What do Americans think of their former best friends in Canada?

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STRATFORD, NEW JERSEY — The closest Canadian stronghold to Donald Trump’s Trade-War-A-Lago is a bright, spacious fortress with plenty of free parking in the suburbs of Philadelphia, 230 kilometres northeast of the Oval Office. It is a command centre and commissariat where the True North is revered, the current American president is reviled, annexation will be strenuously resisted, and a Maple Dip costs US$1.81, tax included.

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Some Canadians may not be aware that their precious Tim Hortons even exists in a country where the term “double-double” means ten points and ten rebounds, but the company’s footprint already enfolds more than 700 cafés from the America Ocean to the Gulf of America and is expanding quickly, like a married couple having triplets just before filing for divorce. And unlike the TD Bank next door on White Horse Pike — “America’s Most Convenient Bank,” it styles itself without even whispering the word “Toronto” — there is no attempt to camouflage where Timmies comes from and what it stands for.

At this Tim Hortons location — and perhaps at all of them — the door handle is a hockey stick, the maple leaf graces every coffee cup and serviette, and a mural of the eponymous, rock-jawed defenceman and founding father covers the entire south wall.

“Bringing the best of Canada,” crows the chain’s promotional website, without belaboring the point that Tim Hortons is merely a part of a conglomerate called Restaurant Brands International. So, it seemed like a logical place at which to divine the actual, human-level state of affairs between two countries that TIME described this week as “once-friendly allies.”

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To be clear, 15 people at a Tim Hortons in the Garden State is hardly a scientific sample but, while some Canadians have been setting their hair on fire and vowing that we are never ever, ever getting back together, not one of the Jerseyites I met here on Presidents Day 2025 had any idea that Canada and the United States had picked up where they left off in 1812.

For a more legitimate survey of American attitudes, these recent polls offer a window into the relationship. A poll  by Ababacus Data at the end of January found overall, Americans hold Canada in high regard, with 54 per cent describing the U.S.-Canada relationship as that of “best friends” or “close friends.”  When it comes to tariffs, public sentiment is more in favour of staying friends, according to a poll in the Visual Capitalist. Just 28 per cent of surveyed Americans think proposed tariffs on Canada are a good idea.

Back in New Jersey, the word “tariff” was never mentioned. Neither was the word “hockey.” Not one of the breakfasters I encountered had watched — or even heard of — the 4 Nations Face-Off. Not one of them had voted for Donald J. Trump during any of his three presidential runs, and the majority either had never been to Canada at all, or had walked across the bridge at Niagara Falls for a very brief stay.

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But all of them have been have been paying attention to The Donald’s acidic regurgitations.

Maybe the Canadians WANT to be part of the United States

“Take over Greenland? Yes,” a customer and builder of custom motor vehicle engines named Ernest Bey, Junior responded when I asked about The Donald’s obsession with manifest destiny, other peoples’ sovereignty be damned.

“Take over whatever’s left of Ukraine? Yes, for the minerals,” he went on, “because I think that’s what the war was about in the first place.”

“We definitely need to get the Panama Canal back after Jimmy Carter gave it away,” said another man who emigrated from the Communist madhouse of Albania 30 years ago, but who still was afraid to give his name. “We can’t let China take superiority over our investment, because 10,000 men died to build it.”

But Canada?

“Canada’s our neighbour,” Ernest Bey, Junior reasoned. “It’s better to be friends with them. Once Trudeau is out of the way, we can get somewhere.”

“If Canada became the 51st state, I would go there,” Junior vowed. “I have a friend in Canada who I talk to every day. He says the health-care system looks great, but it doesn’t work — you wait for years to get treated. But if Canada and the United States became one conglomerate, they’d be booming, and together we could support a health-care system that would be the greatest thing in the world.”

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“Would you send in the Marines to take it by force?” I asked.

“They’d need to lay out the reasons,” Junior replied. “I think it’s not worth fighting for,”

“When our kids were young, we talked about moving to Canada,” a customer named Diane Lacombe related.

“The mountains! The forests! I hear the people are friendly,” she enthused. “The cities are beautiful. The health care.”

“Why didn’t you move?” I wondered.

“At that time,” she replied, “you had to have a sponsor, and we had three small kids, and we didn’t know anyone.”

“Should America just invade and take them over?” I asked.

“It would be a lot to swallow,” said Lacombe.

“Canada got to stay Canada,” that Albanian gentleman declared.

“Maybe the Canadians WANT to be part of the United States,” his wife suggested. “They like it when Americans go there.”

“Not anymore,” I contradicted. “They’ve been booing The Star Spangled Banner at hockey games.”

“OK, so we will go on our Albanian passports,” the woman smiled.

Stratford, New Jersey, is hardly a MAGA citadel. Kamala Harris carried the borough last November with 57 per cent of the vote. The town, population 7,000, has a Democratic mayor and an all-Democratic council and a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, and it lies in a state with two Democratic U.S. senators, one of whom recently replaced a longtime lawmaker named Bob “Gold Bar” Menendez, who was sentenced in January to 11 years in the penitentiary for accepting bribes that included bricks of solid gold bullion.

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At Tim Hortons, the only bouillon is in the chicken-noodle soup, but there was no evident enthusiasm for an incursion across the America River that would raise Maple Dip prices, leave the Toronto Blue Jays stranded in a one-team league, and be a double-double loss for all concerned.

“He’s not smart,” Ernest Bey, Sr., Junior’s father and his boss at the engine shop, said of the Commander-In-Chief. “He speaks like a fifth-grader. He’s just a slickster, that’s all he is.”

“Fifty-first state?” sniffed Bey, Senior. “No chance. Why would we want to make another place as bad as what we have?”

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