‘Canada is not for sale’: Trump’s threats of annexation and tariffs stoke Canadian patriotism

Half a dozen employees were working in a textile factory outside Ottawa on Friday to satisfy the sudden surge of nationalist sentiment in Canada. They are in charge of supplying the latest and unexpected North American cultural war: the battle of the caps. Here, and in a dozen other factories spread across Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, they are embroidering the message “Canada is not for sale,” the flag with the maple leaf and 1867, the year of the country’s founding, on white, blue and red fabrics and the same font as the most ubiquitous political symbol of our time: those MAGA caps that, south of the border, call for the United States to be made great again.

Liam Mooney is the strategist behind this counteroffensive. Owner of a “brand innovation” company, he watched an interview on Fox News on January 8 by host Jesse Watters with Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, who expressed Canadians’ misgivings about being absorbed by their powerful southern neighbor and becoming the 51st state, as Donald Trump says he wants. “I don’t understand it,” Watters told him. “Everyone wants to be an American citizen!”

Two days earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had announced his resignation after nearly a decade in office, and Mooney, who describes himself as a “conservative,” felt that his country was “like a ship without an anchor or a rudder” in the midst of the worst storm in its recent history, and thought he had to do something to oppose Trump, “a guy who looks at the world through the eyes of a real estate developer.” So he started making caps.

He has been “sleeping very little” for a month to deal with a sales fever that keeps growing. He says he has sold “tens of thousands” of units (with a mysterious air, he apologizes for not being more specific), especially since Ford, who is up for re-election this month, wore one at a public event in a gesture of political astuteness. Mooney has recently expanded his online offering (where he claims to have filled “thousands of orders” from the United States) to sweatshirts and winter hats. He has also added another slogan to his repertoire, taken from the Canadian national anthem: “Strong and free.”

But it is the caps that have become the symbol of the anger of his fellow Canadians, people who are generally not given to expressing their displeasure. It began shortly after Trump’s election victory and culminated last weekend with the threat made by Canada’s main trade partner, which receives around 80% of its exports, to impose tariffs of 25% on Canadian products. Canadian authorities responded with a list of levies on hundreds of American goods, chosen to hurt: above all those from Republican states, producers of oranges, bourbon and corn flour.

On Monday, after markets fell and Trump granted President Claudia Sheinbaum a month-long truce in his trade war with Mexico — a country that shares a free trade agreement with the U.S. and Canada, and has recently become Trump’s latest tariff target — Trudeau managed to avoid the start of hostilities with another one-month delay. In exchange, he promised to strengthen border surveillance and appoint a fentanyl czar, a surprising demand from the United States that is mostly made fun of in Canada. Not so much because of the attempt to blame others for the problem of consumption of the powerful opioid, forgetting where demand is generated, but because in 2024, Canadian border agents only seized 19 kilos of fentanyl, compared to the ton seized on the border with Mexico.

The postponement of the tariffs has left a feeling of “relief” among Canadians, who will no longer see American alcohol disappear from their liquor stores. The booing of the American anthem at hockey and basketball games over the weekend has also ended, but it is too late to stop a civic movement of resistance to the bullying neighbor that has emerged from what David Skok, founder of the influential economic digital site The Logic, defines as “a psychological blow that is difficult to take.” “Canadians go on holiday to the United States, our sports teams play there, we study at their universities… The majority of our population lives on the 49th parallel, right on the border. The idea that this relationship was not solid is deeply painful.”

The feeling is widespread. In dozens of conversations this week in Ontario, both in Ottawa, the capital, and in Toronto, the country’s economic powerhouse, it was not easy to find anyone happy with the idea of annexation to the United States, but there were many who had decided to join the Made in Canada movement by consulting, like Wendy Miller, the places where they could buy local products in a Facebook group that has grown to almost 800,000 members, a number that represents almost 2% of the 41 million inhabitants of the country.

Miller was recently at a local craft store in Ottawa, where owner Gareth Davies estimates that this sudden “economic nationalism” has brought him a “20 to 30%” increase in sales. It has also changed habits and customs in supermarkets. In one Toronto establishment, David Chris and Beckner Brohman were scrutinizing labels this week to determine whether things were made or just packaged in Canada, while Mohammed Lahbabi stopped in the fruit section of an Ottawa store exclusively at the spots marked by a sign with the Canadian flag, and Sarah Gratten was outraged to see California wine in a liquor store.

So Trump has accomplished the impossible: tax science has taken over casual conversations, from taxis to record stores and in places like travel agencies, where cancellations of American getaways are piling up in the middle of an especially harsh winter. The trade war has also made its way into the weekly Trivial Pursuit night at a hipster coffee shop in Toronto, which opened Wednesday with the question: “Which comedy show aired a skit about tariffs that went viral?”

The answer was “public television’s program This Hour Has 22 Minutes, even though Canada is no longer in the mood for too many jokes. Trudeau made that clear at an urgently convened summit with business leaders on Friday, when he told them, in a private remark caught on an open microphone, that the threat about the 51st State must be taken “very seriously.”

“Anschluss’ in North America”

A couple of days earlier, the eminent historian Robert Bothwell had agreed at a dinner table in Toronto that Trump “has a serious intention of absorbing Canada.” “It would be a kind of ‘Anschluss’ in North America,” he said, referring to Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. “You could say it’s crazy, because it is. Will it succeed? I don’t think so, although Trump has shown that he knows no bounds.”

Bothwell is the author of Your Country, My Country, an engaging story about the coexistence of two nations so different and yet so similar. The book also reads as an accurate portrait of the soul of a country that is more than the sum of its French and English identities, and which outside observers often dismiss with jokes — such as when people in London say something is “more boring than a Sunday in Canada” — or with platitudes that reduce it to a sensible version of the United States or the last European and British vestige left in North America.

Bothwell points out that the desire to differentiate oneself from one’s neighbor is part of Canada’s founding myth, that tariff wars between the two countries have been recurrent, and that anti-American sentiment also has its own history. A history that, recalls Aaron Ettinger, an expert in international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa, saw its last major episode during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Canada, a faithful companion in past wars, refused to join. “Annexation,” says Ettinger, “would mean that we would lose autonomy in matters such as public health, weapons, abortion or respect for our linguistic exceptionality. And most importantly: we are not Americans. We may be similar, physically similar, even speak alike, but we are not the same.”

Such statements may prove right Margaret MacMillan, a historian at the University of Toronto and Oxford, who said last Thursday in her apartment with a stunning view of the snowy city that “Trump, who, let us not forget, hates Trudeau for the simple fact that he is younger and better looking than he is, has done more work for Canadian nationalism in a few weeks than anyone else in the last few decades.” Polls also support MacMillan’s argument, an authority on the study of World War I: according to the Angus Reid Institute, the percentage of Canadians who feel “very proud” of being Canadian rose from 34 to 44% between December, after Trump’s bragging began, and now.

MacMillan, who admits that she is worried to see “the same kind of people who believed they could help and control Hitler now supporting Trump,” also sees a change in attitude among younger generations. “Mine,” explains the historian, who was born in Toronto at the end of World War II, “grew up aware of the possibility of the country disappearing. We lived through constitutional crises, a very strong separatist movement in Quebec and the nuclear threat. Suddenly, those born after the fall of the Iron Curtain have realized that Canada’s survival is not guaranteed.”

The writer Stephen Marche, a keen observer of American reality and author of a book that wonders whether the neighboring country is not on the verge of a “second civil war,” is also convinced that we are facing a profound change in attitude. “We Canadians feel more comfortable talking about how badly we have behaved than parading our pride, so all this is new,” he clarified in an interview on Wednesday afternoon at his home in Toronto. “We have spent the last 10 years discussing how racist we are, talking about our treatment of Indigenous people, but it took one weekend for us to forget about that and remember that if the provinces joined in 1867 it was because they did not want to be part of the United States,” he recalls. For him, all this actually demonstrates “the weakness” of the neighboring country. “It is like having an older brother who’s addicted to crack, whose word is worthless,” he says. “Trump has the attention span of a drug addict. Today, the talk is no longer about tariffs, but about the outrageous things he said about Gaza, and tomorrow, who knows. That’s how things work with his way of confusing politics and reality TV.”

Like many Canadian cultural workers, Marche is almost entirely dependent on the southern neighbor. He writes for newspapers and magazines in New York, his publishing house is there, and “90%” of his business “goes through the United States.” He is part of a fertile tradition: from Mary Pickford, “America’s sweetheart,” to Neil Young, and from Joni Mitchell to Justin Bieber, some of the artists who have defined American popular culture are Canadian. Which speaks of an influence as great as it is unidirectional, according to Margaret Atwood, a national treasure of letters. Atwood described this relationship in a conversation with EL PAÍS as “one of those mirrors in a police interrogation room.” “We see them, but they don’t see us,” she said.

In an email sent this weekend from Mexico, where she spends time, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale wrote that she felt “sadness” at seeing her neighbors “shooting themselves in the foot for no apparent reason.” Atwood said she is hearing many fellow Canadians say they no longer want to travel to the United States, and that it seems to her that the number of Canadians in Mexico and the Caribbean will grow because of the threat of absorption. She also noted that ”we wouldn’t be the 51st state anyway, but 10 new states, two territories and many [Indigenous] First Nations. Think of the number of new senators and representatives that would be created! And the increase in Electoral College votes! The Republicans would never win an election again.”

Atwood does not remember a similar union of the entire Canadian political spectrum behind the same goal as the one achieved this time in opposition to Trump. From Trudeau’s Liberals, whose polls show them closing the gap in an election they thought they had lost, to the Conservatives, whose leader and aspiring next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, has suddenly forgotten his sympathies for Trump and seems to be in trouble. “It has worked even with the Quebec separatists,” says the historian Bothwell, “who have realized what would happen if Canada didn’t exist.”

The tariffs have also had a geographically equalizing effect; all provinces have something to lose. They would be devastating for Alberta, which sends gas and oil for refining in the United States. They would also be devastating for Saskatchewan’s potash business. Or for Quebec, which supplies hydroelectric power to the U.S. East Coast. In Ontario, the largest economy, it would deliver a hard blow to the auto industry, which has a strong presence in places like Windsor, a border city neighboring Detroit. The center-left congressman Thomas Masse, who has represented that district in the Ottawa parliament for 23 years, explained by telephone on Friday that there are also some 10,000 workers, “most of them in the health sector, who cross into the U.S. every day because there is a shortage of professionals on the other side.”

While many Canadians, as Skok suggests, are praying that his volatile attention span will make Trump forget about them before the month-long deadline is up, Masse has been weighing in these days on the debate about how to think beyond the truce and make Canada less dependent on the United States. He did so at a press conference in his district, with the Ambassador Bridge in the background, the busiest bridge on the border and a symbol of the bilateral relationship, and he repeated it in his conversation with EL PAÍS. “Nothing guarantees that even if we get through this war, Trump will not come back to the fray, so it is urgent to move forward with free trade agreements with other countries, learn from American protectionism, and do something more than extract and send our natural resources out of this country, a practice that is a consequence of the neoliberal economy that we have suffered for decades.”

The politician also advocates for the elimination of trade barriers between provinces and considers it essential to complete the construction of the Gordie Howe Bridge, a public alternative to the Ambassador Bridge, which was bought by billionaire Manuel Moroun in 1979 and in 2022 made headlines around the world as one of the scenes of protests by Canadian truckers who opposed the restrictions imposed by Trudeau during the Covid pandemic. Those incidents placed a country unaccustomed to the spotlight at the center of international news and awakened it, Marche notes, to another reality: “That in this serene place, the extremist ideas of the MAGA movement can also spread.”

Canada’s fringe, right-wing populist People’s Party best represents those ideas. Virologist David Speicher is one of its candidates. We met him, wearing a “maple syrup MAGA” sweatshirt, in Washington, where he had traveled from Ontario to attend Trump’s inauguration with a handful of other Canadians, including Alberta’s conservative premier, Danielle Smith, the top official from Canada there that day. Speicher is the closest thing to a dissident we found in Canada this week. In an email, he explained that tariffs would be bad for his country’s economy; he doesn’t think the 51st state thing will ever happen, but that if it did, “it would be great to see a lot of Trump’s executive orders come into effect in Canada,” especially those dealing with ending diversity policies.

For Speicher, the solution to the tariff problem would be for his compatriots to elect a prime minister — for example, his party leader, Maxime Bernier — who “shares the ideologies of patriotism, border security and crackdowns on illegal immigrants and drug trafficking.” “If Canadians are foolish enough in this year’s federal election to re-elect a Liberal government like Trudeau’s, there is no doubt that he will impose severe tariffs. It is his way of forcing our leaders to do something they should already be doing: being patriotic and making Canada great.”

The date of the date of the election is still unclear, but it seems that the shadow of the new tenant of the White House will loom over the federal campaign like never before. In addition to the choice of prime minister, everything indicates that these elections will serve to test whether one of the golden rules of Canadian politics of the well-known Ottawa political commentator Paul Wells is still valid. That rule says that “for any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.” But that Canadian exception may not be guaranteed in Trump’s new world order. There is a parallel reality in which we have been living for three weeks, and in which boredom seems to be a virtue from another era.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition