Canadians Know Americans. They Don’t Want to Be One.

When Canadians say they don’t want to be part of America, they really mean it. And they know what they are talking about. Canada, where I was born and raised, has always had a peculiarly intimate knowledge of the United States, and not only because many Canadians spent winter breaks in the back seat headed south on I-95.

But if Canadians are at all times aware of their southern neighbor, the reverse isn’t true. I’ve lived in New York City for more than half my life, and I’ve learned that Americans generally refer to Canada only when it’s an election year and they’re threatening to move there. I long ago recognized they were not actually talking about the country Canada, but rather the idea of Canada, which seems to float in the American imagination as a vague Xanadu filled with polite people, easily accessible health care and a relative absence of guns.

This has changed, and not in a good way. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, he’s repeatedly threatened to pummel Canada with crushing tariffs and upend century-old border agreements. He seems determined to annex a sovereign nation, with a population of 40 million people, and delights in referring to it as the 51st state.

This has been, to put it mildly, unwelcome news to some 90 percent of Canadians, who do not want to exchange their citizenship for a U.S. passport, according to a January Angus Reid poll. Indeed, Canada is experiencing an unusual surge in nationalism in response to Mr. Trump’s bloviating. The Boycott America movement is going strong, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, now led by newly sworn in Prime Minister Mark Carney, has experienced a breathtaking turnaround in the polls.

What seems to get lost in much of the recent news coverage is that a large part of the Canadian identity — frustratingly so, at times — has long been based on not being American. (When the Canadian kids in my life are looking for a way to mock me, they tell me I’m acting like an American. That I’ve nearly lost the ability to tell the temperature in Celsius does not help my case.)

As Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau — Justin’s father — told Richard Nixon in 1969, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” adding, “one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”