“It’s the type of event that you’d expect a prime minister and a president to meet in the middle [of the bridge], shake hands, and celebrate the relationship,” Dilkens said in a recent interview at Windsor City Hall, the river visible from the window. “Hopefully, our trade relationship normalizes and stabilizes.”
The combined metropolitan area of the Detroit and Windsor region includes 5.7 million people, On the U.S. side, 645,705 live in Detroit proper, among 4.3 million citizens of southeastern Michigan. Ford and Stellantis, which have their world and U.S. headquarters, respectively, in greater Detroit, run big plants in Windsor. But mutual ties go beyond shipping automobile parts and finished cars between the Motor City and its Canadian cousin. The mayor said 6,000 daily commuters—mostly engineers and medical workers—cross the U.S. border for jobs but live on the Canadian side. Beyond that, citing military alliances with the U.S. on D-Day in World War II and, more recently, in Middle East wars, Dilkens said of Canada: “We’re not a goddamn neutral country. We are an ally and a friend. And we are there with you. And we’ve got to figure this out. Because it’s gone to a dark place, and it never had to.”
In August, Trump raised tariff rates from 25 percent to 35 percent on Canadian goods not covered by other tariffs (like those on steel and aluminum) or by the United States–Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. In his first term, Trump often crowed that the USMCA was a personal diplomatic triumph that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement. But since then, he’s often said that Canada “has been ripping us off.”
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