It wasn’t the United States. We never called it Michigan or even “the other” Sault Ste. Marie. It was just “across the river” – less a separate place than an errand.
I grew up in the border town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., the Canadian half of the “twin Saults” that face each other across the St. Marys River. Sault Michigan is so close that if you stand on the boardwalk on the Canadian side and wave, someone standing on the American shore could probably see the greeting.
These days, it’s more likely to be a one-finger wave.
When I was a kid, the Canadian dollar was strong, and every weekend, my family would do like everyone else and go across the river for groceries. Milk, cheese, beer and meat were cheap, and so was gas. Virtually all of our family vacations happened in the U.S.
You didn’t need a passport to cross, and the border guards barely glanced at your driver’s licence. Bridge fare was less than $2, and the console of our car held the same little booklet of “bridge tickets” everyone had.
When I was maybe 10, on one of our regular Saturday shopping trips, I found a bike I loved at Kmart, put it on layaway and paid installments each week from my paper route money. A few years later, we went across the river to buy my Grade 8 graduation dress – hunter green, off the shoulder, peak 1990s prom – at the Apple Blossom Shop, which promised not to sell the same dress to two people for the same event.
In our last year of high school, my friends and I would pile into a cab and go across to a bar called The Back Door, where drinks were $1 and the vibe was exactly what you get in a place where drinks are $1. I can’t remember if they didn’t check ID or if we procured fakes, but in we went; it was a scuzzy rite of passage.
Americans crossed in the other direction in smaller numbers because there wasn’t the same draw of cheap groceries, but they still came in droves to hunt, fish or ski.
Our most popular radio station was 99.5 YES FM from Michigan, and it felt more familiar to watch the evening news from Detroit than the CTV broadcast from Sudbury. Our Northern Ontario accents carried more Michigan and Wisconsin twang than Ontario flatness.
Toronto and Ottawa might as well have been another planet, geographically and culturally. We belonged to where we were and who was next to us.
Matthew Shoemaker, the current mayor of the Sault, grew up camping in Brimley, Mich., with his family, and he can remember renting a suit at Tuxedo World across the river, maybe for a first communion. He points out that Sault Ste. Marie is a rare Canadian border town that’s much larger than its American counterpart – 77,000 vs. 13,000 people – which explains how the tiny Michigan city sustains so much retail: “It’s because of us.”
These days, there’s only one thing people in the Canadian Sault want to discuss.
“Everyone is talking exclusively about tariffs,” Mr. Shoemaker observes.
“I think most Saultites are torn internally,” he says, adding, “People treat Sault, Ontario and Sault, Michigan as one city across two nations. That’s been a tagline of the community for many years – ‘One city across two nations.’ It is nothing to go across there for dinner, and it’s nothing to have Americans on your hockey team here, and it’s nothing to be a student at Lake State.”
In 2018, when Donald Trump slapped 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, places like the Sault, Hamilton and Regina, where those products feed the local economies, were more isolated in weathering it, Mr. Shoemaker says. This time, everyone has jumped over the boards together.
“There is this all-in, complete devotion to responding to this on the Canadian side,” he says. “That is going to give us the leg up, I think, that the Americans don’t have. Because they’re not committed to this, the American population is not committed to this.”
Mr. Shoemaker and I talked on the phone for 15 minutes. When we started our call, the tariffs were in place, and by the time we hung up, they had been suspended. Again.
This brings us to my point, which is the lumbering, rancid stupidity of this trade war. The latest temporary reprieve only ratchets up the instability to Olympic-calibre gaslighting. And none of what’s going on right now needed to happen; it is a man-made disaster that serves no purpose – except one, which we’ll get to.
It will tank our economy and theirs, too. It will make life more expensive for the Americans who elected Mr. Trump because they believed he would make things easier for them. And that means that it won’t be long before this absurd flex harms the only thing the President cares about, which is Donald Trump.
Even within the fetid confines of the universe as he recognizes it, this is asinine.
This trade war, together with his various episodes of grotesque geopolitical vandalism in the scant two months since he returned to office, torches whatever was left of the stature of the U.S.
Forget shining city on a hill. The United States is now the world’s drunk uncle-by-marriage, showing up at a family dinner to spout off ugly nonsense while everyone looks away from the stains on his clothes and tries to ignore the odours wafting from him.
Once you cross off all the things this trade war is not about, all the problems it does nothing to solve or makes much worse, you are left with one thing it does accomplish. It makes Mr. Trump – again, more, always and forever – the centre of attention, a human wildfire creeping toward the village, a cosplay ochre emperor sitting on a treasury large enough that no one will point out that he’s lost his mind.
No one can look away from him, and that is the one thing the President prizes above all.
My hometown is a miniature of the Canada-U.S. relationship – what it once was, and what has become of it. And the only reason any of this is happening is to drown out the ceaseless bathtub-drain sucking sound at the centre of Donald Trump’s being. Maybe he can’t hear it at the moment because of all the other noise he’s managed to make, but the rest of us sure can.