Behind trade-war lines

Guest post: A Canadian in New York on the view from there

Kaleigh Rogers is a freelance reporter based in New York. She's covered elections on both sides of the border since 2014, most recently as a reporter for the New York Times. I asked her to write about the landscape of worry on the other side of the looming tariff wall. Here’s the story she sent. — pw

Kaleigh Rogers

Gallup has asked Americans the same question every month or so for the last 24 years: “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” Government leadership, the economy, and immigration frequently top the list of responses. I recently asked Gallup how many respondents, out of the thousands in their February and March surveys, gave an answer that referenced the ongoing Canada/U.S. conflict — spurred by Trump’s trade war and his repeated, and increasingly serious, threats to Canada’s sovereignty.

I didn’t expect the growing tensions to get top billing. But I was still surprised by their answer: one. Precisely one respondent out of a big national sample thought the Canada/US conflict was the most important problem facing their country right now.

I’m writing this dispatch as a Canadian living in the U.S. While the election and the state of Canada-U.S. relations are sucking up all of the oxygen north of the border, the air down here is startlingly different. Our two nations are facing their most significant conflict in a generation, and it can feel as though only one side has noticed.

But there are exceptions. An array of politicians, business leaders, and even podcasters have been speaking out against the trade war and threats of annexation. Polling shows that the ideas behind Trump’s tariff campaign, while perhaps not top-of-mind, are very unpopular among average Americans.

There are Americans who take all of this as seriously as we do. There’s just also a lot of other stuff going on. It can be hard to know what to focus on when there are multiple constitutional crises unfolding.

Certainly, there is a gap in attention between the two countries. The most recent “Tariff Tracker” survey from Leger showed a significant plurality of Canadians, 41 per cent, identified the tariffs, Trump, or U.S. aggression as the most pressing issue facing Canada (inflation was a distant second, with just 18 per cent of Canadians saying that was their top concern).

This is partly because the U.S. is so much bigger than Canada, so Canadians spend a lot more time thinking about their neighbour than they think about us. But there are pockets of Americans who are nearly as invested as your average Canadian in the current state of affairs.

Some of the most vocal have been those who have the strongest economic ties to Canada, such as leaders in the automotive industry. Automobile manufacturing is so intricately intertwined between our two countries, the adage goes, that a car part being manufactured crosses the border five times before it’s complete. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has come out strongly against the tariffs, saying they would “blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we've never seen.” Agricultural industry groups have shared similar fears: American Farm Bureau Federation president Zippy Duvall issued a statement warning that tariffs could create “an economic burden some farmers may not be able to bear,” and other trade groups like the Montana Stockgrowers Association, which represents cattle ranchers, have been lobbying lawmakers for a trade deal.

Even the organization representing Kentucky bourbon producers, faced with the prospect of retaliatory tariffs or having their products stripped from Canadian liquor store shelves, have been raising alarm bells.

But it’s not only those with a financial stake who are fretting about the current state of relations along the 49th parallel. Americans who live close to the border have a front row seat to the chaos, though their responses have varied. For Democratic lawmakers in border states, like Minnesota Governor (and last fall’s vice presidential hopeful) Tim Walz, criticizing the tariffs is a gimme. He sarcastically suggested fabricating a “trade war winner” award to placate Trump.

Republicans in these areas and beyond are in a trickier position, having to thread the needle between their own fears and supporting their party leader. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has said she hopes Trump will “reconsider” the tariffs she worried would hurt Maine’s economy, which is “very integrated with Canada.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson has spent weeks simply repeating that he is “concerned,” and is expressing that concern to the White House. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been leading a lonely crusade to try to get his fellow members of Congress to recognize the economic risk of the tariffs and oppose Trump’s plans, but he hasn’t been finding much support.

The American public, to the extent they are thinking about tariffs, are uneasy about them. In a Guardian US poll from early March, 72 per cent of Americans said they were concerned about the tariffs and while there is a significant partisan divide, a majority of Republicans (52 per cent) said they’re worried, too. The annexation talk is even less popular. A recent Angus Reid poll found 60 percent of Americans had no interest in seeing Canada join the U.S. About a third would be open to the idea, but only if Canadians want to. (They don’t.) Six per cent did say the U.S. should annex Canada using economic and political pressure, but it’s not hard to find 6 per cent of Americans who agree to just about anything. Eight per cent say Bigfoot “definitely” exists. Perhaps even more notably, only 17 per cent of Americans were “closely” following the news of Trump’s talk on annexing Canada — 16 per cent said they weren’t following it at all.

Many Americans are simply baffled by Trump’s newfound fixation on Canada. Even podcaster Joe Rogan, far from Trump’s biggest critic, questioned the conflict, asking “why are we upset at Canada? This is stupid.”

In thinking about this issue, and the different ways people on either side of the border have been reacting, I reached out to a former colleague of mine, Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania (he used to write for FiveThirtyEight, where I worked for four and a half years). Hopkins has done lots of work studying western democracies including Canada, and from his survey findings, he wasn’t altogether surprised at how things have shaken out. In particular, the remarkable unity it has created in Canada was in line with what his research has found.

“Ironically, it may be that Trump has accomplished something that generations of Canadian federalists — including Pierre Elliott Trudeau — were not able to accomplish, which is to build meaningful support in Quebec and elsewhere for a stronger and more robust Canadian identity,” Hopkins told me. “Few things can mobilize people to defend a national identity like an external threat.”