This is sad. It's about what we have done to our relationship with Canada.
--Kim
The author is right. He captures the sorrow, the rage, the profound sense of hurt and betrayal on behalf of lifelong best friends who never did a damn thing to us except show up when we needed them, over and over and over -- because in big, frozen, remote country, that's what decency requires of good neighbours.
And he's also wrong. Because no matter how hard Americans vote this November (and it essential that we vote like we've never done it before), this hurt cannot be undone with a mere election. Or a decade of them.
Canada watched us. They've endured bad leaders, and know that sometimes all you can do is gut your way through it. But when -- after two impeachments, Epstein, and even freaking January 6 (!!), not to mention the constant potshots at Canadian sovereignty -- Americans stood up and said: oh hell yeah, that was great, let's have us some more of that...
That was the moment that we lost them. And they're not coming back not while any Canadian who was an adult in this decade is still alive enough to tell the story of this past year.
The thing Americans don't understand about Canada is that Canadian Nice seems limitless...until it ends. And when it ends, the elbows are up, the gloves are off, and there will be blood and corpses on the ice from net to net. Look up Vimy Ridge. Look up the history of the Geneva Conventions (the barbarians they were sanctioning weren't German or Russian; they were Canadian). Ask the Germans, who feared Canadians more than any other troops in WWI, and carried that fear right through WWII. Countries who've found themselves on the wrong side of Canadian patience have usually paid unfathomable prices.
Slow to anger. But much slower to forgive. Canada's spent this past year taking stock of its options and its leverage. It has a superpower's share of both that it's never used. But that, my friends, is about to change -- and America without its first, best ally will be an America permanently diminished.
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Letter to My Fellow Americans: About Canada
We lost our oldest friend on purpose. How we start deserving them back.
Ross Boulton
Jul 14, 2026
I’m an American writer in Baton Rouge. I spent thirty years inside this country’s institutions — utilities, audit agencies, the systems that only work when somebody keeps them honest.
This week a senator asked Canada to be nicer to us. This is my answer, addressed to the right people.
The Letter
A senator from California wrote to Canada this week asking them to be nicer to us.
I read it twice to make sure it was real. Then I got angry, and not at Canada.
Do you know what we did? I’m asking honestly, because most of us don’t. It went by in the noise. Our president called Canada the 51st state. Not once, at a dinner, as a joke. Over and over, from behind the seal of our republic. He looked at a country of 40 million people — a country with its own flag, its own parliament, its own dead from two world wars it entered before we did — and called it a real estate opportunity.
Then we tariffed their steel, and their aluminum too — aluminum we barely make anymore. We shut our own smelters years ago, and then taxed the neighbor who kept our factories running. And he told us Canada would pay those tariffs. That was a lie, and not a complicated one. A tariff is a tax collected at our own ports, paid by our own importers, passed down to us at the register. Canada never wrote a check. We did — on every truck, every beam, every can. He taxed us, and called it punishing them. Then we shook them down over a bridge they built and paid for — his own words: he would not allow it to open until America was “fully compensated” for a bridge that cost us nothing. Then, when they quietly stopped buying our whiskey and stopped driving south, we sent senators to ask why they were being mean.
Nobody has talked to Canada like that in over a hundred years. It took us to do it.
Let me tell you what that border used to be. It was the longest undefended border on earth — our best brag. Not the aircraft carriers. The neighbor who never needed to fear us. My grandfather crossed it to fish. Theirs crossed it to watch a ball game. Nobody checked twice.
In 1979, when our embassy fell in Tehran, six Americans slipped out a back door with nowhere to go. Canadian diplomats hid them in their homes for three months, and Canada’s own cabinet secretly authorized real Canadian passports to smuggle them out — their government put its name on our escape. On September 11th, when our sky closed, a town in Newfoundland smaller than a college campus took in nearly seven thousand of our stranded and fed them for days without asking who would pay. When we went to Afghanistan, they came. They buried a hundred and fifty-eight of their own for our war.
That’s the country our president says shouldn’t exist. That’s the country our senators are scolding.
I’ve walked the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Everybody who’s been to Washington has — it was a park with a famous house in it, and that was the brag too: the most powerful man on earth, and you could stand on his sidewalk. This week they proposed fencing it permanently — Lafayette Square too, the park where we’ve protested every president since Jefferson. There’s already titanium fencing around the new ballroom; he bragged a bulldozer couldn’t knock it over, and there’s a bunker going in six stories beneath it. I saw the photograph of that fence and understood something I’d been avoiding: men do not build compounds against people who love them. And I grew up being told we were the good guys — every movie, every classroom, every Fourth of July. So here is the hardest sentence I have ever had to write. Right now, today, we are the country other countries protect themselves from.
Canada figured that out before most of us would say it. Now let me tell you what their answer looks like, because it isn’t rage. Rage we’d know how to dismiss.
A woman in a liquor store in Sudbury turns a bottle, reads Kentucky on the label, and puts it back. Somewhere in Bardstown, a man who’s filled bottles like it his whole working life watches the orders fall and wonders what he did wrong. The answer is nothing. A family in Mississauga cancels the Florida trip they’d taken for eleven years. The motel in Bangor sits empty. The outlet mall in Buffalo where Ontario plates used to fill the lot every Saturday is asphalt and echoes now. At hockey games, they boo our anthem — and if you knew Canadians, you’d know how much it costs them to be rude on purpose.
Here’s the part I need you to sit with. They aren’t angry at you. Ask any of them — I have — and they say the same thing, almost apologetically, like they’re worried we’ll take it wrong: it’s not the waitress in Bangor, it’s not the vineyard family in Sonoma, it’s him. Our trade representative filed them next to China — “the company they’re running in,” he said, of the people who forged our way out of Tehran. And still they keep separating us from the man behind the seal, more carefully than we ever separated them from anything.
Our oldest friend is boycotting us and apologizing to us at the same time.
It broke something in me.
They watched him threaten Greenland, shake down NATO, send masked agents into our streets — and they still made sure the quarrel was with him, not us. They use a word for him up there that our own senators are afraid of. I’m done being more afraid of the word than the thing. They’re right.
So here’s what I’m asking, and unlike Senator Schiff, I’m asking the people who can actually fix it. Us.
Stop waiting for Canada to get over it. They won’t, and they shouldn’t. The empty shelf isn’t a tantrum. It’s the last polite warning a polite country knows how to give.
And understand what they’re actually asking for, because it was never about wine sales. It’s respect. A sovereign country. An equal. Not the 51st anything.
This November, vote like the border depends on it, because it does. Not just the states that always decide things — all of them, down to the school boards. And if you already vote — you’re not who this paragraph is for. The person you bring with you is. One man is not stopped by one election in one place. He is stopped when a whole country stands up at once and takes Congress out of his hands.
Then make Congress use it. We tried impeachment twice. Seven of them were brave the second time. The rest decided their seats mattered more than their country. Send them home too.
And then let the courts finish it. He broke our laws in the open, daring us to care. So care. Try him. Convict him. Put him where a president who betrays his country belongs — in a cell, for the rest of his life, where he can never again reach across a border he didn’t respect.
Not vengeance. Precedent. Every strongman on earth is watching to see whether America punishes this or forgives it. So is every friend we have left.
Our grandparents crossed an ocean to stop men like him, and Canadians crossed it beside them. All we have to do is cross a parking lot.
And I’ll say the quiet part, because some of us are already whispering it at kitchen tables: what if he doesn’t let November count? Here’s what I know from thirty years of watching systems fail. Rigging works in the dark and in the margins. It cannot survive turnout so large the count is beside the point, and it cannot survive forty million witnesses next door who have already shown they’ll call things by their name. So don’t vote like it’s close. Vote like it’s watched — because it is, from fifty feet across the river.
And when he’s gone — because these men always go, never quietly, and never on their own — I want to be there the day the Canadian plates come back over the Peace Bridge. I want to hear their accents in the motels in Maine again. I want to stand in a bar in Ontario and buy the first round with our whiskey — the day it’s back on their shelf and they’ll take it — and tell them we’re sorry, and mean it.
They spent a hundred years being the best neighbor any country ever had.
It was never them.
It was us. So it’s ours to fix.
If this letter says what you’d say — don’t share it. Write your own. Then send it to your senator, signed.
I keep seeing these hopeful American posts suggesting that all the US has to do is get rid of Trump, and the world will just snap right back to where it was before. And a big part of that is the assumption that Canadians are so nice (and also very dependent on us) that they'll just roll over and smile and all will be forgiven.
No one south of the border seems to understand that that past is gone, and it ain't ever ever ever coming back. Europe, as an ally, is gone. Japan and South Korea are backing away slowly. Australia and Latin America are looking elsewhere, too.
But Canada -- our closest friend, culturally, historically, economically, and geographically -- knows us best. And they were the very first ones to step back -- energetically, decisively, in a way that inspired those other countries to line up behind it. They're at the core of an entirely new global center of economic and political gravity; and once they build that power, they will not be giving it up again.
I feel privileged to have arrived back in Canada the same month it began to write an entirely new century of history for itself. It won't be easy, but people here are recalling and invoking the wartime footing their WWII-era grandparents told them about. They are reaching forward, while the US is still stuck reaching back. That gap is going to become nothing but wider for quite a while to come.
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