Canadians are really upset, Americans should pay attention.

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 episode of the “Say More” podcast.

Shirley Leung: Welcome to ‘Say More’ from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Shirley Leung.

You ever take a friend for granted and then find out they’re actually really, really mad at you? I’m afraid that’s what’s happening between the US and Canada right now. It all started with President Trump talking about imposing big tariffs on Canadian goods.

Then there was talk of Canada becoming our 51st state. In the US, late night hosts have been having a field day…

Jon Stewart (clip from The Daily Show): Canada? We’re picking a fight with our most reliable and pleasant friend, the labradoodle of allies?

Stephen Colbert (clip from The Late Show): What will this do to the longest, continuous, peaceful border in the world? How will this affect our cooperation with a vital NATO ally? What will this do to our relationship with our imaginary girlfriend from camp? Her name’s Mackenzie and she’s a model..

Leung: But the longer this tiff with Canada drags on, the less funny it gets. What does it mean for the US to be alienating its closest ally? Later in the episode, I talk to Canadian journalist Stephen Marche about what this moment means for US-Canada relations.

But first, I’m in the studio with “Say More” producer Anna Kusmer to talk about what she’s been hearing from Canadians.

You have a lot of ties to Canada, right?

Anna Kusmer: Yeah, Canada is very near and dear to my heart. I went to college in Montreal and lived there for six years.

My husband is a dual Canadian citizen, which means my kid is a Canadian citizen as well. I am proud to say that I have traveled almost every inch of the Trans-Canada Highway. I’ve traveled extensively in Canada from the Yukon Northwest Territories all the way to Newfoundland.

So I’ve really traveled around Canada and I love the country. I spent a lot of time there.

Leung: Wow. You’re like an honorary Canadian.

Kusmer: I like to think I am. I’m not allowed to call myself that, but if any of my Canadian friends wanna pipe up and give me that title, I’m very honored to have it.

Leung: You still have a lot of friends in Canada, so what have you been hearing from them?

Kusmer: People I know have been going to protests at US embassies and bringing their kids. I get a lot of texts from my Canadian friends saying things like, “What is wrong with your country?” Or like, “What’s going on over there?”

And to be honest, when they send those texts, I don’t even know what they’re referring to. I’m like, “Can you just specify what news item you’re referring to?” Because when I look at the news, there’s probably at least four or five headlines they could be reacting to.

We have a Canadian colleague here who says her family won’t come to visit her. They won’t even cross the border to come see her. If you dare to go into Canadian social media, you will be surprised about how passionately people feel about this and all the memes being shared among Canadians. There’s a classic 2000 Molson beer ad, which is a Canadian beer, that’s all about Canadian pride.

2000 Molson beer ad (clip): Hey, I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader. And I don’t live in any igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled, and I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American…

Kusmer: The guy Jeff Douglas, re-released it with new language, which is entirely directed at the US.

“We Are Canadian” 2025 video (clip): They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent…

Kusmer: …and ends with this extremely dramatic moment.

“We Are Canadian” 2025 video (clip): We’re not the 51st anything. We’re the first to unite a crisis, the first to build bridges not walls, and the first to stand on guard for the, my name is Jeff and ‘We are Canadian.’

Kusmer: Rousing, right?

Leung: Rousing.

Kusmer: We also have Canadians booing the national anthem at hockey games.

Fans booing at US-Canada game (clip): Can you see…*booing*...by the dawn’s early light.

Kusmer: Going through all this stuff, it’s pretty clear that it’s Trump, specifically, that’s the object of Canadian ire. There’s a lot of talk about how ‘We don’t hate Americans. It’s the government that’s the problem.’ The new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, really came out swinging. He’s just been prime minister for a couple weeks.

Here he is at a press conference earlier this week.

Mark Carney press conference (March 2025): President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen.

Kusmer: So what really strikes me about this is that he is taking Trump to task, specifically and constantly referring to Trump by name.

This is a huge contrast from Trump’s first term where Trudeau and Trump obviously didn’t get along very well, but Trudeau never really went after Trump. Now all the rhetoric is like entirely calling out Trump by name and essentially labeling him as an enemy of the Canadian people.

And that to me is really striking. One last thing I will say is that there’s all this kind of hockey talk. There’s this term, “elbows up.” Have you heard this, Shirley?

Leung: I’m only learning this now through this fight between the US and Canada.

Kusmer: Yeah, so it’s a term in hockey that’s used to describe this defensive move that a player will do if they’re being attacked.

Now “elbows up” is this slogan that Canadians are embracing, directed at the US. It’s like, ‘Okay, Canadians, let’s get in formation here, elbows up, let’s defend ourselves.’ Even though a lot of Canadians are able to create these kinds of funny memes, I think we should not discount how deadly serious people are about this.

Leung: Another thing that is very real is the economy. What Trump is doing, threatening these tariffs. It could really send Canada into a recession, right? That could also hurt the New England economy as well, because Canada is its largest trading partner. So what do you think of the impact on us here?

Kusmer: Yeah, the New England economy is extremely reliant on imports from Canada. It’s New England’s largest trading partner. Things like fuel, oil, seafood, precious metals and natural gas could be affected. And there are a lot of products like airplanes, seafood products, and wood products that cross back and forth across the border.

So there’s one phase of manufacturing that’s in Canada, one in the US. There are all these industries that could potentially be extremely disrupted by that border becoming less easy to cross or expensive to cross. The Canadian consulate says that 90 percent of Logan airport’s jet fuel comes from Canada.

You can only imagine what the potential impact could be. Are prices gonna go up? Right now the plan is 10 percent tariffs on energy imports from Canada.

Leung: Also, Canadian tourists. Massachusetts relies on tourism from Canada. I think this year Massachusetts had expected a record number of tourists, 880,000, but they’re probably not gonna hit a record this year because you have leaders in Canada telling Canadians ‘Don’t come to the US.’

Hotels here, a lot of tourist attractions, they’re bracing for what could potentially be an unexpected slowdown.

Kusmer: And it’s gonna be very location specific. Thousands of Canadians will go to a town in Maine called Old Orchard Beach.

I saw a recent interview, I think it was a hotel owner, who said that he went from being entirely booked over the summer to having like hundreds and hundreds of cancellations. Very specific places are gonna be hit extremely hard because either they’re very integrated with Canada or there are bad vibes from the Canadians to the US.

Leung: I guess the concern is, will this just be a short term thing or will Canadians leave us for a long time?

Kusmer: I hold the country and its people in such high esteem. It’s almost embarrassing to imagine that one US president could fumble such a long term, good relationship. For someone like me, who went to college there, I’ve spent tons of time there. It has meant so much to me. So what does that mean for the next generation?

If relations are not good, is that going to be a rare or harder experience to spend time there? That’s just very sad for the US.

Leung: Well, Anna, keep your chin up on US-Canada relations. Maybe we’ll all come around.

Kusmer: I will not only keep my chin up, Shirley, I’ll also in solidarity, be keeping my elbows up because I stand with my Canadian brothers and sisters.

Leung: After a short break, I’m going to connect with Canadian journalist Stephen Marche. Stay with us.

Leung: Hi, welcome back to “Say More.” I’m now here with Canadian journalist and author Stephen Marche, who is joining us from Toronto. Stephen has written extensively about American politics.

So, Stephen, tell me about this moment in US-Canada relations. How big of a deal is it?

Stephen Marche: I think it’s probably the largest moment in Canadian identity since the founding of the country. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I think the entire nature of the relationship with America has been basically altered overnight.

And because of that, it’s going to have profound changes to our entire economic, political, military, geopolitical structure. These things are all being negotiated incredibly quickly in a frankly shocking degree of unity and solidarity by the Canadian people. There’s really never been anything like it in my lifetime.

Leung: I mean, you follow politics on both sides, right?

Marche: Yeah, in Canada and America.

Leung: What do you think about how Americans are viewing what’s going on with Trump’s “war with Canada?” Talk about what you’re seeing from both sides.

Marche: Look, I have a very close friend who writes for the New York Times. We were going to go to her 50th birthday party in Cape Cod this summer.

And we’re not going anymore. She is a very informed person, probably about as informed as it gets in the American public. And she was like, ‘Well, you can’t really be serious.’ And we were, like ‘Ukrainians did not go to Russia for vacation before the invasion like that.’

Every dollar that a Canadian spends on an American source is a dollar that could be used to enslave us. That is the footing that we are on. And I think Americans famously don’t really have a grasp of foreign policy. And so it’s not really a surprise to me that they would not have a grasp on Canada or the situation.

You are ending your greatest alliance in your old history and one that has an immense amount to do with your national security, and you don’t really seem to be noticing.

Obviously this is part of the flood strategy of the early Trump administration where there’s just so much chaos and so much destruction going on in American institutional life that it’s hard to notice all of it, right? It’s hard to even pay attention to all of it.

But this is a very drastic thing. I think it is a fundamental change in America’s relationship to the entire Earth.

Leung: So there’s a long list of events that led to this moment. We have Trump threatening tariffs. We have accusations of poor border control. Trump’s saying, ‘Make Canada the 51st state.’ Even Canadians are being held by ICE at the border.

Was there something in particular that you feel escalated the feeling of betrayal felt by Canadians?

Marche: The betrayal is actually not that big a deal. I think when you’re dealing with the United States, you get used to betrayal. Pierre Trudeau, a very important prime minister in the sixties, famously said that living next to America was like sleeping beside an elephant.

Like every turn you feel it. It doesn’t matter how nice the animal is, every turn you feel it.

I think there were three things that really changed things. One was the tariffs, which is trade war. Then it became clear, by our own political offices, that Trump’s plans for annexation and changing the border were very serious.

He was saying this at senior levels of diplomatic correspondence. This was something that was not just talk. That was really the turning point. That was when we were like, “Well, we’re no longer allies of the United States.”

And then of course when he said that he was going to take the F-35s and there would be a kill switch or he would deny parts to other countries that bought it, because as he said, sometimes allies aren’t allies anymore.

That was the moment where it became clear like, “Okay, we are no longer in the American military sphere.”

So we need to get our own nuclear weapons and we need to possibly consider things like conscription in preparation for an America that is an aggressor against us, that we’ll have to fight off to preserve our liberty.

That’s a very big turn for our country.

Leung: Just to be clear, for Americans, Trump has threatened terrorists for a long time. But everything else, the annexation, denying parts for military aircraft, that’s all new to us. And I think, frankly, if you talk to most Americans, they would still think he’s not serious about it.

Marche: If you look in the polls, few Americans are in favor of conquering Canada. Ninety percent of Canadians don’t want to become Americans, right? There’s no interest here whatsoever in becoming America, particularly the America of today. But, your population can obviously be talked into a lot of nonsense.

Your country has a long history of destabilizing democracies all over the world. And your country has a long history of invading countries and then leaving them just in ruins. President Ronald Reagan said, “We’re kin.” And I think we have a real true kinship relationship.

I was a columnist at Esquire for eight years. I lived in New York. I taught in New York. I have my Trump-voting cousin in Washington state, and almost every Canadian literally has a family relationship with somebody in America. Until I was in my late thirties, you did not need a passport to enter America.

You waved at the border when you went to America. So, this sudden, very drastic turn, it’s a bit like your big brother who never thought about you very much, became addicted to meth and showed up at your door with a knife asking for money. The first feeling is terror.

And then the next feeling is disgust, followed by residual sadness. It’s a sense of…

Leung: In a sense of helplessness? Like there’s nothing you can do about it, right?

Marche: Oh, no, we’re not helpless. There’s lots we can do. It’s you guys who are helpless. You have a political system that can’t respond to reality, or to anything that you want to do.

We actually have a functioning political system where we absolutely are not helpless. We passed the interprovincial trade barriers, which they’ve been trying to do since my grandparents’ generation. They did that overnight last week.

We’re going to expand our markets to China. We are going to expand our markets to Europe. We already have security cooperation agreements with Europe. We are not helpless.

Leung: But is there a sense that maybe, ultimately this will be good for Canada, this sudden change?

Marche: I don’t know if it’s good. It’s a lot more patriotic. Canada’s not a flag- waving country. Now it is.

We spent like 10 years under Trudeau, arguing about this kind of post-national reality of trying to figure out what role national identity served in a multicultural society. It’s all done.

It’s now back to straight nationalism. I don’t know if you would consider that a benefit. We’re under threat. That’s why we’re suddenly so united.

But definitely, there is a level of unity and solidarity here that I certainly would not have predicted.

Leung: One of the things that struck me is that you talked a little bit about Canada thinking about getting nuclear weapons and you’ve also said that Canadians are generally concerned about how the US could use some military action against the country. Talk more about how Canada is gonna be arming itself.

Is that actively happening?

Marche: It’s definitely being widely discussed, how to become a nuclear power. What’s that American expression, “An armed society is a polite society?” I think all this talk of annexation would stop pretty quickly if we were nuclear power.

I think literally everything is on the table for Canada. This is considered an existential threat here. America is an existential threat to us.

I trust that I don’t need to explain to the people of Boston the value of liberty. The city is literally a byword for fiery independence. I don’t think I need to explain that there’s no price that’s not worth paying for freedom.

I think we are discussing exactly how we guarantee that freedom, and part of that solution is definitely military.

Leung: Canada historically has also relied on the US for trade. I think close to like 80 percent of Canadian exports are bound for the US.

Marche: That’s right.

Leung: Are you guys talking about, or bracing for, an economic recession?

Marche: Yes. You’re gonna hit us in the face and we’re gonna take punishment. Everyone is under the impression that we are going to be in recession and that we are going to be hurt.

We are transitioning as fast as we can to sell our oil to China and Europe. It’s a little harder to Europe, but we will be able to sell it to China with a pipeline to the West Coast, which again was a real sticking point for national unity for many decades and has basically been resolved by this threat.

We need closer relationships with all the other world powers, basically in particular Europe. We’re definitely gonna go through a very brutal time economically.

There’s absolutely no question about it.

Leung: Because Trump can be very fickle, what if in April he decided, “Never mind, let’s be friends again.” Is it too late?

Marche: Yeah.

Leung: Is there no turning back here for Canada and for America?

Marche: No. We’ve learned our lesson.

If you’re the friend of America, that’s a very precarious position to be in. At this point in history, you don’t want to be America’s friend. You want to be respected by them, and being vulnerable to them is no way to get respect. The economic pain that we’re about to go through will be entirely blamed on American political insanity and will create a generation of resentment.

The last time Canadian unity was this strong was when William Seward, who was the Secretary of State for Lincoln, accidentally leaked a memo saying like, “We have a big standing army. Why don’t we conquer Canada?” And Canada decided to confederate, and that was the 1860s. That’s the last time we had this much unity.

Leung: How do you think differently about Canada’s future now compared to a year ago?

Marche: We’re obviously gonna be much more independent. I think we’ve always thought of ourselves as a node in a series of international systems.

We really want to be an open society. I think that’s something that we really strive toward, pretty consistently on both Liberal and Conservative governments for 50 years, more openness to the networks of the world. We are a highly educated population with a lot of resources.

This has done very well for us, right? Obviously that world, not just America, is over. The tilt of America toward authoritarianism is kind of the final message, that there’s no real escaping this. So Canada is going to be much more itself than it would otherwise be.

It will be much more isolated, much more fearful, and we are going to have to build up from ourselves in a way that I don’t think we’ve really done since the sixties. We’re sort of like Ukraine in 2014. We’re like, “Okay, how do we prepare for when it really goes off the cliff?”

We’re hustling as hard as we can to get ready for that. And even though there’s an election and there’s lots of tension between Conservatives and Liberals. Both of these groups have really the same strategy. It is resistance to America, for sure.

Leung: I guess you found a common enemy, your political parties, right? It’s us, it’s America.

Marche: Look, we’re always gonna have a kinship relationship with America. Just simply because of geography, we’re always gonna be attached to America in a very inescapable way.

I would never describe America as an enemy. I don’t think that is the sentiment here. We are preparing for war, but I mean, you think anyone wants to go to war with America? No, we don’t. The question is, is this going to be forced on us? In that case, we better be ready.

Certain polls showed that if you asked Canadians in August, ‘Do you have friendly feelings towards the United States?’ It was 78 percent. In January, it was 22 percent.

Marche: So, there’s obviously been a change. Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary critic, said, “A Canadian is an American who rejects the revolution.”

We are very politically different, but genetically similar kinds of communities, right? Those ties are always going to bind even in this horror show, despite the fact that Canada’s preparing for economic hardship and to separate ourselves from the United States.

It would not be true to say that Canadians hate Americans. That would be a really inaccurate thing. I think we love Americans. We’re just afraid of them.

Leung: Stephen Marche is a Canadian journalist and writer. His latest book is called “The Next Civil War.” He’s joining us from Toronto.

Listen to more “Say More” episodes at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at saymore@globe.com.

Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Anna Kusmer can be reached at anna.kusmer@globe.com.