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Thursday, June 19, 2025

'Northeastern Governors and Canadian Premiers Unite Against Trump'

 Canada knows the drill. Prime Minister Mark Carney worked hard to stage-manage President Trump’s whirlwind G7 appearance. It went sideways anyway, as the president sidetracked a press briefing into lobbying for Russia, absent from the proceedings since the invasion of Crimea. Then came the predictable mendacities about former prime minister Justin Trudeau, and diatribes about blue cities, undocumented immigrants, and for some reason, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, “probably the worst governor in the country.”

After seven long minutes of the president’s freestyling, the prime minister all but performed a body block between Trump and reporters to shut down questions. The American president hurried off soon after to his Iran-Israel decision-making back in Washington, leaving Carney with another trade deadline to navigate and a second collapsed Canadian summit. Trump did a similar early disappearing act in 2018, with Trudeau as host.

Almost a continent away, governors from New England and New York and the premiers and surrogates from Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces held their own meeting in Boston, concurrent with the G7 talks. Trump wasn’t in the room and only barely mentioned by name, but he dominated a public session alternating between defiance and resignation.

The Northeastern border-state governors have some of the strongest ties to their Canadian peers, and like them, they are trying to deal with the hand that the 2024 election dealt. Several times, Susan Holt, the premier of New Brunswick, mentioned wanting to “see us through the other side of this, when we get back to normal.”

Amid the volatility of Trump’s international relations, the prospects of a permanent or even semipermanent accord on tariffs eluded the “G6 +1”: Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan. Whether North American premiers and governors can hang together and power past the “+1,” Trump, in the next three and a half years is the open question that they gamely tried to answer.

The Northeastern governors and Eastern premiers began meeting in 1973, two years before the finance ministers of the West’s economic powerhouses began holding summits on global economic and national-security affairs. Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) insisted throughout the public session that states and provinces had no choice but to double down to preserve generations’ worth of diplomatic, cultural, and economic ties. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) was blunt. “These are relationships that have now been damaged because of rhetoric out of Washington as well as tariffs,” she said. “A tariff on Canada is nothing more than a tax on Americans.”

Disrupted supply chains marred by 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imposed by the United States weighed heavily on the group. Doug Ford, the Ontario premier, said that those tariffs prompted the province to begin reshoring products like metal cans, which he stressed will only produce job losses for thousands of Americans.

A brain drain and its threats to Massachusetts’s powerful and prestigious “eds and meds” sector preoccupied Healey. She commented that Canada is actively recruiting talented medical researchers, and students—from undergraduates to postdoctoral candidates—are making different choices about where to study. “There is a war for talent,” admitted Holt, the New Brunswick premier, “and the opportunity to attract the brightest and best.”

The governors were also quick to underline their heavy dependence on Canadian energy—hydro electricity, natural gas, and oil—and the threats that that dependence and any possible interruptions pose not only for residents but for artificial-intelligence development and other energy-intensive sectors. Ford pointed out that data hubs, for example, “suck more energy than anything on Earth.” Ontario, he added, is a more reliable source of the rare earth mineral exports that the U.S. needs and that China has cut off (one of the reasons for Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty).

“We have to safeguard our energy future, acting as independent actors in this space, regardless of what happens in D.C., and think of ourselves—because clearly Washington is not,” Hochul stressed.

In the U.S., travel and tourism were the first sectors to show almost immediate significant downturns. Noting that Maine travel had declined 26 percent from February through April, Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) has planned a goodwill trip to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Healey reeled off other statistics. Massachusetts and New Hampshire saw 20 percent drops. Vermont hotel reservations are down 45 percent, and credit card spending has dropped 36 percent.

In New York City, Canadian bookings have dropped 45 percent. School trips are way down, said Healey, who recalled her own eighth-grade trip to Toronto.

Canadians have also been inundated with reports of fellow citizens and Europeans who have been detained by American border authorities. In addition to warnings about crime (including petty theft, gun violence, home break-ins, and robberies), Canadian travel advisories now include information about avoiding demonstrations and adhering to curfews.

Asked about whether they’d promote travel to the U.S., the answer from the Canadian provinces was basically no. Holt suggested visits to neighboring Nova Scotia and spending some time at home. Ford encouraged travel to Ontario.

Americans probably don’t understand that “a generational shift” is under way, says Alasdair Roberts, a professor of public policy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There is a profound sense of betrayal by the United States and being burned,” he adds. “That’s burned into Canadian political culture and it’s going to persist for decades.”

Premiers treat governors as useful intermediaries with Washington, regardless of who is in the White House, which prompted Gov. Daniel McKee (D-RI) to underline that “Governors do matter.” Democrats hold down New York and most of the New England posts with a couple of exceptions: Vermont, where voters returned Republican Gov. Phil Scott, “America’s most popular governor,” to Montpelier, and New Hampshire, where Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) moved into the governor’s mansion after one term as a senator.

Despite their regional and cross-border influence, it’s going to be a colossal challenge for any of them to navigate the national Republican hostility and the relentless stream of policies that will damage the region. The Democratic women have already directly taken on Trump or other administration officials—Hochul on New York City congestion pricing, Mills over Maine’s laws on transgender athletes, and Healey on ICE detentions in the Bay State—prompting closer scrutiny of their states from the administration.

“It’s not just a question of ‘Oh, Trump is hard to deal with.’ There’s a widespread understanding that politics in the United States has become unstable and potentially dangerous for Canada,” says Roberts, an Ontario native. “My own view is that there is no going back to normal even after President Trump.”

“Part of the difficulty is the polarization and instability of American politics,” he explains. “Even if Trump does not do a third term, we don’t know that there won’t be some Trump-like politician in the future or might be simply an alternation between Democratic and Republican presidents who just have profoundly different views about international engagement and international economic cooperation—in which case it means any deal you strike with the American government is good for four years at most.”

Demonstrating that there’s fight in the regional American leaders may not be enough to win Canadians back. Beyond the affected states and local communities along the northern border, unfortunately, many Americans don’t appear to fully understand—or care—about the broadening rifts between two countries that have long had some of the most peaceful and mutually beneficial ties on the planet.

https://prospect.org/world/2025-06-19-northeastern-governors-canadian-premiers-unite-against-trump/

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