The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.

It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”

Things escalated from there, with heated meetings and calls leading to the US enacting (then retracting, then enacting, then retracting) tariffs on its northern neighbor, and Canada responding in kind.

Province leaders got in on the action as well, perhaps most notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “If they want to try to annihilate Ontario,” he said early on in the tariff saber-rattling, “I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face.” This week, he took steps to make good on that threat, announcing a 25 percent tax on electricity exports to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan. The US responded by promising to increase tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent. That led to both sides reversing course, and a fresh round of ongoing talks. (Though Trump maintained on Thursday that “Canada only works as a state.)

I wanted a firsthand account of how all this is affecting normal Canadians and Canadian politics. So I dialed up Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Canada, to get the scoop.

Zack told me that “Canadians are angry — just out-of-this-world angry about what the United States is doing to them.”

Here’s what else he had to say. (Our conversation was edited for length and clarity).

What’s going on in Canada right now?

Well, for over a century, the US-Canadian border has been one of, if not the, most peaceful borders in the entire world.

There have been extremely strong relations between the two countries and extremely tight economic ties between them. For a long time, it’s been extremely easy to travel back and forth between the United States and Canada. Even before NAFTA, there was open trade for some goods.

There’s a way in which the economies are so intertwined that it’s not crazy to think about Canada and the US as having a broadly integrated economic system, even if it’s totally wrong to call Canada the 51st state.

I’ll give you an example.

The US is a big farm country. Canada is too. Farming requires fertilizer, and the US imports 80 percent of its potash — an important fertilizer — from Canada. Then it sells some of the products that it grows back to Canada. When I go to the grocery store, I often find “Product of the USA” and “Product of Canada” in the produce aisle.

By putting tariffs on agricultural products on both sides, you’re making things more expensive in multiple ways.

The potash becomes more expensive to import, which also means that farmers have to pay more. It also means consumers in the United States have to pay more, and so do Canadians, because Canada’s putting reciprocal tariffs on the United States.

So not only........

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