Operating from a tiny converted garage on the fringe of Toronto’s Junction Triangle district, Gram’s Pizza was until recently considered largely a local secret, best known for its “Hot Hawaiian” and generously sized $5 slices. Lately, though, Gram’s owner, Graham Palmateer, has made waves far beyond his neighbourhood with his one-man protest against US President Donald Trump, who has sparked a trade war between the United States and Canada and, apparently in all seriousness, is intent on Canada becoming the 51st US state.

Canadians such as Palmateer are rightly perturbed. He’s trying to rid his business of all US-sourced ingredients, ditching his Italian-style Californian tomatoes and his favourite Ohio-sourced pepperoni and replacing Coca-Cola with a range of soft drinks from a Canadian outfit. “You might notice my fridges and shelves looking a little different for the next little while,” he posted on the pizza shop’s Instagram account. “I’m voting with my dollar. I know, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I’ll sleep better.” Palmateer’s stand has resonated widely. Media interest has been so intense, he tells us, that he’s had to pause interviews for now and get on with making pizza.

Since Trump began threatening to use “economic force” on a (formerly) highly valued trading partner, Canadian nationalism has swept the country. “An unfamiliar emotion has been brewing in normally polite Canada,” wrote CNN. “Anger.” From his home in Toronto, history professor Robert Bothwell tells us: “The generally accepted habit that the US was just a southward extension of our own country where we could travel, visit and buy, almost at will, has been severely challenged.”

Is Canada truly imperilled? Why has its relationship with the US turned so sour? Are there lessons for Australia?

Is Canada really like a wintry Australia?

Talk about deja vu. There’s an election coming up that’s expected to be a close-run thing. A housing crisis, the cost of living, immigration and the plight of remote indigenous communities are all major issues both in Australia and in Canada, which goes to the polls on April 28. We have much in common. Toronto, a waterfront city with an ethnically diverse population, is often likened to Melbourne; harbourside Vancouver to Sydney (a recent advertising campaign urged Australians to start treating Vancouver as Sydney’s “cool Canadian friend”).

“Australia is the only country I’ve ever been to where the moment I stepped foot on Australian soil, I felt unconditionally comfortable and at home,” says Paul Maddison, who was Canada’s high commissioner to Australia from August 2015 until May 2019 (he also served as a commander in the Canadian navy and has lived in the US and Britain). “It’s a strange feeling,” he tells us. “And Australians sometimes say the same thing about Canada.” Canadians, meanwhile, are keen to not be mistaken for Americans, says Grant Wyeth, an Australian political analyst who lived for a time in largely French-speaking Montreal. “You have the case of the Canadian backpacker that always has the Canadian flag on their backpack, just to make sure that they are never recognised as Americans.”

Both nations are former British colonies and, while now similarly independent, retain ties to the mother country through our shared head of state, King Charles III, and his representatives, the governors-general. “The health systems, the organisation of education, management of emergencies, policing and support for culture are certainly comparable and intelligible between Canada and Australia,” says Alan Lawson, an expert on post-colonialism with the University of Queensland. Though he notes while both were British colonies, “Canada was established a century or so earlier so it came out of a different set of English philosophical and political belief systems”.

Another point of difference is that parts of Canada actively maintain cultural and linguistic ties to their French origins. France settled part of what is now Canada’s eastern seaboard from the 1500s, ceding it to the British in 1763 after a seven-year war between the two nations. Today, the province of Quebec remains majority French-speaking. In its largest city, Montreal, 70 per cent of residents speak French as a first language at home, and restaurants channel old-school Parisian bistros with their mirrored walls and steak frites.

Pride in Quebec’s French origins surged during the province’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a period of parochial-driven progress that particularly improved the lot of its native Francophones. It also emboldened an independence movement that has twice sought to have the province secede from the rest of Canada. Quebec’s most recent independence referendum, in 1995, failed by just a whisker, 49.42 per cent voting “yes”. (Legally, Quebec cannot simply decide to secede unilaterally, but a clear poll result could be used to change Canada’s Constitution to allow the move to take place.) There are also simmering independence movements in other provinces, including Alberta, which borders the US and produces much of Canada’s oil, and its similarly landlocked neighbour, Saskatchewan, driven by friction with Canada’s east-coast elites in the capital, Ottawa, and in Toronto, the nation’s largest city.

As in Australia, Canada has faced a reckoning in recent years over its historic treatment of its Indigenous population. One particularly insidious scheme that began in the 1880s, with echoes of Australia’s stolen generations, took some 150,000 Indigenous children far from home to live in residential schools designed to erase their culture and heritage. Thousands died while in care, often from outbreaks of disease, and were buried in situ. The Canadian government’s Indian Residential Settlement Agreement of 2007 contained an apology to the communities and provided for financial reparations to survivors. A year later, it launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to gather survivor stories. Work also continues in a search for forgotten graves. Today, the Canadian Constitution recognises three distinct groups of Indigenous peoples: First Nations, Inuit and Metis, who between them comprise about 5 per cent of Canada’s population of 40 million.

When (and why) did a US-Canada border go up?

People arrived in icy Canada between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago and hunted whales, seals, a two-metre-long beaver and, on the west coast, salmon. Vikings visited in the 10th century, encountering fierce resistance from peoples they called “the Skraelings”, as Bothwell writes in The Penguin History of Canada. Around the 16th century, great schools of cod in the northern Atlantic drew the first major waves of Europeans to Newfoundland and Labrador, initially from Portugal, Spain and France, countries where salted cod (baccala) remains a delicacy today.

‘While the main border crossings in populated areas are quite formal, some back roads in rural areas on the prairies have been effectively open.’

Alan Lawson, emeritus professor with the University of Queensland

Had America not won the War of Independence against the British in 1783, perhaps the whole of North America would have been combined into a single entity, eventually. As it was, the Canadian colonies remained in British hands, officially becoming a modern state in 1867 and expanding over the next 82 years to incorporate other territories including, most recently, the British dominion of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949.

The border with the US was first drawn up in 1783 but was something of a moveable feast until 1908, when a new treaty resolved some fine detail (such as exactly where it ran through bodies of water). It was further refined in 1925. Today, it’s the world’s longest, at 8891 kilometres (including 2475 kilometres with Alaska), some of it staffed, much of it not. “The Canada-US borders have always been pretty porous,” says Alan Lawson, an emeritus professor with the University of Queensland. “While the main border crossings in populated areas are quite formal, some back roads in rural areas on the prairies have been effectively open.”

How is Trump threatening Canada?

“I don’t think a day has gone by since the Trump presidency began that we haven’t talked about it,” says Aashim Aggarwal, a Canadian food writer and content creator based in Toronto. “I never thought that our sovereignty would be questioned by supposedly a strong ally of ours.” His unique response to the recent uncertainty has been to promote Canadian cuisine, eating and posting about a particularly Canadian dish every day for 20 days, starting with poutine, the iconic concoction of fries, gravy and cheesy curds – “salty, savoury and comforting”.

More widely, consumers are now urged to “buy Canadian”, bottleshops have stripped shelves of US bourbon, and sales of maple leaf flags have spiked. Ice hockey fans have booed the US national anthem and promised to resist Trump’s overtures with their “elbows up”, a notorious defensive technique used on the rink. In March, more than 80 Tesla cars were vandalised at a dealership in an apparent protest aimed at Trump ally Elon Musk.

Trump first made regular comments about the US taking over his northern neighbour in December, though back then nobody paid too much attention. “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State,” Trump posted on social media (defying polling that suggested the complete opposite). “They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!” In early January, he was at it again. “If Canada merged with the US, there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them. Together, what a great Nation it would be!!!”

As with Trump’s designs on Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone, many believed these were thought bubbles he would soon forget. But as time passed, it seemed more likely that he really meant what he said. High-placed anonymous sources revealed to The New York Times that Trump had raised several grievances on calls with the-then Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, including “Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.” Trump also reportedly said he did not believe the border demarcation between the two countries was valid and that he wanted to revise it.

Trudeau took Trump seriously, telling a business conference he thought the president’s bluster was “a real thing”. Then, in his final comments before stepping down on March 18, Trudeau made the extraordinary claim that Trump wanted “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us”. Other prominent Canadians have since echoed his concerns. “This is not a joke any more,” Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told the BBC. New Prime Minister Mark Carney said the US was no longer a reliable partner and warned: “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation is over.”

‘Comments about Canada being unable to provide for its own economic or national security without the US ... You can’t help but take it seriously.’

Paul Maddison, former Canadian high commissioner to Australia

If people took care to listen, says Paul Maddison, Trump’s messages have been consistent, day in and day out – “around annexation, around the 51st state, around the border between Canada and the United States. Comments about Canada being unable to provide for its own economic or national security without the United States, and therefore not having sovereign agency as a nation state. You can’t help but take it seriously.” Bottom line, he says: Canada is facing an existential crisis.

What tariffs did Trump impose on Canada?

In February, Trump announced widespread tariffs on Canada and Mexico in what he said was an effort to make them take more responsibility for the trade of drugs and illegal immigrants across their borders into the US. He did this by declaring a national emergency. Trump then paused the tariffs for a month, then briefly reinstated them, then paused them again for another month. On “Liberation Day”, April 2, when Trump revealed new worldwide tariff rates, Canada and Mexico were not included on the list. Confused yet?

We do know that, despite all the talk about tariffs, many goods exported from Canada into the US remain exempt from duty under a free-trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico that dates back to 2020 (which Trump signed). However, Canada remains caught in umbrella tariffs that apply to steel and aluminium (a $50 billion annual export to the US) and on vehicles. The latter will be particularly difficult to calculate given that vehicle components might go back and forth across the border many times during their evolution into becoming a complete car, so integrated is the North American automobile manufacturing sector. Says Maddison: “It’s going to be carnage.”

Pizza maker Graham Palmateer has experienced just how difficult it actually is to completely extricate a business from the US economy. “I have to accept that a complete divorce from American goods isn’t possible,” he wrote in the Canadian news journal, Macleans. “Canadian-owned and locally produced kitchen supplies, like paper towels and plates, have been surprisingly hard to find, and the source-tracing rabbit hole deepens quickly. Where were the trees that go into the paper grown? What company produces the packaging? For example, I’ve begun buying lemon juice from a Canadian company, but it’s possible the lemons were grown in the US because we definitely don’t farm them here.”

‘It’s really down to who can sustain the pain the longest. And Trump has kind of made it existential for Canada.’

Grant Wyeth, political analyst

With Trump running hot then cold, a spooked Canada prepared for war. In March, it slapped its own 25 per cent tariffs on a range of goods imported from the US that included everything from umbrellas to table-tennis tables and scrap metal. In Quebec and Ontario, provinces where the regional governments control the supply of hard liquor, US whiskeys and bourbons were pulled off shelves. “Trade wars are wars of attrition,” says political analyst Grant Wyeth. “It’s really down to who can sustain the pain the longest. And Trump has kind of made it existential for Canada. So Canadians will be willing to tolerate a lot if the next best option is annexation.”

Canadians fond of visiting the US (and who make up the biggest group of visitors there) have rethought their travel plans. Road trips are down almost a quarter, according to Statistics Canada, and airlines have begun reducing the number of flights across the border due to relaxed demand. The Canadian government has paid for billboards across the US that read: “Tariffs are a tax on groceries. Tariffs are a tax at the gas pump. Tariffs are a tax on hardworking Americans.”

All told, some 75 per cent of Canada’s exports are usually destined for the US, with a total of about $4.4 billion in trade between the two nations – daily. “It is overwhelmingly the wealthiest border in the world,” says Wyeth. “To disrupt that is pure lunacy looking at the scale of just how integrated the two economies are.” Robert Bothwell, who has written more than 20 books about Canadian history, describes the current situation as “dreadful”.

Could Trump actually annex another country?

It has happened in the past. In 1848, the US ended the Mexican-American War with a treaty that allowed it to annex territory that became the modern-day states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. The US annexed Hawaii in 1898 after manufacturing a coup against the lawful monarch, Queen Liliuokalani. It bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and what are now called the US Virgin Islands from a cash-strapped Denmark in 1917, and has tried unsuccessfully several times to buy Greenland (just 26 kilometres from Canada’s Ellesmere Island). It’s attempted to invade Canada before, in 1775 and 1812, when it was roundly sent packing. At the Battle of Chateauguay, some 1530 Canadian-British forces comprising a ragtag army of regular soldiers, volunteers, militia and Mohawk fighters repelled a much larger force of US regular army troops that had planned to march on Montreal.

It seems unlikely that American troops might cross the border now, not least because Canada is a member of NATO, whose other member nations would be compelled to come to its aid (as they would in the case of a US force invading Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark). Nor would the Canadians necessarily prove easy pickings. “It is not a good idea to invade Canada,” writes Elliot Cohen, a former counsellor to the US State Department, in The Atlantic. “Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals – the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes – with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.”

‘Trump has unified Canada perhaps more than any Canadian PM has managed to do.’

Alan Lawson, emeritus professor with the University of Queensland

A March poll found 90 per cent of Canadians were opposed to the idea of joining the US. “I don’t think I’ve felt this level of personal pride in being Canadian and also this broader level of unity amongst Canadians since the 2010 Winter Olympics,” says Aashim Aggarwal (that was when Canada’s ice-hockey team scored in extra time to beat the US to win gold). Indeed, say the observers we spoke with, Donald Trump has succeeded in uniting a nation against him. “In response to the recent Trumpian provocations,” says Alan Lawson, “Canada is probably more unified and nationalistic than ever before. Even Quebecois who have long quite energetically distinguished themselves from the maudits anglaises [damn English], are buying Canadian. Trump has unified Canada perhaps more than any Canadian PM has managed to do.”

In Ottawa (chosen as the capital by Queen Victoria in 1857 after local politicians failed to agree), Trump’s threats have already had a silver lining for Canada’s Liberal Party, which had been heading for an electoral wipeout on April 28 at the hands of the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party. Now, though, the race has flipped. The Liberals have a new leader in Mark Carney (after the increasingly unpopular Trudeau stepped down) and are now ahead in the polls as voters weigh up the benefits of change against stability in uncertain times.

And there’s still a possibility that the countries affected by Trump’s tariffs might somehow still thrive – by directing their trade efforts and strategic alliances elsewhere. “America’s now shut-out trade partners ought to focus on expediting free trade initiatives among themselves,” says the Financial Times. “After all, the US accounts for just 13 per cent of global goods imports … The whole world will suffer, but it need not follow America’s path.” Australian wine might find a bigger market in Canada, for example, from bottle shops that have boycotted US wine. Canada is the most important export market for US producers, worth about $1.6 billion a year.

Meanwhile, Australia has just signed a $6.5 billion contract to sell Canada an “over-the-horizon” radar system for deployment in the Arctic – “a huge deal”, says Paul Maddison, who provides advisory services for defence companies. “It shows that there’s a desire in Canberra and Ottawa to build greater levels of strategic trust. You know, in an increasingly disrupted world you really need to know who your friends are.”

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