When I returned to Windsor, Ontario, the day before President Trump was set to impose potentially devastating tariffs on exports from Canada, fear was the city’s prevailing mood. A week later, following Mr. Trump’s suspension of a 25 percent tariff on most exports and 10 percent on oil, the mood has shifted more toward anger and the nation’s focus has moved toward alternatives to the United States.
Whether Mr. Trump will impose the tariffs in early March remains unknown. But Matina Stevis-Gridneff and I found that whatever happens, relations between Canada and the United States have undergone a profound shift.
[Read: Betrayed: How Trump’s Tariff Threats Tore the U.S.-Canada Bond]
If the tariffs do come into effect, Windsor will be hit particularly hard. It has been nearly 60 years since Canada and the United States started integrating their automotive industries through a trade deal known as the auto pact. The North American Free Trade Agreement then brought Mexico into the mix.
While the president has frequently claimed that the United States is facing an emergency because of large amounts of fentanyl coming across its border with Canada, my colleague Vjosa Isai has documented how his claim that there is a significant problem is highly exaggerated.
[Read: What to Know About Canada’s Role in the Fentanyl Crisis ]
Ana Swanson, who covers international trade in the Washington bureau, writes that to President Trump, “one economic number represents everything that is wrong with the global economy: America’s trade deficit.” (The United States’ trade deficit with Canada is a product of its oil imports.)
[Read: One Economic Number Has Vexed Trump for Decades]
“Mr. Trump has shown a willingness to use American power in a way that most of his modern predecessors have not,” Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, writes. “His favorite blunt instrument is not military force but economic coercion.”
There has been no ambiguity in Canada when it comes to Mr. Trump’s proposed takeover. Politicians across the political spectrum reject it, and it has revived a sense of patriotism among Canadians.
That’s a stark contrast to an earlier point in history. When what would become part of Canada was still British North America, in 1846, tariffs threatened to destabilize the economy, prompting economic anxiety and concern.
As part of a move toward free trade, however, Britain ended a system that gave preference to exports of grain, lumber and wheat from Canada and other colonies while keeping out shipments from the United States and elsewhere with high tariffs.
It was bad news for Canadian farmers and soon set off a panic among members of Montreal’s elite when that city was the financial and business center of the colony. Within three years, they formed a group that published manifestoes urging Upper and Lower Canada’s annexation by the United States.
The removal of British tariffs “has produced the most disastrous effects upon Canada,” their 1849 manifesto proclaimed before a conclusion that joining the United States was “inevitable” and that it was the signatories’ “duty to provide for and lawfully to promote.”
More than 300 people signed it. While the majority were members of Montreal’s English-speaking business elite — including names still reflected in companies today, like Molson and Redpath — they also formed an unusual alliance with French-speaking nationalists under Louis-Joseph Papineau.
The movement failed to gain traction in Toronto and the rest of Upper Canada. A trade pact with the United States in 1854 that replaced 21 percent tariffs with duty-free access for many key Canadian exports to the United States caused the annexation movement to wither away.
“The reciprocity deal puts a nail into the economic end of this argument — you could stay within the Empire and trade with the U.S.,” Jeffrey McNairn, a history professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, told me. “It was a moment of tremendous uncertainty and a confluence of political, economic factors and people looking for a solution.”
Arsons, shootings and sabotage, Vjosa Isai reports, are all part of a continuing battle over lobster in Nova Scotia that raises thorny questions about Indigenous rights, economic equity and the conservation of resources.
Research into Ontario’s health records has concluded that marijuana dependence “is a public health threat just like alcohol” and that patients who developed it were 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population and also more likely to die from trauma, drug poisonings and lung cancer.
A self-styled Canadian “pirate” stole tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, prosecutors in Brooklyn say. The 22-year-old man remains at large.
In The New York Times Magazine, Mireille Silcoff, a writer and cultural critic based in Montreal, writes that like many other Gen X women she is now having “more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.”
In Real Estate, the What You Get feature looks at $300,000 properties on Prince Edward Island.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected]. More about Ian Austen
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