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The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.
It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”
Things escalated from there, with heated meetings and calls leading to the US enacting (then retracting, then enacting, then retracting) tariffs on its northern neighbor, and Canada responding in kind.
Province leaders got in on the action as well, perhaps most notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “If they want to try to annihilate Ontario,” he said early on in the tariff saber-rattling, “I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face.” This week, he took steps to make good on that threat, announcing a 25 percent tax on electricity exports to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan. The US responded by promising to increase tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent. That led to both sides reversing course, and a fresh round of ongoing talks. (Though Trump maintained on Thursday that “Canada only works as a state.)
I wanted a firsthand account of how all this is affecting normal Canadians and Canadian politics. So I dialed up Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Canada, to get the scoop.
Zack told me that “Canadians are angry — just out-of-this-world angry about what the United States is doing to them.”
Here’s what else he had to say. (Our conversation was edited for length and clarity).
What’s going on in Canada right now?
Well, for over a century, the US-Canadian border has been one of, if not the, most peaceful borders in the entire world.
There have been extremely strong relations between the two countries and extremely tight economic ties between them. For a long time, it’s been extremely easy to travel back and forth between the United States and Canada. Even before NAFTA, there was open trade for some goods.
There’s a way in which the economies are so intertwined that it’s not crazy to think about Canada and the US as having a broadly integrated economic system, even if it’s totally wrong to call Canada the 51st state.
I’ll give you an example.
The US is a big farm country. Canada is too. Farming requires fertilizer, and the US imports 80 percent of its potash — an important fertilizer — from Canada. Then it sells some of the products that it grows back to Canada. When I go to the grocery store, I often find “Product of the USA” and “Product of Canada” in the produce aisle.
By putting tariffs on agricultural products on both sides, you’re making things more expensive in multiple ways.
The potash becomes more expensive to import, which also means that farmers have to pay more. It also means consumers in the United States have to pay more, and so do Canadians, because Canada’s putting reciprocal tariffs on the United States.
So not only are goods more expensive to begin with, but Canadian tariffs on American imports would make my groceries more expensive.
By going after this very tight economic integration, Trump is likely to wreak havoc on both economies, but especially the Canadians.
The tariffs on various goods threaten one of the foundations of the Canadian economy, which is trade with its much larger southern neighbor. Now, it’s not like Canada will collapse all of a sudden, but the country will experience pretty significant pain if it’s having trouble exporting or importing from the US.
With the caveat that there’s a lot of back-and-forth on this, can you tell us a bit more about what’s going on with the tariffs?
I can, but I don’t know how much good it will do by the time this gets published! But right now [as of late Thursday, March 13], we’re at a pause because of both sides backing down.
Earlier this week, the premier of Ontario — the Canadian equivalent of a governor — threatened to put significant export taxes on electricity sent to the United States, which would basically jack up electrical prices for Americans.
Trump threatened some significant tariffs and retaliation. He got really mad.
They both sort of backed down. Lots of other tariff-related negotiations are going on. And though all this changes constantly, meaning, again, this unfortunately may not be the case when people read this, but the next big date is April 2, which is when the next round of American tariffs on Canadian-related goods will go into effect.
Canada doesn’t want to be the aggressor. What Canadians say, and that includes all sorts of different politicians, is that they want the Americans to stop doing this, because economic warfare isn’t helping anybody. Essentially, “We want our things to go back to the way they were, but you keep threatening us, and so we have no choice but to fight back.”
The Canadian position is this is a defensive form of economic warfare, and they’re right to be clear. Trump started this for no reason. And I mean no reason. There was no justification given that makes any sense. Our own Eric Levitz wrote a piece looking at Trump’s various different justifications, and they contradict each other.
Let’s explore that a bit. It’s a mystery what Trump wants from all this?
I truly don’t know what Trump wants, and I’m not sure Trump knows.
After the election, Trump made some comments about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being Governor Trudeau. And at first they seemed like jokes, like, “Hahaha, Canada, right? It’s small America,” just the sort of thing Canadians hate, but Americans engage in sometimes. It was insulting but ultimately harmless.
But it seems somewhere along the way, inside Trump’s head, this went from being a joke that he made to insult and bully somebody into a serious thing that he actually wanted, to the point where he began to link it explicitly to harmful policies.
And now you have Trudeau saying — and this is the official line of the Canadian government as well — that Trump is trying to bully us into becoming part of the US.
I just didn’t believe Trump would do that at first, because it’s so stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. The United States, for all of its power, does not have the capacity to force Canada to become part of America through economic coercion. That would require an invasion or require war, and that’s not happening, right? Trump is not going to invade Canada. (Though if he does, and I eat my words, I will be next speaking to you from the front lines of the Battle of Windsor/Detroit.)
The only way it makes sense to me is to think of Trump as a mad king. Like the archetype from fantasy literature, who just starts ordering his subjects to do all sorts of crazy things that don’t make any sense in real life. I think Trump somehow got it in his head that it would be really cool if Canada was part of the US. It would be great. It would make him look awesome.
I can’t make any sense out of it otherwise. The relationship between the US and Canada prior to Trump, was as good as any two countries that live next to each other could hope to be right, nearly open trade, no threat of war. There’s literally a bridge that you drive over from Buffalo called the Peace Bridge.
And all of a sudden, Trump has antagonized the Canadians for no discernible purpose, and disrupted what was the most peaceful and mutually beneficial border on Earth.
Of course, there’s the explanation that this is all a negotiating stance, and that Trump wants to seem crazy. I find that ridiculous at this point, because it’s not clear what negotiating benefits we’re supposed to be attaining. What can Canada give the US? I don’t know, and from what I understand, the US hasn’t articulated anything privately, other than, “You can make it stop when you become the 51st state.”
Tell me more about how that 51st state rhetoric is playing in Canada.
Everything Trump has said and done has led to a level of rage and defiance that I think very few Americans fully appreciate.
People hear that 51st state stuff, and say, “America is literally attempting to annex us. They’re trying to coerce us into becoming Americans. And we hate that.”
Yesterday, I was walking around my neighborhood, and there were three shops in a row on the main drag in my neighborhood, and every single one of them listed the Canadian-made goods that they were selling.
There’s a widespread boycott of American-related goods here in Ontario, which is not only Canada’s largest province, but where state-run liquor stores have a semi-monopoly on alcohol sales. And they have taken all American-made products out of those stores. That’s a government initiative, not a citizen boycott. There’s both: Consumers don’t want to buy American goods, and the government is limiting access to certain American goods.
Ontario is currently governed by a Conservative government, one that you would think would have more ideological affinities with the Trumpers. The fact that they’ve been so aggressive is demonstrative of where public opinion is in Canada.
Canadians are so insulted, so infuriated because they have their own real sense of nationhood. One of the pillars of Canadian national identity is being not American, is that Canada is different from the other country near them. To say “You should just become part of the US” is to assail one of the foundations of what makes Canada Canada.
Being so infuriated has led to a backlash against the United States and against the Trump administration, unlike anything in recent memory, dwarfing even the anti-Americanism you saw in Canada during the Bush administration around the Iraq War.
So all this is making Canadians very angry. What’s it doing to Canadian politics?
It’s transforming Canadian politics. I’ve never seen anything like this. So to back up, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, and his Liberal Party have been in power for a really long time.
On Friday, he’s stepping aside in favor of Mark Carney, his successor at the top of the Liberal Party.
It was widely thought that the Liberals were done, that Trudeau would resign, there would be a new Liberal prime minister for a little bit until Canada has elections, and then the Conservative Party, which is their main rival, would end up winning the elections and be in charge because Trudeau was very, very unpopular — as leaders tend to be after 10 years in power.
All of a sudden, though, the polling dramatically reversed. What had been a consistent Conservative lead for years became almost a dead heat over the past week or so.
Trudeau stepping down is part of that. But it really is about America for two reasons.
First, people like the way that the Liberals have handled the United States. Trudeau and the rest of the Liberal Party have been defiant, aggressive, willing to push back, not giving any ground, calling on Canadians to stand together and stand up for their country in the face of American bullying. And that’s been hugely popular. Trudeau’s approval rating is still negative, but it’s gone up by 10 points, which is striking.
Second, the Conservative Party made a choice to elevate a guy named Pierre Poilievre to leadership. Poilievre is about as close to a Trump-style conservative, as you can get in Canada. He’s not a danger to Canadian democracy in the same way that Trump’s a danger to American democracy, and he’s less right-wing on a lot of issues, including some big cultural war ones. But he has a penchant for a kind of aggressive policy rhetoric and conspiracy theorizing to the point where he’s developed a bit of a fan club among American conservatives, who praise him.
That may have seemed like an asset for Poilievre at one time, certainly in his primary race. But now being close to the US or American-style in any way is like a death sentence in Canadian politics. The US government is the one who’s literally trying to destroy your country. It’s not helpful if you’re seen as somebody who can’t stand up to the Americans.
It’s not that Poilievre hasn’t been trying. He’s been making statements about how he’s willing to push back on the US. But the Liberals are seen as the much more naturally antagonistic party against a Republican-led United States.
Now what was once a shoo-in election for the Conservatives is now a toss-up. And if trends continue, it may even turn into a Liberal favorite election, but that will take some time.
Are we seeing something of a long-term reorientation in US-Canada relations here?
There are two ways to think about it, both of which could be equally valid.
The first one is one that I’ve heard from European diplomats and the people who talk to them: One Trump term can be dismissed as a fluke, but two Trump terms suggest that the United States might be like this in the future. That is, every four years you have the possibility of facing an antagonistic, aggressive right-wing, nationalist government that wants to bully you and undermine the foundations of your shared diplomatic relationship.
If you take that view — that Trump is just what the Republican Party is, and we need to readjust our politics around the fact that America might often be like this — that would lead to a long-term strategic reevaluation of the relationship and a transformation of what the nature of the US-Canadian border is going to look like, what trade is going to look like, what economic ties between the two countries are going to look like.
The second school of thought is that that’s all really costly. The relationship takes a lot of work to change, and there’d be a lot of short- and long-term pain.
The US-Canada relationship developed as it did for a reason. Geographic proximity makes it easy to trade, and it makes sense that these big markets with different climates that can grow different crops and easily support different industries would cooperate. It is a naturally congenial economic and political relationship. It would be to everyone’s detriment if the politics were more hostile.
So it might be that you start seeing a policy that acknowledges the long-term risks and takes some steps to ameliorate them, while attempting to leave the door open for a return to the pre-Trump status quo.
Those schools of thought aren’t mutually exclusive, and you can see elements of both in a Canadian strategy. What I can say for sure is the odds that there will be some kind of political or economic rupture between the US and Canada that lasts decades into the future have gone up substantially just over the course of the past few months.
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