Think your neighbours are bad? Try being Canada

But during Trump’s first term, the border at Emerson made unwanted headlines. Six years ago, dozens of undocumented migrants, including mothers with children, poured through the trees and snowfields of the borderland, heading north into Canada to escape Trump’s first immigrant crackdown. In the harsh winters up here, the temperatures can fall to -30C (-22F).

Those immigrants had been repulsed by America’s harsh new policies. But they had also been attracted by a new policy introduced by then-prime minister Justin Trudeau, which allowed migrants to make asylum claims once they’d arrived on Canadian soil.

Doug Johnston was a town councillor at the time and had also spent 40 years with the local fire department. For several weeks, he was part of a group that helped the lost, frozen people who were emerging from the ice fields, none of whom was equipped to deal with the conditions. Gently spoken and always choosing his words carefully, Johnston said he was pulled in different directions.

“I feel, yes, they are crossing illegally,” he said when I spoke to him. “But when a mother and a child are coming in winter, it shows their desperation.”

If the US-Canada relationship was first tested by immigration, the confrontation between the two has since turned economic. Last year, Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico. It was the first in a swathe of levies he put on almost every country, claiming it would raise revenues and level out a global trading system that was tilted against the US.

In Canada, it was felt as a gut punch that went far beyond simple economic policy. The two countries had been allies for years, fought side by side in two world wars. More than 150 Canadian soldiers died in the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Trudeau announced counter-tariffs, but they did nothing to calm the feelings of anger and betrayal. Canadians boycotted US goods, such as Jim Beam whiskey, and cancelled trips to the US. Las Vegas experienced a 20% drop in visits. Famous for being polite, Canadians booed “The Star Spangled Banner” at sports venues.

When Trump had first threatened the levies after securing his second term, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, the country’s most populous province, said it was like a “family member stabbing you right in the heart”.

In July 2026, Trump announced even more taxes on Canadian imports. In early August, explaining why, he said: “Canada’s nasty. They are. They’re nasty. I love the people, but they’re nasty. Nasty leadership.”

But now the Canadian attitude has hardened in trade talks between the neighbours. “Yes, this is a tough negotiation,” prime minister Mark Carney said, after laughing about Trump’s repeated use of “nasty”. 

“We can change the adjective. You can say ‘nasty.’ But I mean, this is a question of Canadian jobs. It’s a question of the future of Canadian businesses.”

And this time Ford said of Trump: “He’s nothing but a bully. That’s all he is. And you have to stand up to the bullies in the schoolyard, or they end up taking your lunch money.” 

The border separating Canada from America’s lower 48 states is 3,987 miles long, the longest in the world. There’s no fence for the most part, and there are no troops stationed there.

Frazier Fathers lives in Windsor, Ontario, which is directly opposite the US city of Detroit – the two cities face one another across the waters of the Detroit river. Since Trump returned to office, Windsor has had to deal with the economic effects of the tariffs, as well as a weaker Canadian dollar, and tense relations arising from the fact that 5,000 Canadians still cross the river into the US every day for work. 

In recent months there’s also been controversy over the delayed opening of a new crossing between the two cities, the Gordie Howe international bridge. There is currently only one bridge, the Ambassador Bridge and if you want to cross, there’s a standard toll of CAN$14, or if you’re towing a trailer, CAN$28. That bridge is currently owned by the Maroun family.

There are accusations that Trump personally intervened to benefit the Moroun family, which feared a drop in traffic if the new bridge were opened. Records show Matthew Moroun, who owns the bridge and is the son of late real estate billionaire Manuel Moroun, has donated at least $1m to Trump’s campaigns.

Fathers, 39, works as a consultant, but last year he was elected to the Windsor City Council’s 2nd ward, which means the Ambassador Bridge is now on his turf. He says the people of Windsor have a unique relationship with the US because so many travel to Detroit both for work and pleasure. But that has dropped off since the tariffs were imposed, he says, partly because people are suffering financially and partly because they’re making an active decision to avoid the US.

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“We’re feeling pain here, unemployment and the impacts to our local economy,” Fathers tells me.

While local politicians in Canada are supposed to be non party-political, Fathers says he does see some value in comments made earlier this year by the current prime minister, Mark Carney. At a speech at Davos, the PM said the nations of the west were “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”. It was clear that Carney’s comments were directed at Trump’s destructive behaviour. The Canadian PM said it was essential that “middle powers” looked elsewhere to find new alliances.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order,” said Carney, saying the actions of Trump meant that, “this bargain no longer works.”

Fathers says over the long-term it is good to have a “diverse set of partners to do business or trade with or rely on for defence”.

But in the short term, things were not so simple, and he pointed to the thousands of people in Windsor who relied on the US for their jobs, and who now found themselves subject to the whims and arbitrary decisions of a malicious US president. “If suddenly they said the border’s closed,” he says, “that’s going to have a massive impact on our local economy.”

But the border doesn’t need to close in order to stop people from crossing. Sarah Earl, who lives in Toronto, has many friends and relatives in the US. Since Trump launched his trade war, she’s decided not to visit. That’s not because she doesn’t want to see them. After Trump announced his tariffs and began referring to Canada as “the 51st state”, a YouGov poll showed that two-thirds of Canadians started boycotting US items and “Buying Canadian”.

Figures compiled by the Canadian government suggested the number of visits to the US was down by 25% in 2025. Cellphone information examined by the University of Toronto found the number could be closer to 42%.

Earl, 55, who works for a non-profit, tells me: “There are lots of Canadians who feel angry. It’s also just frustration, a sense there’s little you can do. The one thing you can do is just refuse to travel there and refuse to buy American products.” 

Earl, who has American relatives, says she’d normally go two or three times a year but ended the visits after Trump threatened Canada’s “sovereignty and independence”. While she says her mother won’t travel as long as Trump is president, for others it may need more than a simple election to repair the damage. “I’ve heard other people say there needs to be a change in things like ICE and the way immigrants are treated,” she says. “It’s a whole system.”

That view comes close to a description by the political scientist Nomi Claire Lazara of the US as being “like a bad ex-boyfriend they want to do without”. She says in an email that polling data and anecdotal evidence both suggest that Canadians are now sceptical about “both Trump and the United States as an ally in general”.

She believes the initial burst of anger has shifted to “a sort of disdain”. “If America is the bad ex-boyfriend, then PM Carney is the BFF who says ‘You don’t need him, girl’,” adds Lazar, a professor at the University of Ottawa.

“His vision is both bold and necessary, though how that vision will play out is deeply unpredictable because so much in the global landscape is novel and in flux.” As a measure of that flux, she points out that, this summer, Canada successfully applied to join the Eurovision Song Contest. The symbolism of that was hard to miss.

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But away from the symbolism, the hard data shows that both Canadians and Americans are feeling the pain of Trump’s latest trade war, which followed his tearing up of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during his first term. 

Official figures from the Bank of Canada, where Carney was once governor, estimate that GDP growth has fallen by 1.5% as a result of the tariffs. This suggests that Canadian households are between $1,700 and $2,000 worse off.

Meanwhile, contrary to Trump’s claim Americans will not suffer as a result of the trade war, the Tax Foundation, a think tank based in Washington DC, calculates people in the US are paying an extra $1,000 in taxes.

Back in Emerson, Johnston says he is trying not to be disturbed by the larger political drama that’s playing out. He says he wishes the two countries could “sit down over a beer and talk it out”.

He has kept up contact with friends across the river and when they went fishing he and his son Paul talked about “everything” but politics. On the water they headed to the fishing grounds and found two American boats in the same area.

“We were all after the same catfish. They might have a Canadian catfish,” said Johnston, “and we might have caught a US catfish.”

“We waved to each other, talked a little bit, and we were all catfish fishing, and that was our day,” he says.

“Right now we’re going down an endless track,” he says. “Canada and the US have worked together for years and years. Where we’re going to end up now, I don’t know.”

Through his insults, tariffs and political aggression, Trump has horrified Canada and turned a good neighbour into a nation looking elsewhere for friends. It is not certain things will ever go back to how they were.