CRISP ON SUNDAY

I have spent the past four weeks in Canada, and I can report that the country is in the grip of a fever. Not the kind you treat with a Lemsip and a lie-down. The kind you treat with a very large flag.

They are everywhere. Flags on front gates. Flags in balcony windows. Flags nailed to the side of weatherboard houses at slightly drunken angles, as though whoever put them up did it in a hurry, at night, in a fit of feeling. On the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, where I’ve been living like a local, I counted 14 maple leaves on one short walk to the General Store. I counted two dogs. In Australia we hang the flag out for Australia Day and the cricket. Canadians appear to have hung theirs out for the foreseeable future.

This is not normal Canadian behaviour. Canadians are, as a rule, the most reserved people on Earth. They apologise to furniture. They queue for buses that haven’t been announced yet. A Canadian expressing patriotism usually looks like a man saying, quietly, that the hockey “went pretty good” and then changing the subject. So when a nation this polite starts waving flags at you from every porch, you have to ask: what on earth has happened?

The answer, of course, is Donald Trump.

Sticking it to the stickers

You notice it first in the supermarket. Canadian-made products wear enormous stickers, bright red and impossible to miss, that announce their origin like a proud parent at a school concert. “Product of Canada.” “Made in Canada.” “Prepared in Canada.” Some shops have whole shelves labelled for the purpose, so locals can buy Canadian. Or, to put it the way everybody here actually means it, so they can avoid buying American.

It isn’t a fad. When the trade war started in early 2025, 78 per cent of Canadians told Abacus Data they intended to avoid American products. Nineteen months later, in September, that figure was 77 per cent, virtually unchanged. Some 61 per cent say they’re buying more Canadian goods than ever before. More than half (52 per cent) now have no plans to travel to the United States at all, up from 32 per cent. A separate Research Co. poll found a third of Canadians are steering clear of American fast-food chains. I watched a man in a café decline a muffin because he suspected the blueberries were from Oregon. He was probably wrong. He did not care.

And this, remember, is a country that has just been hit with fresh American tariffs of 50 per cent on about $20 billion of its exports. The list of targeted goods includes, I promise I’m not making this up, hockey equipment. You can tax a Canadian’s maple syrup, his timber and his wine, and he will grumble politely. Tax his hockey gear and you have declared war.

The flag on the backpack

There’s another phenomenon I hadn’t expected. Canadians travelling abroad are sewing the maple leaf onto backpacks, pinning it to jackets and wearing it on caps. This is not new, exactly. Canadians have been doing it for decades so they don’t get mistaken for Americans in foreign bars. But the urgency has changed. It used to be a joke about being liked more than the neighbours. Now it reads like a statement of political allegiance. I’m not with him.

From the other side of the world, I think we Australians miss how personal all this is. To us, Trump’s talk of turning Canada into the “51st state” sounded like another one of his bits, the sort of thing you laugh at and file under “Donald being Donald”. To Canadians, it was something else entirely. It was the largest, richest, most heavily armed country on the planet saying, more than once, that it fancied owning them.

Canada and the United States share 8,891 kilometres of border, the longest international border in the world. Most of it isn’t even fenced. Imagine your next-door neighbour, a man with a garage full of weapons, leaning over the fence and announcing that your house would look better as an extension of his. Then imagine he keeps saying it.

“An extreme tail risk”

Which brings me to the moment I nearly choked on my poutine.

In an interview with The New York Times, Prime Minister Mark Carney revealed that his government had prepared for the possibility of a US invasion. An invasion. Of Canada. By America.

To be fair to him, Carney was careful. He called it “an extreme tail risk”, not something he believed would happen. He said it would be “irresponsible” not to plan for the worst case. A senior American admiral called the very idea “absolutely and utterly preposterous”. A former Canadian defence minister accused Carney of provocation. Military analysts mostly shrugged and said every country plans for scenarios it hopes never happen.

All true. But sit with it for a moment. The leader of a G7 nation, a founding member of NATO and one of America’s oldest allies, has said out loud that he planned for the United States to attack. Twelve months ago, that sentence would have been a spoof. Now it’s a policy footnote.

The quiet man with the steel spine

And the Canadians I’ve met love him for it.

Carney is not a natural showman. He’s a former central banker, which is to say he has the charisma of a well-ironed shirt. But that seems to be exactly the point. Faced with a bully, Canadians wanted someone calm, competent and impossible to rattle. When trade talks collapsed in August, Carney said Washington had “asked too much and offered too little”. He walked away from the table and hit back with dollar-for-dollar tariffs of his own. Nobody here thought he was being reckless. They thought he was being Canadian, only with the elbows up.

The polls bear it out. Research Co. found 65 per cent of Canadians approve of how Carney is handling the tariffs. Abacus Data has his government’s overall approval at 56 per cent, with Carney’s personal ratings at 53 per cent positive and just 28 per cent negative. Those are numbers most Western leaders can only dream of. Abacus also notes that his approval rests heavily on one file above all others: the Americans.

Meanwhile, the feeling in the other direction is less warm. In the Research Co. poll, 82 per cent of Canadians called US tariffs a threat to the country. An astonishing 43 per cent said the United States is a military threat to Canada right now. And only one in five would seriously consider a process for Canada becoming an American state. I suspect most of those were joking. I suspect some of them were Albertan.

Trump on steroids?

Across the border, Trump is in trouble. His average approval rating sits at about 39.5 per cent, with 58 per cent disapproving. Earlier this month it touched 38.2 per cent, the lowest of his second term. One Pew poll had him at just 30 per cent.

Which brings us to the big question every Canadian I spoke to was asking: what happens next?

The US midterm elections are on November 3, just three weeks away. Nate Silver’s forecast now gives the Democrats a 93 per cent chance of winning the House of Representatives and a 75 per cent chance of taking the Senate, where Republicans currently hold 53 of the 100 seats. If that happens, Trump will face a Congress actively trying to clip his wings for the final two years of his presidency, with investigations, blocked appointments, budget fights and, almost certainly, talk of impeachment.

So will a cornered Trump calm down? Here’s what worries my Canadian friends.

I have long since stopped being surprised by what Trump says. Just last weekend he declared it was “time for Ukraine to get a new president”, in the same breath as blaming Volodymyr Zelenskiy for America’s high diesel prices. Some of what comes out of his mouth is so outrageous that, if you put it in a novel, your editor would send it back as unbelievable.

Now imagine him with a hostile Congress, sinking polls and nothing left to lose. Does he become more radical? More unpredictable? More Trump, if such a thing is even possible? A president who can’t get his way at home often looks abroad for a fight he thinks he can win. History suggests the neighbours had better keep the porch light on.

Canadians don’t know the answer. Neither do I. But I do know this. After four weeks among the most polite people in the world, I’ve learned there is a limit to their politeness. It’s somewhere around the 51st state. And they’ve drawn it in red and white, on every front gate in the country.

Have you travelled to Canada or the US recently? Did you notice the change in mood? Tell us in the comments.