You Have No Idea How Furious the Canadians Are

In May, I reoriented my algorithms to flood me with Canadian content, turned on push notifications from The Globe and Mail, and temporarily moved my family north of the border.

For months, Donald Trump had been casually threatening to annex Canada and turn it into a state, adding insult to the injury of the trade war he was waging on the country. One prime minister resigned amid Trump’s bullying, and another was elected because voters thought he could stand up to him. In the ordinarily placid provinces, feelings of bewilderment, anxiety, and offense hardened into a defiant resolve against the United States. “Elbows up,” went the nation’s new hockey-inspired mantra. As a Montreal journalist told me, Americans were preoccupied with “12 different crises.” In Canada, this was the crisis.

Anti-American resistance was visible as soon as I landed. At a news kiosk at Toronto Pearson International Airport, the cover of Maclean’s, the de facto national magazine, teased “20 Reasons to Eat Canadian.” Inside was a letter from the editor about canceling a vacation to Cape Cod. This was mild compared with the cover of its next issue, “The New Nationalism,” which contained articles about “Why Canada Will Never Be an American State,” “How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Tariffs,” and “Fear and Loathing in a Canadian Border Town.” The publication had a new promotional campaign: “Canada’s Not for Sale. (But Maclean’s is.)”

In grocery stores, Canada-affiliated products had been demarcated with red maple-leaf insignia — an official act of solidarity that complemented the consumer practice of flipping U.S. products upside down to make them easier to avoid. At a Loblaws, a woman wearing a leather jacket and AirPods was inspecting a jar of pomegranate marmalade to verify its country of origin. “I’m so disgusted by what’s going on down there. The most recent Harvard thing?” she said. “I shop on Amazon all the time — I recognize it’s an American company — I switched from buying stuff made in America to buying stuff made in China. And you know what? I’m okay with it.”

She suggested I download an app called Maple Scan, which would tell me how Canadian a product was when I took a picture of it. (Canada Dry ginger ale, I learned, is owned by the American conglomerate Keurig Dr Pepper.) The app is just one of a crush of new tools that people up North are using to scrutinize the Canadianness of their purchases. Another one called TheCanadaList.ca was founded by a forensic-psychology professor at Ontario Tech University. He broke down his new habits in a newspaper interview: “I’ve switched from Oreos to Dare or Leclerc, from Nature Valley to MadeGood, from Lay’s to Hardbite, from Oikos to Liberté, from Tostitos to Mad Mexican.”

The Buy Canadian phenomenon was even more pronounced on the alcohol front, as the country’s liquor stores are mostly government-run. Ontario Premier Doug Ford — brother of the late Rob Ford, the scandal-plagued Toronto mayor — halted the sale of American products by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, inspiring the other provinces to do the same. I drove to a Toronto LCBO to experience a liquor store with zero bottles of Tito’s Handmade vodka or Josh Cellars Merlot. Taped to the entrance were signs in French and English announcing the removal of U.S. products FOR THE GOOD OF CANADA. I was handed, and asked not to misplace, a laminated list of Canadian alternatives to popular American products. A clerk told me the U.S. booze was in the cellar aging indefinitely.

Caught in the crossfire are blameless Canadian products that have an American stigma. For example: White Claw hard seltzer. “White Claw is a Canadian company that made itself huge down South,” Tyler VanderWallen, the general manager of Toronto’s Grizzly Bar, told me (“down South” is the U.S.). “If I sold White Claw here, I’d have to explain that to every third person, and I don’t want to have that fight.”

Grizzly Bar is located on Toronto’s nightlife-heavy Queen Street West. A 14-foot inflatable moose guards its front door, and patrons are greeted by a motion-sensor-activated snippet of “O Canada” when they walk through it. The cocktails have names only Canadians understand, like “TVO Kids” and “Hadfield.” Everywhere, there is knowing Canadian kitsch: Canadian-side Niagara Falls projected onto a wall; a Wall of Heroes featuring framed photos of Ryan Reynolds, Leonard Cohen, Shania Twain, Margaret Atwood, Alex Trebek, and 46 others; a map of the key battles of the War of 1812.

The bar is owned by a Vancouver video-game designer and his wife, who like to change its theme regularly, “like a piece of code.” When Trump ramped up his attacks, switching to a rabidly pro-Canada décor was the obvious move. The establishment was now under extra pressure to present a wholly Canadian front, from food ingredients to playlists. VanderWallen has started sourcing limes from Mexico instead of the U.S., even though they cost him around 20 cents more apiece. He said he still buys Heinz ketchup “because there’s a Heinz branch in Canada that is promising me I am getting 95 percent Canadian tomatoes.”

Other establishments became anti-American against their will. When I visited Badlands, a Toronto bourbon bar that opened three months before all the bourbon disappeared, the manager, Carolina Rodriguez, pointed to a shelf of whiskey bottles she hadn’t intended to stock: Crown Royal (Canadian), Johnnie Walker (Scottish), and Bushmills (Irish). Deprived of the authentic U.S. product, Badlands rebranded as an all-purpose “country” bar. “My favorite cocktail is a Paper Plane, and if you have to make it without bourbon, it is terrible,” Rodriguez confessed to me. When she feels a customer deserves it, she’ll pull from her dwindling stash of pre-Prohibition Jim Beam and make them a proper drink without revealing its key ingredient.

The country’s political class has attempted to sever itself from the U.S. by reorienting the Canadian economy in an east-west rather than north-south direction. For example, Canada is knocking down interprovincial trade barriers that make it near impossible to order a bottle of gin from Winnipeg if you live across the country, in say, Halifax. But on an individual level, the most evident rupture has occurred with respect to travel. Southbound commerce and tourism, even to once-symbiotic border destinations, has fallen off a cliff. Horror stories circulating about aggressive U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents don’t help. Buffalo’s new “Buffalo Loves Canada” campaign is trying to entice Canadian visitors by raffling off a $500 gift certificate and by emphasizing its appreciation of Canadian brands. (“Looking at you, Tim Hortons, Swiss Chalet, and Labatt Blue!”) The director of New York’s Thousand Islands tourism bureau stopped showing American images to Canadians on social media “because that allowed for some of that negative sentiment to fester.”

The unfavorable exchange rate had already dampened Canadian enthusiasm for the U.S. before Trump smothered it entirely, said Caroline Beteta, the half-Canadian president and CEO of Visit California, the state’s tourism agency. But now warm-weather American states were desperately trying to lure staycationing “snowbirds” back to the sunny regions that rely on their seasonal commerce. “The Canadian media didn’t really want to entertain interviews with us,” Beteta said. She and her team put together an ad spot to highlight connections between the two peoples: the California roll, invented by a chef from British Columbia; Napa’s Signorello Estate, owned by a Canadian. YouTube commenters found it unpersuasive.

The snowbird deficit was especially pronounced in Florida, with travelers flocking to the Caribbean instead and Canadian airlines axing direct flights. Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t seem too worried about the 3.3 million Canadians who visited in 2024 not returning, though others in Florida were frantic. “We don’t have any emails; we don’t have any calls,” said Karine Martinez, the Miami-based executive director of the CanadaFlorida Chamber of Commerce. These kinds of casualties are all over the place: In May, Canada’s passport office announced it was cutting 800 jobs because of decreased demand for applications.

I spoke to snowbirds who are not just boycotting the beach but have sold second homes. One tech investor who built a house north of Palm Beach a few years ago told me his American golf buddies started making 51st-state jokes: “The first time, it’s funny. The second time, okay. The third time, it’s becoming annoying.” The last straw was a guy in a pickup truck who saw his plates in a parking lot and told him to go back to Canada. This is no way to live, he recalled thinking.

Dale Hajas, a retiree from Ontario, recently kissed good-bye to her Greater Tampa development, where she estimates one-fifth of the winter residents are Canadian. “I’ve written to every tourism outlet in the United States — and not very graciously, I swear — to tell them why I will never set foot” there again, she said. “I redacted and then sent out-of-date bank statements showing what we’ve spent in the U.S. over the years.”

Edmundston, New Brunswick, sits directly across the border from Madawaska, Maine. Both communities are bilingual, and until this year, their historically Acadian roots bound them more to each other than to their respective nations. Now, Edmundston’s mayor, Eric Marquis, told me border tensions have ruined everything. Residents say they will never return to the U.S., even though everybody has family on both sides and Edmundstoners used to cross over all the time for cheaper gas. “We had to procure two new fire trucks this year,” Marquis said, and this time, they had to be Canadian made. “The first question posed by the city council was ‘Where do they come from?’”

The rupture began in earnest last fall. After decades of ho-hum amity that had survived the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in his first term, Trump began to covetously talk about the “faucet” of Canadian river water he wished to divert to California. After the election, then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago to try to calm Trump’s early trade-related belligerence. The visit backfired when Trump mused about annexation over dinner, then started referring to Trudeau as a mere “governor” on Truth Social. Deeply unpopular even before Trump started messing with him, Trudeau announced his resignation in January.

Trump proceeded to air grievances about Canada’s stingy military spending and dairy-production quotas while calling into question the boundaries governing control of the Great Lakes and the 1908 treaty that established the 49th parallel as the border. The administration then applied a round of tariffs to Canada, allegedly to punish it for the fentanyl slipping in from the north. (From 2022 to 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 59 pounds of fentanyl from Canada, compared with 61,900 pounds from Mexico.)

Trump’s top brass took up the cause too. FBI director Kash Patel declared on Fox News that 85 percent of “known or suspected” terrorists who entered the country last year came via Canada. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited a library that straddles the border, hopping from Quebec to Vermont while chanting “51st state!” Through the early months of the year, the administration continued to threaten, delay, and apply more tariffs while others were struck down in court. Canada is now chiefly being hit with 50 percent duties on steel and aluminum and 25 percent on automobiles, categories from which it had theoretically won exemptions when it signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2018, a pact Trump called “the best trade deal ever made.” In April, Canada experienced a record trade deficit, driven by a double-digit decline in automobile exports.

That month, the central banker and political novice Mark Carney led the underdog Liberals to an upset national victory, which the party owed to the electorate’s view that the once-favored Conservative Party could not credibly stand up to Trump. “Trump is trying to break us so he can own us,” Carney had argued on the campaign trail. Even if most Canadians didn’t deem it likely that Trump would literally invade, there was agreement that he was, for some reason, fixated on crippling them. Carney has since applied counter-tariffs on some $30 billion of U.S. goods, targeting red-state-manufactured products such as bowling balls and bullets.

There is only so much pain a country nine times less populous than the United States can inflict, but Canada’s boycotts have started to have their intended effect. Not long after the alcohol ban was imposed, a Kentucky distiller reported he’d already lost $115,000 from canceled shipments to Canada. Every week brings new statistics documenting Canadian retrenchment. Car trips to the U.S.: down 38 percent. Flights: down 24 percent. Canadian web traffic to the home-listings site Redfin: down 26 percent. Thirty-four U.S. states count Canada as their largest export market. “Give us another chance,” said North Dakota Republican Kevin Cramer, when a delegation of U.S. senators visited Ottawa to try and mend relations.

In early May, Carney and Trump held a predictably surreal press conference in the Oval Office. Trump began genially, congratulating Carney on his election: “It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” But when a reporter asked if he still envisioned Canada as the 51st state, Trump killed the goodwill.

“You know, I’m a real-estate developer at heart,” he said. The president waxed poetic about erasing “that artificially drawn line” on the map between the U.S. and Canada, saying that “when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together — I’m a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beauty, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be.’” Carney interjected coolly, “Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now.”

Trump’s attacks galvanized Canadians because they had thought of their relationship with the U.S. as fraternal; the two countries share a language, cultural idioms, an undefended 5,525-mile border. When the Canadian journalist Paul Wells reluctantly severed his ties with the States this year, he wrote that it felt like an “amputation.” Yet the result of Canada’s withdrawal has been not just a mass “freedom fries” moment but a quest to redefine a national ethos distinct from American influence. Ten years ago, Trudeau told the New York Times his country had “no core identity” and had proudly set aside its cultural divisions to become “the first post-national state.” Now, Trump has given Trudeau’s own listless party an opening to reclaim a sense of patriotism, making Conservative pols feel like the victims of a stolen-valor campaign but uniting most everyone else around an invigorating shared project.

When Scarborough, Ontario, native Mike Myers brandished a CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE T-shirt and mouthed “Elbows up” on Saturday Night Live — the phrase is associated with Red Wings legend Gordie Howe — he gave a name to the movement sweeping the country. In an ad spot for his bid for prime minister, Carney grilled Myers, a U.S. resident, to make sure he had retained his Canadian in-knowledge. (Carney: “What are the two seasons in Toronto?” Myers: “Winter and construction.”)

Celebrity affiliation cuts the other way, too. In June, Jagmeet Singh, the former leader of the progressive New Democratic Party, was spotted attending a Kendrick Lamar concert, which was arguably disloyal to Lamar’s rival, Drake, even in peacetime. The Toronto rapper called him out, and Singh groveled for forgiveness, claiming he had been there only to see the other headliner, SZA. Also, wine from the estate that produces Wayne Gretzky’s line has become an exception to the Buy Canadian rule. Once a national hero, Gretzky is now persona non grata for his friendship with Trump. A guy offering tastings at a kiosk told me he places Gretzky’s wine as far from the customer eyeline as possible.

One of the surest signs of the national mood shift is that even in Quebec, the independence-minded, Anglo-skeptical electorate is reporting unprecedented surges of Canadian patriotism. The leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, has dismissed the rest of Canada as “an artificial country.” Yet many Québécois have swung toward the Liberals as a bulwark against Trump, and Blanchet understands the need to ally with them too. “This truce will last as long as we face the challenge imposed by Trump,” he told Maclean’s.

Even the most anti-Canada Canadians I met couldn’t work themselves up for annexation. In Ottawa, I met Nicholas Ewanchuk outside the Canadian Parliament; he was flying a Trump flag, an American flag superimposed with an 18-wheeler, and an upside-down Canadian flag — the latter two symbols of the trucker convoy that blockaded Ottawa in 2022 in protest of COVID-19 restrictions. A Saskatchewan trucker fired for noncompliance, Ewanchuk had been protesting in Ottawa ever since. I asked if he was interested in joining the U.S. He winced, parrying the question. “You know, there never used to be a border. Back in the day, it was called Turtle Island,” he said, using an Indigenous term for the North American landmass.

Canadian Star Trek legend William Shatner has been publicly workshopping a counterproposal to the U.S., summoning his Captain Kirk persona to engage in freelance diplomacy. “Canadians are very aware of the ka-ra-te adage ‘Use the opponent’s weight against them,’” Shatner told me from Los Angeles. “Canada should say to President Trump, ‘You are the head of a rambunctious country, very difficult to govern at this point. We can ease your pain. Canada is calm, settled, successful. Clean air, clean water, pleasant people. Why don’t you become the 11th province?’”

Two days after I arrived in Canada, I caught a plane to Ottawa to get a glimpse of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. Charles had come to the capital to deliver a highly anticipated address to the Canadian Parliament called a “Speech From the Throne,” the climax of a pomp-filled 24-hour visit plotted by the new prime minister as a symbolic rebuke to Trump. In the hours leading up to the speech, I followed the royals to events designed to showcase Canada’s heritage and natural bounty: a puck drop at a youth hockey game, a farmers’ market, a tree planting, a military parade, all of them thronged with people in maple-leaf and Union Jack gear.

Rolling out the red carpet for one’s old colonial master may not seem like an obvious demonstration of national sovereignty, but it made sense in Canada: Since Trump has a thing for the royals, it was a flex that the nation, as a member of the Commonwealth, could summon its king on short notice, especially as Charles was undergoing treatments for cancer. Amid Trump’s confusing aggression, the visit would also underscore the country’s secure place in a wider global dominion. And contrary to the idea that the two nations were intuitively mergeable, a choreographed regal affair might accentuate certain proudly un-American aspects of Canada’s national character, such as the “peace, order, and good government” enshrined in its constitution.

In the capital, the royal visit was treated as a national holiday. Even its most benign details were curated, or at least interpreted, to reflect the hostile new dynamic between Canada and its longtime ally to the south. On previous visits, for example, Charles had been chauffeured in an American-made Lincoln. This time, he rode in a BMW. A royal historian named Justin Vovk insisted to the CBC that even Charles’s planting of a single tree would “take on added symbolism,” given Trump’s rhetoric about Canada’s natural resources.

Waiting for the royals to show up at the farmers’ market, I chatted up well-wishers pressed against a security perimeter. A woman named Lucia Velasco told me she saw Charles as a stabilizing force in wartime. “And right now we are not at war, but …,” she said, trailing off. Debbie Guiry, standing nearby and wearing a Union Jack umbrella hat, finished the thought: “It feels like it.”

The night before the “Speech From the Throne,” I met Liam Mooney at the Rideau Club, an elite gathering spot established by two of Canada’s founding fathers. Mooney, who runs an Ottawa branding agency with his wife, created the now-famous CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE cap worn by Premier Ford, which has sold more than 50,000 units and inspired many knockoffs. A little sheepishly, Mooney told me, he has cried at just two celebrity deaths — those of NFL broadcaster John Madden and Queen Elizabeth II. In other words, some part of him could easily have been American, but another was not. In January, after Trudeau announced his resignation, Mooney said, “We had this weird problem where Canada doesn’t have a dad.” Today, he said, half-joking, “Granddad is here.”

Over my weeks in Canada, I encountered a number of attempts to retrofit a cohesive identity onto a nation that can seem best defined by its agreeable pastiche of other nations’ influences. “Talking about the Canadian border or the 49th parallel like it’s an imaginary thing — it forces you to think, like, Okay, well, what is it that we’re about?” Mooney said. “Well, Canada’s bilingual. We are a peacekeeping nation. We are a winter nation. When it’s 30 below Celsius, you better have a good relationship with your neighbor” because it’s too cold to head into town for milk. Mooney repeated an adage I heard a lot: The country is a mosaic of peoples, rather than an assimilated, American-style melting pot. “We are a parliamentary democracy,” he said. “We were founded by these two crowns, the British and the French.”

A Euro-style social democracy built on a foundation of Tory mildness, Canada can feel lab-designed for compromise and geniality. In The Globe and Mail, a writer described the nation as one of “satirists and folk singers, sage retired bureaucrats, and many, many farmers.” In Maclean’s, another writer compared Canada’s “long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably” with America’s “unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire.”

All of which makes the new Canadian nationalism so striking. Despite Trump’s instigation of the conflict, there is an oddly abstract quality to U.S. bellicosity; even the president’s most loyal supporters may be only vaguely aware that the relationship with the country’s close trading partner and military ally has completely ruptured. Whereas in Canada, where nobody had a problem in the first place, virtually the entire population is now charged up and doing bespoke economic protectionism. “In the U.S., there’s roughly 350 million people going on their way, la-di-da,” said Ford, the Ontario premier. “But there’s 41 million Canadians at a fever pitch right now doing everything they possibly can to support the cause. I’ve never seen patriotism like this.”

The “Speech From the Throne” took place at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. Normally a rote address used to open a new session of Parliament, the actual sovereign had only twice appeared in person to deliver it. And while the speech was written by the prime minister’s staff, even the subtlest anti-Trump jab ventriloquized by the monarch would be newsworthy. The country’s political class showed up in full, including vanquished Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. First Nations leaders from the prairie provinces arrived in traditional headdresses, and Trudeau caused a fuss by wearing turquoise-and-orange Adidas Gazelles with his suit.

The king began by acknowledging the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people, then delivered his speech in French and English, alternating every few paragraphs. “When my dear late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, opened a new Canadian Parliament in 1957, the Second World War remained a fresh, painful memory,” read Charles in his familiar murmur. Sitting beside him was Camilla, wearing a maple-leaf brooch. Now, he continued, “Canada is facing challenges that are unprecedented in our lifetimes.” The king spoke of self-determination and the rule of law and trade, rendering the target of his speech unmistakable. His closing line generated a rousing ovation: “As the anthem reminds us, the True North is indeed strong and free.”

If the goal was to get Trump’s attention, it appeared to work. Later that day, he posted on Truth Social, “I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!”

In my travels, I met a retired high-school history teacher named Peter Kear who loaned me his copy of a 1993 book called The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Canadian Resistance to American Expansionism. As an American typically unversed in Canadian history, I wondered if its title was maybe a bit hyperbolic. Then I opened the book to example after footnoted example of zealous American attempts to dominate Canada.

“Come then, ye generous Citizens, range yourselves under the Standard of general Liberty,” General George Washington wrote to the Canadians in September 1775, announcing he had authorized a military invasion “not to plunder, but to protect you.” The British Empire had recently conquered Quebec and the rest of New France from Louis XV, and the Americans were trying to enlist the colony in their brewing revolution. Their entreaties failed, in part because of Britain’s shrewd passage of the 1774 Quebec Act, which allowed the province to maintain its Catholic religion. Washington launched a New Year’s Eve invasion of Quebec City that ended in miserable defeat and the capture of 372 of Colonel Benedict Arnold’s 500 troops.

America was undeterred. “The unanimous voice of the Continent is that Canada must be ours,” insisted John Adams, then a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress. In the winter of 1776, Benjamin Franklin was sent north on a diplomatic mission to tout the U.S. cause, which also failed. After the Americans won the Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of Tory “United Empire Loyalists” fled to Canada, massively increasing its English-speaking population and arguably seeding the temperamental divide between tranquil Canada and its more ardent neighbor to the south.

In 1812, President James Madison declared war and invaded Canada again; Speaker of the House Henry Clay said, “I would take the whole continent from them.” (The war is generally considered a draw, but I was made to understand that British Canada and its Shawnee allies should be seen as the victors because the invading Americans gained no territory while their opponents burned down the White House.) In 1844, James K. Polk won the presidency on the strength of the “54-40 or Fight” campaign to claim northwestern land clear to Alaska, up through present-day British Columbia.

From the Canadian perspective, the movement to confederate the country’s provinces into a single nation was driven partly by the need to resist American expansion, which Canadians feared would spread northward after the military buildup of the Civil War. “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and they purchased it; they coveted Texas, and stole it,” said Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a Father of Confederation who had moved from the U.S. to escape its “diseased love of excitement.” McGee was allegedly murdered by a member of an Irish separatist group that attacked Canada with the possible blessing of President Andrew Johnson.

Even after Britain granted Canada the right to self-governance, in 1867, the U.S. continued to wage economic warfare in an attempt to bring the young country to its knees. In 1888, Secretary of State James Blaine wrote that, like a ripe apple, Canada would “fall into our hands” and “seek admission to the Union” if the U.S. bludgeoned it with the heavy import duties that became known as the McKinley -Tariff, named for Trump’s favorite protectionist. (There have also been Canadian pro-annexationists, including the composer of “O Canada,” of all people, who in the 1880s became embittered with his country and moved to Massachusetts.)

Relations improved vastly in the 20th century, but even in the 1980s, vestigial anxiety about American imperialism was such that many felt free trade, not protectionism, was the thing that would finally KO Canada’s sovereignty. The 1988 Liberal Party leader John Turner argued the trade pact that preceded NAFTA would reduce the country “to a colony of the United States” dependent on the impulses of its corporations. Turner lost that year’s election, but a million more Canadians voted for the anti-free-trade candidates than against them. (The author of my talismanic new history book, David Orchard, was one of the leaders of the movement.)

So a student of Canadian history might not have been surprised at a renewed bout of U.S. encroachment, nor the Canadian response to it. “The U.S. always seems to think, If we can threaten you economically, you’ll just come and join us,” says Christopher Sands, an expert on U.S.-Canada relations. Sands used to direct the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute, until, tellingly, the Wilson Center was dismantled by DOGE. “It has never worked. It only ever builds up a certain Canadian nationalistic response,” he said.

Of course, not every single last Canadian is living life at a nonstop anti-U.S. fever pitch. Though nobody wants to be annexed, there tends to be an older-white-liberal bent to the most fervent of the new patriots, as at a “No Kings” rally. The cause may feel less urgent for oil-and-gas libertarians in Alberta, which is home to a growing separatist movement, or in the immigrant enclaves of the Toronto suburbs that voted Conservative in the recent election, where people were focused on housing costs and quality-of-life issues. Some demographics are bound to find the rah-rah a little embarrassing. “Elbows up, or whatever,” wrote Slate’s Toronto-based music critic Carl Wilson on his Substack, recommending some Canadian LPs for Canada Day.

Others are fully catastrophizing. This past spring, Canadian author Stephen Marche war-gamed a potential conflict in The Atlantic. Given the large discrepancy in the size of the countries’ standing armies, he figured the Canadian military response would have to include civilian insurgency. “If only one in 100 Canadians took up arms against an American occupation, that force would be 10 times the estimated size of the Taliban at the outset of the Afghan War. And that force would consist of machine-learning specialists and petroleum engineers rather than shepherds and subsistence farmers,” he wrote, citing a combat expert. “Canadians cannot afford complacency.” Marche has an eight-part podcast out on the U.S. threat featuring an image of geese and eagles fighting.

The plot of Michael Moore’s 1995 movie Canadian Bacon is that a U.S. president gins up anti-Canadian hate to boost his approval rating, the running joke being, Who could possibly hate a Canadian? In South Park, Canadians are depicted as a malign, weird-looking species, and the townspeople hold them responsible for corrupting the youth. What pop culture treats as prima facie farcical, Trump is doing in real life: blaming Canada.

His exact motivation remains opaque. Trade tensions flared in his first term, but there was no talk of water faucets and 51st states. Some theorize Trump enjoys trolling Trudeau and, even after his resignation, just never stopped. “He always saw Trudeau as a theater major,” said someone involved in the trade negotiations.

Not all of Trump’s complaints are random. His grievances with Quebec’s protectionist dairy industry, which limits imports, were shared by the Biden administration. (Milk is the third rail of Canadian politics. Carney has already pledged not to touch it in trade negotiations, lest he lose Quebec’s support.) And especially now, you can find Canadians who agree with Trump that the country should ramp up its military-defense budget to meet NATO spending obligations, as Carney has pledged to do.

When it comes to the president’s outré talking points, such as the location of the 49th parallel, observers of the conflict -suspect trade hawk and White House senior counselor Peter Navarro may be in his ear. In 2018, Navarro said there was a “special place in hell” for Trudeau during routine trade talks. This year, he reportedly proposed ejecting Canada from the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network. (He denied the report.) When I texted Steve Bannon to ask what he thought of the new hostilities toward Canada, he replied, “LOVE IT.” But then, just a few months ago, Bannon struck a different tone in an interview with the Financial Times. “Canada punches way above their weight. If you look at military history, they’ve been the best ally we’ve had,” he said. Bannon didn’t pick up the phone when I tried to square the circle. “I’m not sure this has an intellectual underpinning, to be honest,” a former Trump-administration foreign-policy official told me.

The tariffs themselves, should they stick, are likely to have mixed results. Canadians do fear they could decimate the auto industry. “We don’t really want cars from Canada,” Trump explained to Carney in May. “And at a certain point, it won’t make economic sense for Canada to build those cars.” That same month, General Motors announced it was eliminating a shift at its Oshawa, Ontario, plant that makes Chevrolet Silverados, resulting in roughly 650 layoffs that will take place in the fall; GM is ramping up Silverado production in Indiana.

But Canada’s inclusion in Trump’s aluminum tariffs has also generated puzzlement. The U.S. gets two-thirds of its aluminum from Canada, but those smelters are mostly powered by cheap Quebec hydroelectricity the U.S. probably can’t replicate. Sylvain Maltais, the head of the aluminum-workers union in the company town of Alma, told me that there had been no layoffs and that Rio Tinto, the mining giant that owns the plants, was proceeding with existing investments. “For the moment, it’s going well. There’s not a lot of stress,” Maltais said. In the U.S., however, the prices of seltzer and cat food — and anything else that comes in a can — are expected to rise.

Even if a truce is reached to end the trade war, the national resistance against America will persist. As Trump continues to belittle and toy with Canada, its people have lost faith that its neighbor will treat it decently. At the start of the conflict, commenters tended to lump Trump’s attacks on Canada as of a piece with his designs on Greenland and the Panama Canal, all of it evidence of cartoonish saber-rattling. But as the rift deepened, Canadians began taking the imperialist threat seriously. Surveying the growing imbalance between the temperate Canadian climate and drought-stricken areas of the American West, an environmental journalist recently forecast, in the magazine The Walrus, a future in which Canada becomes a strip-mined “vassal state”: “As US aquifers go dry, the lakes will be a natural place to look.”

On June 15, Trump arrived in Carney’s home province of Alberta for the Group of Seven Summit, where the Canadian media and political Establishment were cautiously optimistic that the conference might produce a new trade agreement. Would the countries patch things up? Instead, in a press conference, Trump blamed Barack Obama and Trudeau (who wasn’t in power at the time) for kicking Russia out of the then-G8 for its 2014 invasion of Crimea. Trump abruptly left the next day without any progress made on a deal, and Canadians felt had all over again.

In July, seemingly out of the blue, Trump threatened a new round of tariffs on all Canadian goods, posting an open letter to Carney on social media in which he complained that Canada had “financially retaliated” against the U.S. and doubled down on the assertion that Canada fails “to stop the drugs from pouring” across the border. Carney responded on X: “We are committed to continuing to work with the United States.” But, he added, “we are building Canada strong” and “strengthening our trading partnerships throughout the world.”

Until his retirement from Parliament earlier this year, Charlie Angus represented a large swath of rural Ontario. A rabble-rouser who plays in an alt-country band called the Grievous Angels, Angus has remade himself as a de facto leader of the “Elbows up” movement, posting testimonials of everyday resistance on Substack and touring auditoriums across the country. The night after Trump’s G7 exit, I went to one of his events in Oshawa, the economically anxious General Motors town. Filling the theater was a mostly older crowd with a few union types mixed in. Angus launched heatedly into his one-man show.

“They thought, Canada, wow, let’s go pick on the Canadians, right? I mean, what’s easier to pick on than Canadians? That’s what they thought. They thought we were pushovers. Now they’re learning,” he said. It used to be “we didn’t need a big national story. We didn’t need to be jingoistic because we had next-door neighbors who were super-loud. We just did our thing. And then suddenly, we have a government who says we don’t even have a right to exist as a nation. Overnight, something changed for every person in this country. You said, ‘Not on my watch,’ and you sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘No, we’re not going back to Florida.’ And you called the hotel in Arizona and said, ‘I don’t care if we lose our deposit.’”

If all this sounded like a civilized way to conduct a trade war, well, that only underscored the rift. It takes a special kind of belligerence to piss off the nicest people on the planet. With friends like us, who needs enemies? And if our enemies now include Canada, we probably don’t have any friends left at all.

A couple of weeks before the show, Angus and I had met in Toronto at Grizzly Bar. “You think I’m going to let that fucking criminal take my country? Not a chance,” he said as we drank Canadian beers. “So suddenly we go from being really easygoing to a nation of hockey goons.”