I am one such American. Hello! Bonjour! I am planning to visit Montreal over Labor Day weekend…and have begun to fear that my New York plates might provoke some patriotic ne’er-do-well to key my car.
As someone who grew up on the Canadian border, with Canadian friends and Canadian radio stations and Canadian flags on most every pole, the notion that I might be newly unwelcome — or, quelle horreur, despised — in Canada is a new and unpleasant one.
Not to fear, said my colleague Zack Beauchamp. (Zack lives 90 minutes northwest of me in Ontario, and is Vox’s go-to expert on Canadian concerns.) Most Canadians “are actually quite chill toward individual Americans,” he said, and he therefore rates it “unlikely” that anyone will vandalize my vehicle.
At the same time, Zack said, most Americans fail to realize how dramatically, and perhaps permanently, Canadians have turned on the US as a country. To many of us, the trade war is a tedious or incomprehensible policy dispute. To Canadians, it’s seen as a real threat to their sovereignty.
Zack shared this example from his own family, which — existential stakes notwithstanding — kind of cracked me up. His wife, who is Canadian, is participating in a popular boycott movement and has “shifted literally everything she purchases” to avoid American products.
That includes buying terrible Canadian-made dishwasher pods whose wrapping doesn’t dissolve in the machine. Or purchasing him a deodorant from the puzzlingly named brand Green Beaver, which is “somewhat worse at repelling smell,” Zack said.
“Whenever I ask her about why she does these things, she points to those World War II posters about reducing gas use — carpooling so you aren’t riding with Hitler,” Zack said. “Because that is literally how Canadians think about these things: as a war for their survival.”
The rupture is existential for Americans, too, I think — albeit in a different and less urgent way. It has to do with what American identity represents in the world today.
That’s more abstract than something like the cost of a car (which, by the way, will likely rise dramatically if Trump implements the tariffs he threatened this morning on Truth Social). But the way the world sees America also matters.
