On a Friday in September, more than 100 Americans boarded boats in the San Juans and set sail for British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island. The flotilla had a simple goal: to connect with their island neighbors that happen to be separated by an international border. A three-day festival spurred conversation and sparked new friendships.
In a time when President Donald Trump’s trade war has pushed the United States and Canada apart, the flotilla brought Canadians and Americans together. It showed that grassroots efforts can enhance the deeply cross-stitched cultural ties between the U.S. and Canada.
The Canadians of Salt Spring, for their part, were happy to oblige a request from the all-volunteer Orcas Island Yacht Club to come for a visit. An “overwhelming yes,” was the Salt Spring Chamber of Commerce’s answer, said its president, Jason Roy-Allen.
The resulting “Hands Across the Water” was like the inverse of an international incident. Panel discussions highlighted shared challenges like housing affordability, the health of the Salish Sea and the plight of Indigenous peoples who existed here long before a U.S.-Canada border. Yoga classes, soccer games and bike rides fueled the camaraderie.
“This is a moment where showing friendship is actually a pretty radical act,” Ross Newport, an Orcas Island resident and conceiver of the flotilla idea, said during the festival’s closing ceremony Sept. 21.
Newport noted chambers of commerce, yacht clubs and other local organizations might not be what people “normally think of as leading the fight for decency.”
But here we are.
This kind of citizen diplomacy is what’s needed if there is any hope in maintaining the bonds that created the world’s longest undefended border in the first place.
The political backdrop is stalled trade talks between U.S. and Canadian officials. Trump terminated them about a month ago over an anti-tariff advertisement funded by Ontario’s government.
But Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, a politician on the other end of the 5,525-mile U.S.-Canada border, said recently he was less worried about the trade spat.
“The deeper problem is the cultural break,” King said at the Halifax International Security Forum, as quoted by CBC. “The idea that Canadians don’t think of Americans as their friends and neighbors, but as adversaries.”
It is the U.S. president who’s running point on “the dumbest trade war in history,” declared The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. Trump has hiked tariffs on many Canadian goods by 25% while at times threatening to annex the country. Those aren’t just existential threats: many in Canada have responded by boycotting American goods. Citizens are afraid they could be detained at the border.
The result is plummeting border crossings — down 25% overall this year, a particularly damaging trend for communities situated along the economically interdependent borderlands.
President Ronald Reagan once said that “peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.” The U.S.-Canadian relationship, which built the longest peaceful border in human history, can endure. The question is who among us will rise to the occasion and form new bonds that can last beyond today’s political whims.
The onus is on Americans — and those of us in Washington state — to reach out to our northern neighbors. It might be as simple as planning a B.C. visit or as grand as connecting to a new sister city. Either way, the cultural bonds between the U.S. and Canada mustn’t be severed. It will take work — and more hands across the border.
