Americans are unhappy with Trump's tariffs. Canadians are furious.
President Donald Trump's decision to impose blanket tariffs on Canadian imports — which went into effect Tuesday — and his increasingly hostile rhetoric toward the U.S.'s northern neighbor have deeply strained the relationship between the two countries. But while the tariffs are unpopular on both sides of the border, the tension between the two nations has been felt most acutely in Canada.
In a recent poll from Ipsos, 11 percent of Canadians ranked the country's relationship with the U.S. as the top issue facing the country, making it the third-most commonly cited issue, ahead of even housing and the economy. In the U.S., it's just been one of many headlines from the Trump administration's first weeks. This lopsided reaction is emblematic of the uneven relationship between the two countries, and may be a preview for how big of an impact the tariffs themselves have on each nation.
"It is, no question, the most important issue right now in Canadian politics," said Will Greaves, a professor of international relations at the University of Victoria and a candidate for Parliament under the Liberal Party banner (Canada is set to hold a federal election this year, possibly as early as this spring).
It's hard to overstate how pervasive the tariff topic, and the "51st state" rhetoric, have become in Canada. A "buy Canadian" movement has swept the nation, with Canadian consumers boycotting U.S. goods and prioritizing buying Canadian-made food and products. Canadians have been canceling trips to the U.S. Companies are attempting to leverage the newfound animosity, with Amazon offering a "Made in Canada" specialized storefront, pizza companies offering "reverse tariff" deals and coffee shops doling out Canadianos instead of Americanos.
In true Canadian fashion, the border tensions have also caused a 25-year-old beer commercial about Canadian pride to gain renewed popularity. Comedy sketches about the trade war have gone viral online. And the heightened rivalry prompted about 1 in 6 Canadians to tune into the championship game of the 4 Nations Face-Off between Team Canada and Team USA — a just-for-fun hockey tournament played in lieu of a National Hockey League All-Star Game. It was the second-most watched hockey game in a decade, which I promise you is a lot, even for Canadians. (Team Canada won the game.)
But the impact goes far beyond playful patriotism — Canadians are furious. A February poll from Canadian pollster Leger found 27 percent of Canadians viewed the U.S. as an "enemy" nation. (By contrast, less than 1 percent of Americans described Canada this way in a poll from another Canadian pollster at the end of January.) As recently as 2020, fewer than 5 percent of Canadians described the U.S. as an enemy. And in a February Ipsos poll, 68 percent of Canadians surveyed said they think less of the U.S. as a country in the face of heightened tensions. Canadian sports fans have even been booing the U.S. national anthem during cross-border games, a decidedly impolite act.
"It takes a lot of doing to mess up the Canada-U.S. relationship, but Trump has managed to pull it off," David Haglund, a political studies professor at Queen's University, said in an email. "It is not just that he has convinced about a quarter of the Canadian public to now regard the U.S. as an enemy, but he has even succeeded in making heretofore pro-Trump Canadians into his sternest critics."
The threats from the White House have also had significant impacts on Canada's politics. In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford took on the self-assigned moniker of "Captain Canada" and called a snap election — which his party won — in response to Trump's tariff threats. The U.S.-Canada relationship played an undeniable role in that race, with Ford's lead in the polls doubling from a 6-point lead to a 12-point lead after Trump announced in February that he was planning to go through with the tariffs. At the federal level, with an election looming, the beleaguered Liberal Party has seen an astonishing rebound in the polls as the Conservative Party failed to take an early, strong stance against the Trump administration.
"It reflects the broad nature of the Canada-U.S. relationship, which is that it's a close, interconnected and interdependent relationship, but it's asymmetrical," Greaves said. "Canada is more dependent on the United States than the United States is on Canada. Canada knows more about the United States than the United States knows about Canada. This is an extension of that same phenomenon."
The imbalanced relationship is evident in the U.S.'s trade deficit with Canada — $63 billion in 2024, though the majority of that is driven by oil and gas imports, which Trump has said would be subject to a lower, 10 percent tariff. Even still, the high level of trade between the two countries (Canada is the U.S.'s second-biggest trading partner, after Mexico) and the fact that so many industries are deeply intertwined across the border mean that a trade war with the U.S. could devastate Canada's economy. And while polls show the majority of Americans don't support tariffs and think they will also hurt U.S. consumers (economists agree), it's simply not as poignant of a threat as it is north of the 49th parallel. And it will take a lot more than cheap pizza and nostalgic beer commercials to weather the storm.
