Like virtually everyone else who’s grown up in Windsor, Elaine Weeks spent much of her youth over the river, in Detroit. As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, she went to the Detroit Zoo and visited Santa at Hudson’s department store downtown. When she got a little older, she caught ball games at Tiger Stadium, ate tacos in Mexicantown and attended exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The city felt big, dramatic and thrilling; with a metropolitan population greater than four million people, it was more than 10 times the size of Windsor. It was also shockingly close. The Detroit River, which separates the two cities, is only a few hundred metres wide. Even when Weeks wasn’t physically in Detroit, she could hear and see it: the thump of concerts, the flashing of police sirens, the whine of race cars at the Detroit Grand Prix.

In so many ways, living in Windsor was like living in a suburb of an exciting American city. It was certainly the one that loomed largest, much more than Toronto, a four-hour drive away. And nowhere was the porous, undefended border between Canada and the U.S. more permeable. “We’re divided by water, but also connected by it,” says Weeks. “Our border is literally fluid.” In 2004, Weeks and her husband, Chris Edwards, started a small press called Walkerville Publishing. They’ve produced several books about local history and culture, and just about every one includes a bit about Detroit, too.

After Donald Trump was re-elected last November, it all changed. Weeks already had strong feelings about the president—she calls him “the orange maniac”—and when he began to publicly mock Justin Trudeau and muse about annexing Canada, Windsor’s proximity to Detroit suddenly seemed to Weeks less like an asset and more like a threat. The night of Trump’s inauguration, she lay awake imagining an American bomb attack on Windsor. “I was scared right away that they would send drones across the river,” she says. “Because they want Canada. I thought, We’re sitting ducks here.”

That particular fear subsided. But as the 51st-state rhetoric ramped up, and Trump unleashed his impulsive, incoherent tariff policy, Weeks fought back. This spring, she helped organize the Canadian side of a cross-border rally. In late March, about 500 Windsorites gathered at the foot of the Great Canadian Flag, an enormous maple leaf installed at the foot of Ouellette Avenue, facing the Detroit skyline. Across the water, in Detroit’s Hart Plaza, hundreds of Americans joined in solidarity. Protesters on both sides carried American and Canadian flags, brandishing homemade anti-Trump signs taped to hockey sticks.

Weeks made a speech, as did local politicians, poets and actors. “The American people have a very tough fight ahead of them,” she said, “and they are going to need the encouragement of their lifelong Canadian friends.” The two sides did the wave at the same time. It was pretty genial, as protests go—more like a block party, an expression of friendship and a rebuke to the cruel chaos of the American government.

It was also poignant, due to the countless points of connection between the two cities. Detroit is where many Windsorites have friends and romantic partners. It’s where their kids play in hockey tournaments. It’s where they go to dine or to watch major-league sports. It’s where more than 5,000 people from Windsor’s metropolitan area commute every day, including nearly 2,000 health-care professionals. Since 1983, the University of Windsor and University of Detroit Mercy have offered a joint program that allows lawyers to get degrees from both schools and practise on either side of the border. The two cities’ enormous Arab communities are so deeply entwined that you can buy shawarma poutine in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb. Windsorites use Fahrenheit when it’s hot and Celsius when it’s cold.

Most significantly, the two cities have been lashed together for more than a century by auto manufacturing and trade. Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1903 and, a year later, formed a joint venture across the river with the Walkerville Wagon Company. The partnership was mutually beneficial. The Canadian wagon maker’s fortunes were revived by Ford’s promising new technology, and—in an ironic twist of history—manufacturing in Canada allowed Ford to avoid tariffs levied in the British Empire on American goods. By 1924, Ford employed 3,400 people in and around Windsor. Every major American carmaker eventually followed: General Motors, Dodge, Chrysler. Combined, Detroit and Windsor were dubbed a “motoropolis.” At the same time, the city became a hub for Canada-U.S. trade. As of 2022, nearly $400 million worth of goods, about a quarter of all trade by value between the two countries, crossed the Ambassador Bridge or passed through the Detroit Windsor Tunnel every day.

Until the trade war, those connections were only deepening. In early 2022, Stellantis, the Netherlands-based company that now owns Chrysler, joined forces with LG to build a $5-billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Windsor, the first of its kind in Canada. That same year, Stellantis announced it would retool its Windsor and Brampton factories to produce EVs, pumping another $3.6 billion into that effort. The Canadian government is spending $6.4 billion to build a new multi-modal bridge, the Gordie Howe International Bridge, to further bolster trade and co-operation. It’s scheduled to open this fall. The result of all this integration was, until very recently, an uncharacteristic boom. Last year, Windsor’s economy was among Canada’s fastest-growing, and its population was exploding after years of modest growth.

The White House’s tariffs—including 25 per cent levies on steel and aluminum, as well as passenger vehicles and light trucks—have put a sudden stop to the boom. They’ve also effectively pitted Windsor and Detroit against each other. No Windsorite blames Detroiters for the situation; the city and its suburbs voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris. But that didn’t stop them from feeling a confusing mix of anger and betrayal. Renaldo Agostino, the city councillor for downtown, put it to me this way: “It’s like we’re next-door neighbours, our parents are fighting and we want to sneak out and play.”

Most Canadians have responded to the trade war, and Trump’s threats of annexation, with a defiant, unifying nationalism—and an instinctual protectionism of our own. We’ve cancelled vacations and academic conferences, boycotted Budweiser and avoided Amazon. This has been relatively easy in Toronto and Ottawa and Vancouver. Windsor hasn’t had that luxury; its elbows can only go up so high. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce said in February that the three Canadian cities most vulnerable to tariffs were Saint John, New Brunswick (because of its oil refinery and dependence on exports to the U.S.), Calgary........

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