The Receipt

In March 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney told Canadians their relationship with the United States was “over.” The U.S. was “no longer a reliable partner.” There would be “no turning back.” On election night, he called it “the American betrayal.”[1][2][3]

Canadians listened. They boycotted American goods, cancelled trips south, and pulled U.S. products from shelves. Half the country told pollsters they would sign up for military training in case of invasion. A self-described pacifist in Vancouver said she felt “unflinching ferocity” to defend Canada at all costs. A seventy-year-old in British Columbia vowed never to set foot in the United States again.[4]

Fourteen months later, Carney stood before the Economic Club of New York and told a room of American investors: “Canada Strong will help make America great again.”[5]

Between those two statements, his government unilaterally rolled back most retaliatory tariffs while U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, and automobiles remained in place. It ruled out further countermeasures. It continued payments for American-made F-35 fighter jets and opened the door to continental missile defence cooperation. An Angus Reid Institute poll released August 10, 2026 measures what is left: 48 percent of Canadians now view Americans as people unfavourably. Americans, at 79 percent favourable toward Canadians, do not share the sentiment.[6] Both governments used rhetoric with the capacity to reshape how their populations viewed each other. When the policy changed, neither told the public.

If you are a Canadian who stopped crossing the border, started checking labels for American brands, or felt something change in how you think about the country next door, you acted on information your government gave you. If you are wondering why that same government is now making concessions to reach a deal, the confusion is reasonable. The government’s posture changed. Nobody announced when yours should change too.

What Canadians Were Told

On March 9, 2025, Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership with 85.9 percent of the vote. In his acceptance speech, he framed the tariff conflict as existential. “Donald Trump has put unjustified tariffs on what we build, on what we sell, on how we earn a living,” he said. “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect.” He added: “In trade, as in hockey, Canada will win.” He was not yet prime minister. He was sworn in on March 14.[1]

Nine days later, he called a snap election. The tariffs and sovereignty threats were “the most significant crisis of our lifetimes,” he said. He asked Canadians for “a strong, positive mandate to deal with President Trump.”[7]

On March 27, after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on auto imports, Carney paused campaigning, returned to Ottawa, and delivered the sharpest public statement a sitting Canadian prime minister had made about the bilateral relationship in decades.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said. “It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner.” He acknowledged that comprehensive negotiations might restore “some trust,” but added: “there will be no turning back.” Canada would “need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States” and “pivot our trade relationships elsewhere.”[2]

On election night, April 28, he went further. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal,” he said, “but we should never forget the lessons.”[3]

Trump’s rhetoric ran in parallel. He repeatedly called Canada the “51st state,” said he would use “economic force” to achieve it, and told Fox News he was tougher on Canada than on some adversaries because it was “meant to be” part of the United States. After Carney’s Davos speech in January 2026, Trump responded: “Canada lives because of the United States.”[8]

Two leaders. Two sets of rhetoric. One border full of people listening.

What Canadians Did With It

The population responded as if the threat were real, because the people delivering it held the highest offices in both countries.

Pew Research Center reported in July 2025 that 59 percent of Canadians named the United States as their country’s greatest threat. In 2019, that number had been 20 percent. The question was open-ended. No list of countries was provided. Canadians volunteered the answer.[9]

An Ipsos poll conducted for Global News in January 2026 found that 43 percent of Canadians said they would personally fight to resist a U.S. military invasion, even at risk of injury or death. A separate question found 50 percent willing to join a formal training program to prepare for possible invasion by a foreign country.[10]

The Globe and Mail reported that the Canadian military had modeled an unconventional-warfare response to a hypothetical American invasion, including small-unit ambushes, sabotage, and armed civilian resistance. General Jennie Carignan, Chief of the Defence Staff, announced plans for a 400,000-strong reserve force of volunteers.[11]

Provincial governments pulled American liquor from shelves. Cross-border travel fell. A consumer boycott spread across the country.

In a Globe and Mail feature published in March 2026, Suzanne Corno, a 70-year-old in Kelowna, British Columbia, said she and her husband were prepared to “pick up whatever weapon” whenever needed to defend Canada. She had grown up in Edmundston, New Brunswick, crossing the international bridge as if the border barely existed. Now she had vowed never to set foot in the United States again. Monica Muller, a self-described pacifist and writer in Vancouver, said she had discovered “unflinching ferocity to defend her country at all costs.” She added: “I never knew I had that inside myself.”[4]

These are not outliers. They are what a population looks like when it takes its government at its word.

What the Government Actually Did

While Canadians were rearranging their lives around the rhetoric, the government was moving in the opposite direction.

On May 6, 2025, Carney visited the White House. He described the meetings as “difficult but constructive.” By June, CBC reported that Carney and Trump were communicating privately by phone and text. At the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, on June 16, the two leaders agreed to pursue a deal within 30 days.[12]

The 30-day deadline passed without a deal. On August 22, 2025, Carney announced Canada would unilaterally remove most retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods covered by the trade agreement, effective September 1. U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, automobiles, lumber, and copper remained in place. A White House official called the Canadian rollback “long overdue.”[13][14]

In October 2025, under pressure from Ontario Premier Doug Ford to hit back, Carney ruled out countermeasures. “There’s times to hit back and there’s times to talk,” he told reporters in Toronto, “and right now is the time to talk.”[15]

At Davos in January 2026, Carney told the World Economic Forum that the world was experiencing “a rupture, not a transition” and that middle powers needed to build strategic autonomy.[8] The speech drew a standing ovation. It was directed at world leaders and global investors, not at Canadians.

Then came New York. On May 28, 2026, Carney stood before the Economic Club of New York and pitched Canada as a reliable partner. He emphasized supply chain integration and said Canadian exports to the United States represented the energy equivalent of ten Hoover Dams. He closed with eight words: “Canada Strong will help make America great again.” U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra endorsed the line on social media.[5][16]

The election promise was: “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect.”[1] That commitment ended in August 2025, five months after the election.

What Americans Actually Think

The Angus Reid Institute poll released August 10, 2026, surveyed 2,199 Canadian adults and 1,000 American adults. It found two populations looking at each other across a gap that only one side knows exists.[6]

Seventy-nine percent of Americans view Canadians favourably. Forty-five percent of Canadians return the sentiment. Forty-eight percent of Canadians view Americans as people unfavourably.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. should approach Canada as a friend or ally. A majority of Canadians now say Canada should approach the United States with caution, suspicion, or as a threat. As recently as 2023, before Trump’s second term, most Canadians held the opposite view.

Sixty-nine percent of self-described MAGA Republicans view Canadians positively.

And the starkest number in the survey: 91 percent of Canadians are following the tariff dispute closely. Only 69 percent of Americans are. A full quarter of Americans have not heard about it at all.

The hostility is one-directional. The attention gap is vast. Canadians are consumed by a conflict that a quarter of Americans do not know is happening.

Nobody Turned It Off

Both governments used rhetoric that changed how ordinary people feel about their neighbours. The rhetoric did what rhetoric does. It landed. It changed what Suzanne Corno will do with her remaining years. It changed whether Monica Muller thinks about violence. It reshaped how nearly half a country views a population that, at 79 percent favourable, overwhelmingly likes them back.

When the Canadian government’s posture changed, there was no corresponding message to the public. No statement that said: the threat is evolving, here is how to think about Americans now. The government continued to describe the world as fundamentally altered. At Davos, Carney said Canada had “fundamentally shifted its strategic posture.”[8] In April 2026, he said Canada’s close ties to America had gone from “strengths” to “weaknesses that we must correct.”[17] But operationally, his government was seeking exactly the deal it had told voters to be angry about not having.

The strongest case for the election rhetoric is that it was strategically necessary and reflected a genuine vulnerability. Seventy-five percent of Canadian exports went to a single trading partner, and that partner had proved willing to weaponize the dependency. Carney’s argument at Davos, that integration becomes subordination when a larger power uses it as leverage, is analytically serious. His government’s February 2026 Defence Industrial Strategy explicitly framed greater Canadian autonomy and continued allied interoperability as complementary objectives.[18]

That argument deserves its weight. But it has to carry the cost of what it produced. And it has to reckon with a fact the rhetoric never acknowledged: at the same time the government was telling Canadians to reduce reliance on the United States, it was lifting decades-old restrictions on continental missile defence cooperation.[19] It was continuing payments for American-made F-35 fighter jets. In translated remarks from Montreal in February 2026, Carney said of the U.S. Golden Dome missile shield: “if it serves Canada’s interests, and I think there are certainly many scenarios where that would be the case, we will be willing participants.”[20]

Geography requires continental defence integration. It required it before the rhetoric, and it requires it after. The shared air defence perimeter, the continental energy grid, the 75 percent export dependency: these structural facts did not change when the prime minister said the old relationship was “over,” and they did not change when he stood in New York and borrowed the other president’s slogan.

What changed is how nearly half of Canadians feel about the people on the other side of a border that their government, on the evidence of its own actions, never intended to close.

What Would Change This Assessment

Three conditions would weaken or invalidate this analysis:

  • If the Canadian government issued public communications between September 2025 and August 2026 explicitly telling Canadians that the threat posture toward the United States had changed. We have not identified such a communication. The government continued to describe the world as fundamentally altered while operationally pursuing a trade deal.
  • If polling shows Canadian hostility toward Americans declining in step with the government’s policy pivot, indicating the population is self-correcting without explicit signaling. The Angus Reid data, the most recent available, suggests the opposite: the hostility persists seventeen months after the rhetoric peaked.
  • If Canada received meaningful reciprocal U.S. tariff relief in exchange for its August 2025 rollback, which would undermine the characterization of the rollback as a unilateral concession. As of publication, U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, automobiles, lumber, and copper remain in place. No new reciprocal sectoral relief has been documented.[21]