The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
I grew up boating and driving freely across the longest undefended border in the world, between the US and Canada. My American grandmother bootlegged booze across that border during the Prohibition era in the US, propping up my infant father on cases of Canadian liquor as a decoy, to supply my granddad’s illegal Detroit speakeasy. During the Vietnam war, my older brother planned to flee to Windsor, Ontario, if drafted into the US military.
Now Donald Trump appears intent on building a wall of tariffs and insults and fear between two old friends — Detroit and Windsor — which snuggle about a mile apart, joined by a tunnel and bridge across the border. He threatened (now suspended) 25 per cent US tariffs on imports from Canada, is taunting America’s neighbour with threats of annexation as the “51st state” and regularly insults its prime minister by referring to him as “Governor”. Trump said on Monday that he will go ahead with tariffs against Canada next week as planned.
Tempers are inflamed on both sides, with hockey players brawling and fans booing each other’s national anthems during recent championship games. At last week’s final, which Canada won, the words of “O Canada” were changed to protest Trump’s 51st state threats. Some Canadians are boycotting US goods, US liquor was briefly pulled from Canadian shelves (and replaced when tariffs were postponed) and some Canadians are cancelling US travel.
Trump’s actions “have really touched a nerve among Canadians, and we’re seeing the most un-Canadian of responses, a sort of raw fury. I’ve never seen this level of what feels like pure hatred,” Edward Alden, an expert on US-Canadian relations at the US Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of a new book on the future of borders, told me.
Furious at the tariff threats, Windsor mayor Drew Dilkens struck at the heart of the Detroit-Windsor relationship by vetoing funding for the tunnel bus, used by about 40,000 people a year, mostly Canadians commuting to the US. “While our relationship with Detroit is vital, I cannot in good faith ask Windsor taxpayers to subsidize transit to a country threatening our livelihoods through tariffs,” he wrote on X.
Detroit and Windsor have such integrated supply chains that “it really is hard to say that a car that rolls off the finish line in Detroit or in Windsor was made in either country, because the parts that go into that production . . . have crossed the border on average six or seven times”, he said. Tariffs could be near “catastrophic” for both economies.
Detroit-Windsor is the busiest freight crossing between the US and Canada, according to US Department of Transportation figures. “Our businesses really function as North American units, our economies are just so interlinked,” Beth Burke, chief executive of the Canadian American Business Council, tells me. Jim Farley, Ford CEO, has said tariffs could “blow a hole” in the US auto industry.
But one frigid rush hour morning on the tunnel bus last week, commuters were mostly sanguine about future relations. Canadian Harvey Searle, 70, travelling to work at his brother’s roofing company in the US, brushes off “51st state” taunts. “It’s just the reality, we already are the 51st state,” he tells me, adding that threats of tariffs are “just talk”. The bus driver and another passenger concur.
When we reach Detroit, US border agents search our bus — a reminder that fentanyl smuggling was Trump’s cited justification for tariffs. Never mind that only six pounds of fentanyl was seized last year, minuscule compared with the 18,200 pounds seized at the Mexican border.
As US president, John F Kennedy beautifully captured the essence of this relationship in an address to the Canadian parliament in 1961: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder”.
If his words are ignored now, none will pay a higher price than Windsor and Detroit: friends for decades across a frontier that hardly seemed to exist, unwilling enemies now in a border fight that promises only losers.
