Montreal, Canada – Even before he formally re-entered the White House last month to begin his second term as president of the United States, Donald Trump had repeatedly taken aim at an unlikely target: Canada.
Trump argued his country’s northern neighbour had failed to stem irregular migration and drug trafficking at its border with the US, and he threatened to impose steep tariffs on Canadian imports.
To stave off those measures, which experts say would devastate the Canadian economy, the Republican leader then presented an idea: Canada can — and should — become the 51st US state.
“I think Canada would be much better off being a 51st state,” the US president repeated in a Fox News interview that aired over the weekend, continuing a pressure campaign that initially ramped up in December.
Though the proposal was widely denounced, Trump’s comments — and his continued threat to levy tariffs of 25 percent or higher on Canadian goods, including steel and aluminium imports — have roiled labour unions, politicians and regular people across Canada.
Calls to boycott American products and halt trips to the US are gaining steam, alongside a nationalistic push to rethink Canada’s longstanding reliance on cross-border trade.
The leaders of major Canadian political parties, as well as provincial and territorial premiers, have used harsher-than-usual rhetoric against their country’s top international ally, promising to defend Canada’s economic interests and sovereignty.
“To say it’s a unique moment would be an understatement,” said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, an independent Canadian research firm.
The mood in Canada right now is one of anxiety and apprehension on one hand, and defiance and anger on the other, Kurl explained.
For many, the feeling is that, “Canada did not pick this fight, but if they’re going to take a punch, they’ll try to give one right back”, she said.
‘The Trump effect’
Trump’s repeated threats against Canada come at an already politically charged moment.
The country has been in the grips of a years-long affordability crisis, and soaring grocery prices and housing costs have fuelled increasingly angry rhetoric against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
At the start of the year, Trudeau announced plans to step down once his governing Liberal Party chooses his successor. A new leader and prime minister will be picked in early March, ending nearly a decade of Trudeau-led governments in Ottawa.
The country is also gearing up for a federal election, which must be held before late October.
Yet against that backdrop, Trump’s rhetoric and proposals have become the top political issue in Canada, said Daniel Beland, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
“The most important factor in Canadian politics right now doesn’t live in Canada — it’s Donald Trump,” Beland told Al Jazeera.
Dubbing it “the Trump effect”, the professor said the “ballot question” in the next Canadian election may end up being which political party and leader is best suited to handle the US president and Canada-US relations.
That could effectively change the race, Beland said.
“The national crisis triggered by Trump … really changes the agenda and maybe also changes the perception of what people think is needed for the country at this point and what leader they would like to have.”
Politicians tap into wave of patriotism
Indeed, some polling has suggested that the Trump administration could be among the factors changing how Canadians plan to vote in the upcoming election.
The opposition Conservative Party had enjoyed a commanding, double-digit lead over the unpopular Trudeau-led Liberals until fairly recently.
But with the prime minister shepherding Canada through Trump’s tariff threat, and the Liberal leadership race boosting interest in the party, the dial seems to be shifting.
The Tories’s lead over the Liberals has narrowed to nine percentage points, a recent Leger Marketing survey found.
The same poll found that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney, the ex-Bank of Canada governor who is the frontrunner to take over as the next Liberal leader, were neck-and-neck in terms of who Canadians believed could best handle Trump.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said Poilievre was their preferred choice to manage the Canada-US relationship, compared with 20 percent who chose Carney.
Poilievre finds himself in a difficult position, Beland explained, as a segment of the Conservative Party’s base likes Trump and his policies. Others hope the Conservative leader can stand up to Trump’s bluster.
The right-wing premier of Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta, Danielle Smith, is among those who have taken a more conciliatory approach to Trump. She has rejected any discussions around imposing retaliatory tariffs on Canadian energy exports to the US.
“Danielle Smith is a major conservative figure in Canada, and she’s adopting a soft approach on Trump while [Poilievre] tries to be bolder without alienating his base. It’s not easy for him to navigate,” Beland said.
Meanwhile, poll after poll has shown that Canadians are overwhelmingly rejecting Trump’s push to make Canada the 51st US state. Support for greater sovereignty over trade and infrastructure is also rising across the country.
“Initially, Canadians were somewhat bemused” by Trump’s comments about taking over Canada, Kurl told Al Jazeera in an email.
But now, “Trump’s repetition of annexation plans, combined with all the tariffs, have led Canadians to a more grim place.”
A recent Angus Reid analysis found that the proportion of Canadians saying they are “very proud” of their country jumped by 10 percentage points — from 34 to 44 percent — between December and February.
The percentage of people who said they want Canada to join the US also dropped from 6 to 4 percent. “Almost every politician of every political stripe has been trying to tap into” that patriotic sentiment, Kurl said.
‘Thinking about US all the time’
That includes Doug Ford, the right-wing premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, which is holding a provincial election later this month.
Ford has made pushing back against Trump’s tariffs a central pillar of his re-election campaign.
He and the other leaders of all of Canada’s provinces and territories travelled to Washington, DC, on Wednesday to defend their interests and promote Canada-US trade ties. “This is the first time 13 premiers have showed up to Washington,” Ford told reporters.
“We’re their largest trading partner,” he said of the US. Imports and exports of goods between the two countries totalled more than $700bn (more than 1 trillion Canadian dollars) last year, according to Canadian government figures.
“We’re their number-one customer. I’m not too sure if they fully understand the impact [of tariffs] on both countries, both sides of the border,” Ford added.
That’s the same message Trudeau and his government have been promoting since Trump first threatened to slap tariffs on Canada shortly after he won re-election in November of last year.
The country earned a reprieve last week when the US president agreed to pause 25-percent tariffs on all Canadian goods and 10-percent tariffs on Canadian oil for 30 days, until early March.
But the threat still looms, and a new US push to impose tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports on March 12 has spurred new concerns.
“It’s important to understand that Canada will respond as appropriate, in a calibrated but extremely strong way, regardless of what the United States moves forward with,” Trudeau told reporters during a visit to Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday.
Whatever happens, Beland at McGill University said it’s clear that Canadian politics will be heavily influenced in the weeks and months ahead by Trump and his administration.
“Most Americans don’t think about Canada very often,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But right now, Canadians are thinking about [the US] all the time and are fed up with it — but don’t have much of a choice.”
