One quick question: Is the relationship between the U.S. and Canada permanently broken?
The once warm relationship between the U.S. and Canada is at its chilliest point in decades, but what does the future hold?
We asked Ted Alden, the Ross Distinguished Professor of Canada-United States Business and Economic Relations, whether the “children of a common mother” can come back from the current hostilities.
“The U.S.-Canadian relationship has been fraught the last year and a half with harsh political rhetoric and economic tensions. But are there signs that the bilateral relationship is permanently changing?”
Most foreign policy issues require nuanced answers and caveats rather than a clear response. Not this one: The answer is “yes,” the relationship has permanently changed.
To recognize why, one needs to know a little bit of Canadian history. Canada was created in defiance of continental geography that screamed for some sort of unification with the United States; all the natural trade and settlement routes ran north-south, not east-west. But the people of what became Canada – the remnants of the French North American empire, British loyalists who fled north after the Revolutionary War, and the Indigenous population – wanted nothing to do with the Americans.
Canada was nominally created in 1867 by an act of the British Parliament, but on the ground it was created by the railway built through the Canadian Rockies to Vancouver. The line was placed as far south as possible, through a more rugged part of the mountains, precisely to discourage American territorial claims, which continued well into the 19th century.
It took more than a century for Canada to relax its deep-seated distrust of the United States. Canadians roundly defeated a government in 1911 that had proposed free trade with the Americans. But by the 1980s, with nearly 80 percent of Canadian exports going south to a market 10 times as large, the country decided in a narrow election that life would be better inside the American economic tent. The 1989 U.S.-Canada free trade agreement and several that followed created a truly continental market. The auto industry is the best example: Factories were built across the border based on solemn promises from both governments of tariff-free trade in vehicles and parts.
"It is impossible then to overstate how betrayed Canadians now feel by the United States".
It is impossible then to overstate how betrayed Canadians now feel by the United States. Canada has every reason to fear U.S. domination – just look at the torrent of American content Canadians watch, hear and read every day – but the country rose above that fear because Ronald Reagan and presidents that followed had committed to a legally binding trade partnership. Donald Trump shattered that promise.
Canada has not just been one of dozens of countries targeted by Trump’s trade tantrums; it has been singled out for harsh treatment. Along with Mexico, it was the first hit with tariffs in 2025 on flimsy allegations of fentanyl being smuggled across the border. Most recently, the U.S. imposed 50 percent tariffs on billions in Canadian imports based on a 1930 law that had never been used by a president for tariffs.
Trump has added crude insults to those injuries: calling for Canada to become “the 51st state,” referring to its leaders as “governor,” and unilaterally renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” (“Ontario” comes from an Iroquois word meaning “shining waters,” and the name dates back at least to the middle of the 17th century,)
The realities of geography will keep the two countries closely linked whether they like it or not. But Canada’s leader Mark Carney is spending all his time courting new trade and security partners around the world and working to develop new Canadian resources and industries that will reduce dependence on the United States. More than a year ago he declared the close relationship with the U.S. to be “over,” and things have only got worse from there.
Here in Bellingham and in other communities along the U.S.-Canada border, it is vital that everything be done to temper the damage and maintain cross-border cooperation. A new Congress next year and a new president in 2029 might help a bit. But the U.S.-Canada relationship, sadly, has been forever changed.
Mary Gallagher covers Western’s interdisciplinary centers and College of Humanities and Social Sciences and interdisciplinary centers for WWU Communications and edits Western Today and Window magazine. Email her story ideas at mary.gallagher@wwu.edu.