When an airplane is crashing, the flight attendants tell you to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. This, as best as I can tell, is why Americans have mostly remained silent while their President has launched a full-scale trade war on Canada, belittled our Prime Minister by calling him “Governor,” and repeatedly threatened to annex our country.
President Donald Trump’s constant threats toward Canadian sovereignty and his attempt to crush us economically by launching an unnecessary and unjustified trade war have implications that will far outlast his administration. To say that Canadians feel stabbed in the back is a massive understatement. “It has become very clear,” said Canadian Federal Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson in a speech on March 4, “that we can no longer rely on the Americans in the way that we have in the past. We will never go back to where we were three months ago with our friends in the United States. We will never be able to trust them in the same way that we did before.”
President Trump has insisted that in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada must strengthen the border to prevent illegal immigration into the United States, as well as make tangible efforts to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. Canada has acted on both fronts, spending more than a billion dollars on border security since December, as well as appointing a “fentanyl czar” to manage the fentanyl crisis. This is a first for us. We don’t have “czars.” We think of that as an American thing. Or a Russian thing.
Canadians have already begun to drastically change their habits. We are canceling over-the-border shopping trips, with some Canadian snowbirds even going as far as to scrap their Florida vacations or sell their Arizona homes. Grocery stores now highlight Canadian-made products, and it’s not uncommon to see people pulling out their glasses to read the fine print in the fruit and vegetable aisles to make sure the peach or plum they want to buy is from Latin America, rather than the United States. Likewise, provincial liquor stores have begun pulling American booze from the shelves. Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford ripped up the province’s contract with the American satellite internet company Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, and threatened to cut off the supply of Canadian electricity to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota should the tariff war last into April.
We now jeer “The Star Spangled Banner” before sporting events—I booed it so loud at a hockey game last week that I was too hoarse to sing “O Canada” afterward. I believe our booing may be one of the few things that has led Americans to realize that we’re actually upset about this mess. Canadians have even turned on Wayne Gretzky, the Babe Ruth of hockey, who Trump has floated as a potential future governor of the “fifty-first state.” Gretzky, who attended Trump’s Inauguration as well as his election night party at Mar-a-Lago, is allegedly quite shaken by the backlash from his countrymen, but has so far declined every opportunity to comment on the situation. After this long, I’m not sure what he could say to placate us. The Babe would never.
But Canadians have a different “Wayne” standing up for us on the public stage—two weeks ago, after playing Elon Musk in a guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, Mike Myers appeared onscreen proudly wearing a “Canada is Not For Sale” t-shirt. As the cast waved their goodbyes, the Wayne’s World star and SNL alum pointed to his left elbow and mouthed “elbows up”—a familiar saying to many hockey players, though perhaps unnoticed by most U.S. viewers. “Elbows up is a warning to teammates that liberties are being taken with no calls,” wrote hockey journalist Andrew Berkshire on Bluesky after the airing. “I think it’s a very apt description of Canadian attitudes towards violence. Elbows up is not an act of aggression, it’s a call to defend yourself, violently. We don’t go seeking it, but if you bring it, you’re taking it in the teeth.” Truly, Mike, we’re not worthy.
But Trump officials have been less civil in their approach to the growing rift. Rather than walk the line of diplomacy, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem made a mockery of the previously collaborative relationships between the U.S. and Canada during her visit to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which was established on the border between Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, in 1901. Deborah Bishop, the Haskell’s director, told The Boston Globe that Noem repeatedly stepped between both sides of the thin line of black tape marking the border on the floor, cheering “U.S.A. number one” on the U.S. side and “the fifty-first state” on the Canadian side. It may have offended Canadians less if she’d just stuck to her old schtick and shot a dog instead.
Dave Kaufman
An American and a Canadian having lunch on respective sides of the international border, next to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, September 2020.
I recall making the ninety-minute drive to the Haskell from my home in Montreal during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the border was shut down, to see how the two towns were getting by during the pandemic. I made my way to the Opera House, which was closed, only to find two women sitting outside having lunch together—one on the American side of the line, and the other on the Canadian side. All that separated them was a piece of yellow police tape, flapping in the wind.
Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was recently heard saying on a hot mic that he believes Trump is serious about his threats to annex Canada. Trump has said publicly that he’s serious as well. Canada has long been spared the impact of American imperialism, but that seems to no longer be the case, and we may not find ourselves immune to Trump’s territorial ambitions amid our once-closest ally’s authoritarian descent. The American people are in the middle of a maelstrom, and Canada is just a width of tape’s length away. As Justin Trudeau’s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, once told former U.S. President Richard Nixon, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” The elephant is twitching and grunting, and no longer friendly. Our elbows are up. Way up.