Its third-largest province just gave conservative reformers a landslide.
Its third-largest province just gave conservative reformers a landslide.
A fter trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed in August, there were fears a new cold war would break out between the two nations that share the longest undefended border in the world.
The Trump administration imposed tariffs as high as 50 percent on Canadian goods, and Trump’s rabid trade adviser Peter Navarro warned Canada against interfering in the U.S. midterm elections or “it will pay even more dearly.” In response, the Canadian government announced retaliatory tariffs and let it be known it was reviewing the purchase of U.S. military equipment and even war-gaming hypothetical U.S. invasion scenarios.
But there are signs that average Canadians and Americans aren’t getting caught up too much in this high-level dispute between political leaders.
British Columbia, a province of 5.7 million people in which one out of seven Canadians live, held an early election on Saturday called by the anti-Trump Premier David Eby.
The result was a humiliating defeat for his socialist New Democratic Party and a landslide victory for the B.C. Conservative Party, which won two-thirds of the seats in the province’s legislature. It was the party’s first provincial election majority in nearly a century. In announcing the vote a month ago, Eby mentioned President Trump more than 20 times and said an election was needed to counter the “existential threat” he represented.
Eby said Trump was “threatening our sovereignty,” and he needed a mandate to build a “firebreak” against U.S. economic pressure. He urged voters to “join us saying ‘hell no’ to Trump and to his politics.” But Edy badly miscalculated. A Research Co. of Canada survey found the economy was the No. 1 issue with voters, followed by housing, health care, crime, and government accountability. “This has become a referendum on economic management,” said Research Co. Missing from the list was Trump. “We spoke to 802 people; nobody mentioned Trump,” said Research Co. president Mario Canseco.
The winning Conservatives ignored foreign policy and emphasized their economic program: an income-tax cut, expanded consumer choice in auto insurance, increased natural-gas production, and rolling back anti–private property elements of the province’s policies on Indigenous People. Tensions between Canada and the U.S. are also calming at the national level.
Last week, Trump lifted tariffs on some Canadian goods, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was ready to resume trade negotiations immediately if Washington negotiated in good faith. “Anti-Trumpism is no longer a viable platform provincially,” says Dimpee Brar, a Canadian conservative commentator. “Is it still viable nationally? There are signs that it is waning as well.” One reason for the lower temperatures is that ordinary people don’t care deeply enough about trade wars to change their views of the other country. Polling from the Pew Research Center in the U.S. last month found only 17 percent of Americans rate relations with Canada as “cold” or “very cold.” Canada’s Angus Reid Institute finds that while 79 percent of Canadians view Trump unfavorably, many draw a clear distinction between Trump’s actions and the American people. They are aware that Trump’s tariff policies are unpopular in the U.S.
And the disputes with the U.S. may have a silver lining in Canada. A headline in this month’s The Economist magazine bluntly asks: “Can Donald Trump’s bullying goad Canada out of its complacency?” Canadian workers only produce 71 percent as much per hour as workers in the U.S. In America, business investment went up by 51 percent between 2014 and 2025, but only 4.2 percent in Canada. “Inefficient firms are sheltered from competition by thickets of regulation cultivated by provincial governments,” The Economist concluded. The International Monetary Fund has found that, with these internal barriers, Canada is imposing a 9 percent tariff on itself. As of August, the average effective tariff rate that Canada paid on goods it exported to the U.S. was only 3.2 percent.
By one key measurement, Canada is already “the 51st State” that Donald Trump cruelly and senselessly characterizes as being its future.
The World Bank puts the U.S. 2025 GDP per person at $90,250. Canada’s 2025 GDP per person is $55,698. Mississippi, the poorest state in America, sits at $55,877. So Canada’s national average is below the level of all 50 U.S. states.
The Economist bluntly quotes Jean Charest, who was premier of Quebec from 2003 to 2012, as believing that “Canadians may one day thank America’s president for shocking them out of a slumber.” The first sign that may be happening came from British Columbia on Saturday.
As Charest himself puts it, “Trump is now telling us we have no choice but to change.”