I remember the line. It ran diagonal to the grain of the library’s hardwood floor. It escapes me whether the line was black paint or black electrical tape back in the ’80s and ’90s, but it’s tape today—scuffed and trodden upon, as though it were just some line to be stepped on that didn’t matter very much. Which it is. Or was, anyway.

Donald Trump, the forty-seventh president of the United States of America, has called the border between Canada and the United States “an artificially drawn line.” In this, he is aligned with my eight-year-old self standing inside the Haskell Free Library and delightedly leaping over that line on the floor, transporting myself from Stanstead, Quebec, to Derby Line, Vermont—from Canada to America—and then back again.

The Haskell Free Library was my library. It was where I first borrowed books that my parents read to me and, later, chapter books I would read myself to pass the long summer days on the family farm just up the road. And finally, as a sullen teenager who would have rather been back in the big city than down in the Eastern Townships for another summer, it was where my cousin and I borrowed VHS cassettes: Monty Python, Blackadder, and other British comedies that I pretended I was sophisticated enough to appreciate. It was just a library.

But the Haskell Free Library is no longer as free as it once was. It has become ground zero for a somewhat less friendly approach to Canada by American border patrol and homeland security officers. It may also be the first hundred square feet or so of America’s attempted annexation of Canada.

Is that hyperbole? I’m not sure yet. I think if there’s one thing Canadians will remember about the apparent collapse of one of the most mutually beneficial relationships between countries in the world’s history, it will be that exact feeling: Am I overreacting? They’re not going to do that, are they?

Eventually, every Canadian will be able to point to a place and time when it became real that things were no longer the same. A moment when the past between Canada and America, whatever their memories of that may be, was gone, replaced by something new and uncertain, frightening and enraging. A moment when they realized that a line had been crossed.

For many, the line will be metaphorical—a new threat from the president, a report of a new horror from a rogue administration. Or it will be real yet distant—detaining a Canadian woman trying to cross the border for work, or abducting a former Fulbright scholar simply for writing an op-ed in support of Palestinians. For all of us, it will hit home somehow.

For the residents of Stanstead, Quebec, and the surrounding area, that line is neither distant nor metaphorical. It’s already been crossed. It’s marked with electrical tape and runs diagonal to the hardwood floor. And it was the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who crossed it on January 30, 2025.

The Haskell Free Library was founded in 1904 as a co-operative endeavour by Stanstead and Derby Line, two small towns that share a border and have shared a lot more over the years. The building itself is stately and........

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