The Scotland-born historian Niall Ferguson, who’s now at Stanford, has written numerous acclaimed books and is a fixture on the global lecture and interview circuit. He’s always been a conservative, but, to my mind, a Burkean one. Now he’s an avid fan and booster of President Donald Trump.
In a recent piece on Trump’s address to the Davos conference, Ferguson gushed that he’d “never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous and the self-important.”
Ferguson’s right about Trump’s performance, but not for the reasons he intended.
Trump’s audience sat through his free-association-filled speech that lasted more than an hour—an encomium, as always, to himself.
Trump touted his greatness by bragging again about, among other things, the eight wars he’s supposedly settled during his current term, his landslide victory over Kamala Harris, and his unprecedentedly successful economic policies. To this, he added insulting, ungracious comments about Europe and claims that didn’t square with the facts.
So, yes, Trump commanded the room—but only because his listeners were stunned by the tone and substance of what they heard. Their muted, polite applause said it all.
What does Trump’s Davos speech have to do with the relationship between Canada and the US? Plenty. It was yet another indication of how this administration has created a rift between the United States and a friendly neighboring country bound to it by historical, economic, political, cultural, and military ties.
The drama at Davos followed a speech delivered by Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister and the one-time governor of both the British and Canadian central banks.
Carney’s address was a sharp contrast to Trump’s. Cerebral, self-effacing, soft-spoken, the Canadian leader warned that “middle powers” like Canada were facing an increasing threat of domination by global “hegemons.” He urged them to unite so that they would, as he put it, have a seat at the table instead of ending up on the menu.
Carney received standing applause from the economic and political elite gathered at Davos, and his speech figured prominently in press coverage of the conference.
That acclaim didn’t sit well with Trump, who loathes praise that’s directed at anyone other than himself. He reacted to Carney’s speech with the taunt that Canada owed its survival to the United States and might not even exist but for that blessing. The prime minister, Trump warned, had better keep that in mind the next time he addressed a gathering. Unruffled, Carney replied that Canada’s success owed to its own efforts.
Things didn’t end there. After Canada signed a trade deal—one that Trump had previously praised—that reduced tariffs on Chinese electric car exports to Canada from 100% to 6.1% (with a limit of 49,000 such automobiles, increasing to 70,000 over five years) in exchange for China slashing its tariffs on certain Canadian food products, Trump went ballistic.
Even though Canada hadn’t signed anything resembling a free trade agreement with China, Trump threatened a 100% tariff increase on all Canadian exports to the United States and accused Carney of enabling China to use the US as a dumping ground for its goods. Carney, who knows a thing or two about global trade, must have been mystified.
Not one to relent, Trump, who has called Canada America’s 51st state, addressed the prime minister as “Governor” Carney, just as he had Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, having recently echoed his boss’s claim to Greenland, weighed in with a callfor the resource-rich province of Alberta to break away from Canada and join the United States.
Carney was hardly spoiling for a fight. In his early months as prime minister, he courted Trump, and the two seemed to get along well, no matter that a month before Carney took office, Trump increased tariffs on Canada to 25% and, after he was sworn in, to 35%.
What we’re seeing reflects something much bigger and more consequential than a clash of personalities. The larger story is that Trump has increasingly alienated Canada from the United States.
The significance of this dismaying change can only be appreciated by considering the closeness (geographical and attitudinal) between Canada and the US and the many ties that have bound them together.
To begin with, there’s the long history of the two countries’ peaceful relationship. They haven’t had an armed conflict since the War of 1812. And back then, Canada was a British colony: the United States was fighting Britain because the Royal Navy was disrupting American trade by seizing US merchant ships carrying goods to Napoleonic France, with which the British were then at war.
Since Canada went from being a self-governing British colony in 1867 to full-fledged independence in 1931, its relationship with the United States has been entirely peaceful. The two countries share a 5,525-mile border, the world’s longest undefended border. Imagine if our northern neighbor were a hostile state.
Moreover, during World War II, Canada helped defeat Germany and Japan and then joined NATO once the alliance was created in April 1949. More recently, Canadian troops fought alongside Americans in Afghanistan and served in non-combat roles—medical, logistics, and training—in Iraq.
As for cultural kinship, Canadian and American cuisine have many similarities. Americans and Canadians both love baseball and ice hockey. Americans and English-speaking Canadians share a common language, and though the accents differ, Canadians, proud of their identity, are—much to their annoyance—sometimes even mistaken for Americans when they travel abroad.
Americans, for their part, have been known to pose as Canadians when US wars—such as those in Vietnam and Iraq—have made their country unpopular abroad. Nowadays, some are taking refuge in identity appropriation once again.
The economic ties between the US and Canada are no less tight. Canada is second only to Mexico as a trade partner of the United States. During the first nine months of last year, nearly 13% of American global trade was conducted with Canada versus 15.6% with Mexico, a fraction that in monetary terms totaled $607 billion. To put the latter figure in perspective, trade with China, which occupied third place, was worth $357 billion.
Canada is equally important when it comes to foreign direct investment—inflows involving production, ownership, and management rather than stocks and bonds—into the US. The cumulative sum through 2024 was $812 billion, second only to Japan, which invested $819 billion. Canada didn’t make the list of top five destinations for cumulative US FDI that year; still, the total was just shy of $460 billion—hardly chump change.
My point is not that all of these connections are now at risk of unraveling, let alone that Canada is becoming an enemy of the United States. Neither outcome is even remotely possible. Still, there are unmistakable signs that Canadian goodwill toward the United States has decreased during Trump’s second term—for all of the reasons noted above.
One indication is a rise in Canadians’ disapproval toward the United States. Last spring, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll to gauge Canadian sentiment toward the US. Here’s how Pew summed up its findings: “Nearly two-thirds of Canadians (64%) have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S., including 39% who have a very unfavorable view. This is the highest percentage of Canadians with a very unfavorable view of the U.S. in surveys dating back to 2002.”
Another sign of Canadians’ increasing negativity toward the United States is the fall-off in tourism from Canada. The most common mode of Canadian travel to the US is by car. Last December marked twelve consecutive months of decline and a 28.6% drop-off compared to December 2024. There was a similar fall-off in air travel from Canada to the US. By contrast, Canadian travel to other countries increased.
The steep decline in tourism from Canada has also cost the US billions of dollars in lost income as well as thousands of jobs, especially in popular destinations such as Montana, upstate New York, and Las Vegas.
All of this—the loss of goodwill and revenue—amounts to an own goal, and a completely avoidable one. To be sure, Canada hasn’t turned into an enemy, but Canadians’ growing disapproval toward the US is undeniable, and wholly attributable to Trump. Given the longstanding friendship between the two countries, that is quite a feat—even for Trump, though not one he’ll be trumpeting.
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