Trump Destroyed America’s Relationship with Canada
The international partnership may never recover.
Living on the other side of the longest undefended border in the world from their superpower neighbor has created a paradox in Canadians’ national identity. Canadians are not Americans. They are different in ways that are central to their sense of who they are. At the same time, the two countries’ respective cultures, sports, music, movies, television, literature, economies, and militaries are so integrated as to be inseparable. For longer than living memory, Canadians have seen the U.S. as more than the closest of allies. America has been Canada’s closest partner and friend.
Donald Trump has destroyed that in less than two months.
The president has declared an economic war on Canada that is savage enough to cripple its economy. His tariff threats have created economic uncertainty and shaken the Canadian economy. On March 5, Trump made good on his threats, imposing 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada, before carving out major exceptions. Because Canada trusted its partnership with the U.S. and had made it by far its largest trading partner, accounting for 77 percent of all exports, even the reduced levies are significant enough to damage the Canadian economy.
Trump’s stated reason for the aggressive policy is to compel Canada to tighten border security to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States. Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Melanie Joly, called that justification a “bogus argument.” And the data supports her assertion. Canada accounts for only 0.2 percent of the fentanyl that enters the United States. Nonetheless, Canada was determined to work with the Trump administration, implementing a “$1.3 billion border plan” and appointing a fentanyl czar. Trump demanded results, and the Canadian response gave him the results he sought. On March 3, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reported that “fentanyl seizures from Canada have dropped 97 percent between December 2024 and January 2025.” For whatever reason, that wasn’t enough for Trump.
While Trudeau has been willing to cooperate on fentanyl, he said last week that the true reason Trump is weaponizing trade is to cause “a total collapse of the Canadian economy” and thus “make it easier to annex us.” On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that “Canada should honestly become our 51st state…. We wouldn’t have a tariff problem…. Canada would be great as our cherished 51st state…. When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was drawn with a ruler.” On social media the same day, Trump again said, “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear.’’
Trump had hinted that he wanted to seize Canada even before taking office for a second term. On January 7, Trump threatened to use “economic force” to “get rid of that artificially drawn line” between Canada and the United States. “What I’d like to see,” Trump said, “is Canada become our 51st state.”
In February, thinking the mics were off, Trudeau was heard telling a group of business and union leaders that Trump keeps talking about “making us the 51st state” because the White House “know[s] how many critical minerals we have…. They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those. But Mr. Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that is absorbing our country, and it is a real thing.”
It would be easy to dismiss the prime minister’s seemingly incredible suggestion of what the American president was thinking if U.S. officials hadn’t said that this is exactly what the president is thinking. On March 7, the New York Times reported that, during two phone calls between Trump and Trudeau on February 3, much more was discussed than fentanyl. Four people “with firsthand knowledge” of the phone calls revealed to the Times that Trump told Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”
The Times reports that, in yet another phone call, soon-to-be-confirmed Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick told the Canadian Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc that Trump “had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.” Trump, he informed the Canadians, “was interested in doing just that.” He wanted to revise the 1908 United States-Canada boundary treaty, and he wanted to exit the treaties with Canada on how the two countries share and manage the Great Lakes and rivers.
The damage that Trump has done to the U.S.-Canada relationship seems, for now, to be irreparable, judging by the comments of Trudeau’s successor. In his acceptance speech after being selected as the leader of Canada’s governing Liberal Party, Marc Carney, called the United States “a country we can no longer trust.” He more than once expressed the need “to create new trading relationships with reliable partners”—implying that America was no longer on the list.
The number of Canadians who view the U.S. favorably is plummeting. A recent poll found that 27 percent of Canadians now see the U.S. as an enemy—a stat that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. Despite Trump’s claim that “many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State,” the most recent polling shows that only nine percent of Canadians approve the idea.
No one can know for sure whether Trump is merely employing the bullying tactics that seem to be the first negotiating tool he reaches for or whether he is serious about crippling the Canadian economy to facilitate the seizing of Canadian territory. What cannot be denied is the sad reality that one of the closest and most envied relationships in the international community now lies in rubble.
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