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When an airplane is crashing, the flight attendants tell you to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. This, as best as I can tell, is why Americans have mostly remained silent while their President has launched a full-scale trade war on Canada, belittled our Prime Minister by calling<\/a> him \u201cGovernor,\u201d and repeatedly threatened to annex<\/a> our country.\u00a0<\/p>\n President Donald Trump\u2019s constant threats toward Canadian sovereignty and his attempt to crush us economically by launching an unnecessary and unjustified trade war have implications that will far outlast his administration. To say that Canadians feel stabbed in the back is a massive understatement. \u201cIt has become very clear,\u201d said<\/a> Canadian Federal Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson in a speech on March 4, \u201cthat we can no longer rely on the Americans in the way that we have in the past. We will never go back to where we were three months ago with our friends in the United States. We will never be able to trust them in the same way that we did before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n President Trump has insisted<\/a> that in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada must strengthen the border to prevent illegal immigration into the United States, as well as make tangible efforts to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. Canada has acted<\/a> on both fronts, spending more than<\/a> a billion dollars on border security since December, as well as appointing a \u201cfentanyl czar<\/a>\u201d to manage the fentanyl crisis. This is a first for us. We don\u2019t have \u201cczars.\u201d We think of that as an American thing. Or a Russian thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Canadians have already begun to drastically change their habits. We are canceling over-the-border shopping trips, with some Canadian snowbirds even going as far as to scrap<\/a> their Florida vacations or sell<\/a> their Arizona homes. Grocery stores now highlight<\/a> Canadian-made products, and it\u2019s not uncommon to see people pulling out their glasses to read the fine print in the fruit and vegetable aisles to make sure the peach or plum they want to buy is from Latin America, rather than the United States. Likewise, provincial liquor stores have begun pulling<\/a> American booze from the shelves. Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford ripped up<\/a> the province\u2019s contract with the American satellite internet company Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Elon Musk\u2019s company SpaceX, and threatened to cut off<\/a> the supply of Canadian electricity to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota should the tariff war last into April.<\/p>\n We now jeer<\/a> \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d before sporting events\u2014I booed it so loud at a hockey game last week that I was too hoarse to sing \u201cO Canada\u201d afterward. I believe our booing may be one of the few things that has led Americans to realize that we\u2019re actually upset about this mess. Canadians have even turned on<\/a> Wayne Gretzky, the Babe Ruth of hockey, who Trump has floated as a potential future governor of the \u201cfifty-first state.\u201d Gretzky, who attended<\/a> Trump\u2019s Inauguration as well as<\/a> his election night party at Mar-a-Lago, is allegedly quite shaken<\/a> by the backlash from his countrymen, but has so far declined every opportunity to comment on the situation. After this long, I\u2019m not sure what he could say to placate us. The Babe would never.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Canadians have a different \u201cWayne\u201d standing up for us on the public stage\u2014two weeks ago, after playing Elon Musk in a guest appearance<\/a> on Saturday Night Live<\/em>, Mike Myers appeared onscreen proudly wearing a \u201cCanada is Not For Sale<\/a>\u201d t-shirt. As the cast waved their goodbyes, the Wayne\u2019s World<\/em> star and SNL<\/em> alum pointed to his left elbow and mouthed \u201celbows up\u201d\u2014a familiar saying to many hockey players, though perhaps unnoticed by most U.S. viewers. \u201cElbows up is a warning to teammates that liberties are being taken with no calls,\u201d wrote hockey journalist Andrew Berkshire on Bluesky<\/a> after the airing. \u201cI think it\u2019s a very apt description of Canadian attitudes towards violence. Elbows up is not an act of aggression, it\u2019s a call to defend yourself, violently. We don\u2019t go seeking it, but if you bring it, you\u2019re taking it in the teeth.\u201d Truly, Mike, we\u2019re not worthy<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Trump officials have been less civil in their approach to the growing rift. Rather than walk the line of diplomacy, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem made a mockery of the previously collaborative relationships between the U.S. and Canada during her visit to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which was established on the border between Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, in 1901. Deborah Bishop, the Haskell\u2019s director, told<\/a> The Boston Globe<\/em> that Noem repeatedly stepped between both sides of the thin line of black tape marking the border on the floor, cheering \u201cU.S.A. number one\u201d on the U.S. side and \u201cthe fifty-first state\u201d on the Canadian side. It may have offended Canadians less if she\u2019d just stuck to her old schtick and shot a dog<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n I recall making the ninety-minute drive to the Haskell from my home in Montreal during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the border was shut down, to see how the two towns were getting by during the pandemic. I made my way to the Opera House, which was closed, only to find two women sitting outside having lunch together\u2014one on the American side of the line, and the other on the Canadian side. All that separated them was a piece of yellow police tape, flapping in the wind.<\/p>\n Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was recently heard<\/a> saying on a hot mic that he believes Trump is serious about his threats to annex Canada. Trump has said publicly<\/a> that he\u2019s serious as well. Canada has long been spared the impact of American imperialism, but that seems to no longer be the case, and we may not find ourselves immune to Trump\u2019s territorial ambitions amid our once-closest ally\u2019s authoritarian descent. The American people are in the middle of a maelstrom, and Canada is just a width of tape\u2019s length away. As Justin Trudeau\u2019s father, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, once told<\/a> former U.S. President Richard Nixon, \u201cLiving next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.\u201d The elephant is twitching and grunting, and no longer friendly. Our elbows are up. Way up.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When an airplane is crashing, the flight attendants tell you to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. This, as best as I can tell, is why Americans have mostly remained silent while their President has launched a full-scale trade war on Canada, belittled our Prime Minister by calling him \u201cGovernor,\u201d and repeatedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":133920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[5784,11012,57872,16930,12795,57873,12715,23788],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-133919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-canada","tag-canadians","tag-dave-kaufman","tag-dispatches","tag-donald-trump","tag-elbows","tag-fed","tag-politics-government"],"yoast_head":"\n