WINDSOR, Canada – President Donald Trump’s threats to impose a growing list of tariffs on Canadian goods as well as his remarks about making Canada the 51st state are stirring alarm, mystification, fury and feelings of betrayal. Businesses in this border city on the Detroit River are struggling to navigate the mounting uncertainty.
Few places in Canada are more dependent on trade with the United States than Windsor, Ontario, where prosperity has long been tied to the automotive industry. Economists project Trump’s threatened tariffs of 25 percent on Canadian goods – which he reiterated on Wednesday would take affect March 4 – will tip Canada’s economy into a recession. They are expected to hit Windsor especially hard.
“It feels like a funeral,” said Jonathon Azzopardi, president of Laval, an auto parts and equipment manufacturer here. “That’s the only way I can describe it. We talk about tariffs and what happens? The whole mood of the room changes to something very somber, very dark.”
Each day, 8,000 trucks carrying $323 million worth of goods cross the aquamarine Ambassador Bridge connecting Windsor and Detroit, making it the busiest land border crossing in North America. A second bridge is slated to open this year to alleviate bottlenecks – an assist to the auto industry, which relies on parts to arrive at factories “just in time” to be assembled into finished vehicles.
Windsor is home to major assembly plants for Ford and Stellantis – the city’s largest employer – and hundreds of companies that manufacture parts and tools for the U.S. auto industry. Business leaders on both sides of the border warn the tariffs could kneecap the auto industry – fast.
“The industry will completely grind to a halt within days,” said Don Rodzik Jr., director of operations for the Windsor-based NARMCO, which produces metal stampings, “so that’s problematic for us.”
Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation have dominated the national debate and inflicted damage on U.S.-Canada ties that some say could be irreparable.
“They have changed forever,” said Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t do much business together … But there will be a generation of Canadians who will not trust Washington.”
One frosty day this month, a banner hung from a downtown Windsor office building, facing Detroit. “Canada,” it said, “is not for sale.”
Friends, partners, allies?
“Friends, partners, allies.” That’s how Canadian and American officials have long cast the ties between their two nations, which have shared not only the world’s longest undefended border, but also a history of fighting side-by-side on battlegrounds from Normandy to Kandahar. But now, many Canadians feel their alliance with a traditionally dependable neighbor is fracturing.
Vice President JD Vance recently called Canada’s record of being a close friend a “sob story,” and Trump has regularly threatened Canada’s sovereignty and said it is not “viable” as a country. The threats have stirred displays of flag-waving patriotism that are uncommon here.
Canadians have booed the “Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events. They’re boycotting U.S. products at supermarkets. WestJet, an airline, said Trump’s talk of tariffs and the exchange rate caused Canadian demand for U.S. trips to fall 25 percent in early February.
“It’s a sense of betrayal,” said Hilda MacDonald, the mayor of Leamington, a municipality home to many autoworkers who work in nearby Windsor. “We thought we were best friends, and we find out that that didn’t run as deep on the other side.”
Austin Welzel, an assembly line worker at Stellantis, said Trump’s threats have left him “angry.” For nearly two decades, he has gone to the NASCAR race at the Michigan International Speedway, but this year, in an act of resistance, he might stay home.
“It’s unfortunate,” Welzel said, “but I don’t feel the need to support the American economy if the Trump administration is going to potentially mess with our economy.”
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said he used his veto to cancel a bus that ferries 40,000 people to Detroit each year. If tariffs materialize, he will cancel the city’s sponsorship of the Detroit Grand Prix.
“It hurts me to do it,” Dilkens said. “I never thought I would be in this place to have to think that I’m thwarting off an economic attack by the United States against my country.”
Doing business at a time of uncertainty
Canadian officials are in Washington this week to tout their border measures after Trump cited concerns about fentanyl from Canada as one of myriad justifications for the levies. Less than 1 percent of fentanyl seized at U.S. land borders in the 2024 fiscal year came from Canada.
Trump said Thursday the 25 percent tariffs would go into effect “as scheduled,” on March 4.
Canadian officials have begun to consider reducing Canada’s reliance on the United States, which receives more than three-quarters of its exports. But in border communities like this one, that’s easier said than done, and many are hoping for a resolution to the dispute that keeps ties in tact.
North America’s auto industry is so integrated that a single part might cross the border seven times before a vehicle is ready for sale. Most of Canada’s auto exports go to the United States, and no domestic or international market can easily act as a replacement.
Personal cross-border ties run deep here. Some 1,600 Windsor nurses cross the border each day to work in Detroit. Families and friendships span the frontier. Windsorites cheer for Detroit sports teams. Some Michiganders have their first legal drink in Windsor, where the drinking age is 19.
The city of Windsor had recently appeared to be turning the corner after a long manufacturing slump. A $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant owned by LG and Stellantis – the first of its kind in Canada – is under construction and could ultimately employ 2,500 people.
“We’re really at an incredible time, at this inflection point in our city’s history,” Dilkens said, “and now this, which just kind of just has us all shaking our heads.”
Trump’s threats have left business leaders here struggling with the uncertainty. He announced and paused the 25 percent tariffs in the span of 48 hours. Next came a whirlwind of announcements on other possible tariffs – on steel, aluminum and autos, to name just a few.
“Given the amount of volatility we’ve seen from Washington, it’s been very dizzying to react right away to what you hear,” said Saylo Lam, president of Circle 5, an injection mold manufacturer. “You almost have to put a 72-hour rule and marinate.”
Some automotive business leaders here are holding off on making major new investments without clarity on the future or are shipping as much work out as possible before possible tariffs are imposed. Small auto parts suppliers might not survive even a brief trade war. Few companies have the margins to absorb the cost of a 25 percent tariff, business leaders said.
“It’s been very challenging to be able to forecast the workload that you have and your revenue,” said Lam. “Quite frankly … it’s probably more worrisome now than it was during the pandemic.”
Damian Bryce is the chairman of Flex-N-Gate Howard, a tool maker in Windsor that supplies the auto plants in the United States that make the Ford F-150 pickup truck and Jeep Cherokee. He worries tariffs will force Flex-N-Gate’s Michigan operations to absorb the Windsor plant.
Bryce said that he viewed the tariffs as a violation of the spirit of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the free-trade deal that Trump brokered during his first term and heralded as “the best agreement we’ve ever made.” It comes up for review next year.
“To throw out the baby with the bathwater and create all this havoc makes no sense,” he said.
Azzopardi called the tariffs “unfair, unwarranted, unneeded.” For decades, businesses and politicians in the area have done everything to make the U.S.-Canada border “seem invisible or nonexistent,” he added, and the tariffs would upend all that.
He likened it to the roots of two trees, growing deep beneath the soil and becoming more and more entangled, one year after the next.
“When you try to break those roots free, you’re likely going to kill them – kill them both,” he said.