A Library on the Canada-U.S.Border Is Ensnared by Trump’s Foreign Policy

Once upon a time, a wealthy widow who was a citizen of two neighboring countries hired craftsmen to raise a stately, turreted building of gray granite and stained glass windows. Only the finest wood adorned the reading rooms in its library. Cherubs soared over the proscenium arch in its opera house.

But the widow’s most important, and perhaps unusual, request was that the building sit exactly on the nations’ common border. Inside, black tape representing the boundary ran along the hardwood floors, a symbol not of division but of the enduring friendship between the two lands.

Then one day, the leader of the country to the south threatened to annex his neighbor to the north. One of his trusted emissaries visited the building.

“51st state,” she said, stepping north over the black tape. “U.S.,” she said, stepping back.

President Trump’s tariffs against Canada and his threats to turn it into a U.S. state have fueled a deep crisis among Canadians, forced abruptly to rethink their relations with their neighbor, the rest of the world and even among one another. But they have also upended small-town life across the borderland, where many Canadian and American communities had led intertwined and intimate lives.