes toward America and surging pride in Canada; the latest Pew poll found that 59 percent of Canadians now view the United States as the “greatest threat” to their country. Bourbon and California wines are nowhere to be found, and Canadians are canceling trips south in droves. T-shirts display the latest anti-American slogan, whether “Canada Is Not for Sale” or “Elbows Up” — a classic hockey gesture that means “stand up and fight back,” which the Canadian comedian Mike Myers famously (at least for Canadians) displayed on “Saturday Night Live.”
Even King Charles III, the British monarch and Canada’s head of state, chimed in. Presiding over the opening of the Canadian Parliament and delivering the Speech from the Throne in May — only the third time a sovereign has done so and the first time in decades — Charles III was cautious not to assail Mr. Trump directly. But he offered clear support to Canada by quoting from the national anthem: “The True North is indeed strong and free.”
Here in the Laurentians, where I’ve been spending summers for much of my life, a French Canadian spots my District of Columbia license plate and offers, with a hint of sympathy, “Il est fou, ton Trump!” (“He’s nuts, your Trump!”) Fortunately, Americans visiting Canada still seem to be generally regarded as fellow sufferers, not enemies. Not yet.
It’s all so sad. Because Washington’s targeting of Canada is so unnecessary and so undeserved. A “national emergency” that justifies huge tariff increases because Canada is purportedly failing to halt a “tremendous” (Mr. Trump’s word) flow of fentanyl and immigrants over the U.S.-Canada border? Only a minuscule fraction of the fentanyl seized in the United States, or of illegal crossings into the United States, come from Canada. But that doesn’t stop Mr. Trump, or the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, or the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, from trumpeting a northern border crisis.
Still, what grates on many Canadians is not so much the tariffs Mr. Trump has threatened as the gratuitous insults he lobs this way. “As one Canadian explained to me, tariffs are problematic, but they’re economic, they can be negotiated,” said John W. Gulliver, president of the New England-Canada Business Council. “But the continued taunts about a 51st state, calling the prime minister ‘governor,’ calling the border a fiction — that really angers us.”
Those are the better-known barbs. But there are many more, such as when Ms. Noem, on a visit to a well-known library straddling the Canadian-Vermont border in January, hopped back and forth over a line marking the frontier, saying “U.S.A. No. 1!” on the U.S. side and “51st state!” on the other. And when the White House press secretary, asked about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s scrapping of a disputed tax on American tech giants after Mr. Trump threatened to abort tariff negotiations, responded: “It’s very simple. Prime Minister Carney and Canada caved to President Trump and the United States of America.” “Caved” made many a headline here.
These jibes may not make news in the United States anymore. But Canadians, more accustomed to friendly ribbing over poutine and how they say “eh?,” are still stunned and confused by the overt disdain from the White House, which seems to exceed anything leveled, for example, at Europe or Mexico.
Charlie Angus, a Canadian journalist, musician and former member of Parliament, has gathered a broad audience with a newsletter called The Resistance, dedicated in large part to the American attacks. He has tallied more than 100 public assaults on Canada by Mr. Trump since November, which he depicts as a familiar “right-wing playbook” for “creating a convenient enemy — an existential menace that must be dealt with.”
His response? “We will boycott everything American — your booze, your produce, your tourist destinations — as long as you are under an administration that denies our fundamental right to sovereignty while demonizing our nation as some kind of terrorist gang haven.”
The “Buy Canadian” campaign that arose with the first Trump threats of tariffs may have tapered off a bit, but it is still having an impact on sales of Canadian goods such as food and clothing. A recent Ipsos poll found that three-quarters of Canadians surveyed said they intend to forgo travel to the United States, while 72 percent said they will avoid buying U.S.-made goods. American brands have even jumped on the bandwagon, with companies like McDonald’s stressing their Canadian ingredients. One Canadian clothing and sock brand, OkayOk, reported a 60 percent increase in wholesale transactions so far this year, according to The Globe and Mail newspaper.
“Virtually everyone we know checks the labels of grocery items and avoids buying anything made in the United States,” said Tom Creary, one of my summer neighbors on the lake and a consultant to Canadian companies on doing business with the United States and vice versa. “It’s blueberries from Mexico now, no more from California. Tangerines from Morocco, not Florida. Companies and entrepreneurs I have helped are now exploring business relationships with Europeans. One of them told me last week, ‘I can’t trust America anymore like I used to. I have to look elsewhere. It’s sad, but I have to do it.’”
As with all of Mr. Trump’s actions, it is hard to predict where the discord with Canada may lead. But it is a strong example of the extraordinary damage the 47th president is wreaking on America’s standing in the world, whether he’s slapping tariffs on goods, talking about buying Greenland, humiliating visitors to the White House, canceling lifesaving aid, barring citizens from a dozen countries, bullying Ukraine or otherwise undermining the “soft power” America used to wield around the globe.
However the tariff wars play out, the growing sense in Canada that the “good America” is gone is likely to linger for a long time. Mr. Carney is already in the process of seeking stronger trade relations with Europe and Mexico. And Canadians have begun re-examining the bonds they’ve forged with the United States over the years and their own complex identity, including the geographic and language differences that have fed tenacious secessionist movements in the oil-rich province of Alberta or in French-speaking Quebec.
Michael Ignatieff, a historian and a former head of Canada’s Liberal Party, recently posted an article he titled “Lament for a Nation,” after a celebrated essay published 60 years ago by a philosophy professor named George Grant. It accused the Liberal Party of selling out Canada to America through economic and military integration.
Mr. Ignatieff wrote: “Grant struck a nerve by asking a question we still haven’t answered: What kind of national independence is possible for a country that shares an undefended border with the incorrigibly violent, expansionist and yet irresistibly attractive monster state to the south?” Today, he said, Mr. Trump is raising the same question in brutal, existential terms.
But he may also have provided some kind of answer. Almost everyone I asked about the challenge this American president presents said a version of the same thing: Mr. Trump has done more for Canadian unity than any prime minister ever has.
Serge Schmemann has worked as bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn, Jerusalem and at the United Nations, and as editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune.
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Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
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