The Angry Canadian

The Atlantic

14-03-2025

Since 2018, Doug Ford has been the unlikely premier of the province of Ontario, a close equivalent to the governor of a U.S. state, if more governors looked like longshoremen and gave out their personal-cellphone number to anyone who asked for it. (I didn't ask Ford for his, but he volunteered it to me anyway when he found out I was a local. 'Text twice if it's important,' he told me. He had 4,616 messages waiting for him.) An old-school retail politician with more than 16 million constituents, Ford is the pugnacious, barrel-shaped leader of a near-trillion-dollar economy at an especially tender time: President Donald Trump has been threatening to bankrupt it, waging a trade war until Ontario and the rest of Canada capitulate and become 'the 51st state.' Many of those 4,616 messages were from Canadians scared out of their mind.
Ford has always found ways to elevate himself with almost insultingly simplistic positions, showing little interest in the more complex issues of governance. In his first campaign for premier, Ford won on a promise of 'buck-a-beer,' vowing to drop the minimum price for a bottle of suds from $1.25 to $1. As a campaign tactic, the ploy worked, but Ford never managed to lower prices.
This time around, he saw a grander opportunity in Trump's then-looming tariff threats and called a snap election for last month, more than a year early. Ford, the leader of Ontario's center-right Progressive Conservatives, took a shot at Trump's red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats by wearing a blue one that read CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE. Canadians began ordering the hats by the tens of thousands.
Ford hoped his suddenly patriotic electorate would forget about the province's struggling hospitals and colleges, its bonkers traffic, and the indiscretions that have marked his tenure, including a real-estate scandal that is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. 'It's all about communicating with the people,' Ford told me. His phone buzzed constantly with encouragement—he leaves it on at night but has learned to sleep through its vibrations—and he was elected to his third majority government, an achievement that hasn't been seen in Ontario since 1959. Turnout was low because the conclusion was foregone: When Ontarians looked at the candidates and thought about who they'd want to have with them in a fight against Trump, the choice was obvious.
They picked Doug Ford.
Earlier this week, he seemed set to deliver on his promise to 'protect Ontario,' backed by broad, sometimes vitriolic public support. The province generates enough power to sell its surplus to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota, providing light to about 1.5 million U.S. homes and businesses. On Monday, the price went up.
'We will apply maximum pressure to maximize our leverage,' Ford said at a packed press conference in Toronto, announcing a 25 percent surcharge on America-bound power. 'If necessary, if the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.'
He'd already ordered American liquor off store shelves and canceled a $100 million Starlink contract, but the electricity surcharge was the start of an especially dramatic, tension-filled week. On Tuesday morning, Trump escalated: He slapped an additional 25 percent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum in direct response to Ford's electricity surcharge, on top of the 25 percent tariff Trump was already going to impose. Ford countered with another lightning round of the American TV appearances that have seen him become the crimson face of Canadian anger. 'Stay tuned,' he said.
Hours later, Ford blinked. By Tuesday afternoon, he had suspended the electricity surcharge, saying that 'the temperature needs to come down.' Trump, in turn, canceled the additional metals tariff, reverting to his original 25 percent imposition, and then took his predictably ungracious victory lap. 'President Trump has once again used the leverage of the American economy, which is the best and biggest in the world, to deliver a win for the American people,' the White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.
Ford said that a conciliatory call from Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary, and the promise of an in-person meeting had convinced him to take a step back. 'It's called an olive branch,' Ford said. He was also under pressure from his fellow premiers, who were concerned about his high-stakes freelancing; most of the aluminum that Trump was crushing under his retaliatory tariffs comes from Quebec, not Ontario. 'I only speak for the province of Ontario,' Ford said when announcing his pullback. 'I want to reaffirm that I don't speak for any other premiers.'
Whatever the reasons behind Ford's about-face, it felt like a quick, even humiliating, fold—not just for him, but for every Canadian who agrees with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Trump represents 'an existential crisis' to their way of life.
'Will you really turn out the lights?' I'd asked Ford on Monday.
'Don't think I won't,' he'd said.
At the time, he seemed to mean it. His next move, and Canada's, was much less clear.
Most Canadians recognize that an all-out trade war would devastate their economy. Many have also long felt a low-level antipathy toward the U.S., held back for decades by fear and the desire to be good neighbors. But just as Trump has given permission for other suppressed thoughts to be expressed out loud, he has set loose a wave of Canadian discontent: Now that he's threatening to annex Canada anyway, Canadians don't have much to lose by booing the U.S. anthem at hockey games. They can finally say how they really feel, and for a few weeks at least, Doug Ford became their principal proxy.
After he'd announced his short-lived electricity surcharge, Ford returned to his office at Ontario's Legislative Building, which is made of pink sandstone and known colloquially as Queen's Park. He has never spent much time in it. 'His phone is his office,' an aide told me. Room 281 has a single, conspicuous book on its many shelves, titled With Faith and Good Will: 150 Years of Canada-U.S. Friendship. The battleship of a desk is bare except for a lamp that might not be plugged in and a gold plaque that reads FOR THE PEOPLE. Behind it, a tufted leather chair is likewise empty. The premier refuses to sit in it.
'Don't ask me why,' Ford said. 'I didn't do it for a few years, and then it was done.'
We took to a pair of couches instead. Ford is a solid man, 60 years old but robust, and he sat on the edge of his seat, coiled like a spring. I asked him how he'd introduce himself to Americans who haven't caught one of his many appearances on CNN or Fox, the lonely book on Ford's shelf now feeling like a relic from a forgotten age.
'Elbows up,' he said, using a hockey term that has become a Canadian rallying cry. A 'Gordie Howe hat trick' is a goal, an assist, and a fight; Howe once said that swinging an elbow was his favorite method of on-ice retribution. Mike Myers recently mouthed 'Elbows up' when he appeared on Saturday Night Live to mock Elon Musk. Trudeau said it last weekend.
'Elbows up,' Ford said again. 'Everyone's elbows are up.'
Americans tend to think of Canadians as 'nice' and find the idea of angry Canadians funny. They are wrong on both counts. Americans are nicer than Canadians—warmer, friendlier, more gregarious. Canadians are polite. The difference is subtle but important. There is an unwritten civility contract girding every aspect of Canadian society. The Canadian equivalent of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' is 'peace, order, and good government,' so enshrined in the constitution since 1867. Most Canadians want uncomplicated lives, a desire for calm that can be misinterpreted by louder people as meekness. This is also a mistake.
The bedrock of Canada's collective tranquility is the knowledge that misbehavior will not be tolerated, and, as in hockey, violations of the code of conduct will be met with hair-trigger aggression. Try cutting a line and see what happens.
Canadians say 'sorry' a lot, not because they've done anything wrong, but because apologies are demanded of them from birth until they learn to live right. Treading gently becomes habit. If I let you into traffic—which I will, because I'm not a child—you need to acknowledge my generosity with a wave, and then we will both go about our day feeling good about ourselves; if you fail to wave, I will get very upset about it, unless you realize your mistake and apologize, in which case we have a good chance of becoming friends. In Canada, conducting yourself honorably after a scrap makes the disagreement disappear. What matters is that you're a stand-up bud.
To a large majority of Canadians, Trump is the opposite of a stand-up bud, and Americans are to blame for electing him. Last week in Calgary, some ominous graffiti showed up on the Centre Street Bridge. 'There is no enemy like a friend betrayed,' it read beside a crossed-out image of an American flag. Two months ago, Canadians sent water bombers to help fight the Los Angeles wildfires. Then Trump ramped up his '51st state' and 'Governor Trudeau' trolling, and now come his tariffs. None of it sounded like a joke to Canadians, because it wasn't a joke. It's the biggest failure to wave back ever, and Canadians know better than to expect an apology.
For many, that takes friendship off the table.
Trump likes to play make-believe gangster. Doug Ford shouldn't have needed to pretend. 'He's met a different type of cat,' Ford said to me on Monday. 'He's up against the Fords. We've done stuff that no other politician would ever do.'
Canadians like a little crackle in their representatives. In 2012, Trudeau fought and won a charity boxing match against Patrick Brazeau, a Conservative senator, and became prime minister not long after. (Last week, Brazeau challenged Donald Trump Jr. to a fight, an offer that, so far, has gone unaccepted.) In 1996, Jean Chrétien, one of Canada's most popular prime ministers, brought down a protester who got in his way on Flag Day. Chrétien, who hails from Shawinigan, Quebec, saw his choke hold immortalized as 'the Shawinigan handshake' and won a second majority the next year.
Ford, a.k.a. 'DoFo,' has always been his own kind of heavy, a machine seemingly custom-made to take on someone like Trump. His father, Doug Ford Sr., made a fortune with a sticker company that became Deco Labels & Flexible Packaging, purveyors of labels and plastic wraps for groceries. After 60 years, the company is still one of Ontario's largest printers. Ford Sr. and his wife had four children: Kathy, Randy, Doug, and Rob. He also dabbled in provincial politics, serving one term in the 1990s as the Conservative representative for Etobicoke-Humber, in what used to be Toronto's western suburbs. Doug, regarded as the brains behind any Ford operation, helped run his father's campaign.
Doug Ford Jr. dropped out of college after two months but earned his own education at his father's shoulder and, according to a 2013 investigation by The Globe and Mail, as 'a go-to dealer of hash' in the 1980s, when he was in his teens and early 20s. (Ford was never criminally charged for his alleged drug dealing and vehemently denied the suggestion at the time.) Several sources told the newspaper that Ford was both envied and admired for the way he conducted his less legitimate enterprise—that he was savvy, careful, and controlled, an almost cinematic exemplar of the trade.
Another source said that Randy, who today runs the labels company with Doug, had his own drug operation and favored different tactics. (His lawyer called the allegations 'a smear campaign.') According to the Globe, when Randy was 24, he was charged with assault causing bodily harm and forcible confinement after a customer fell behind on his credit and spent 10 hours locked in a basement. Kathy, largely invisible, has suffered more serious calamity. In 1998, her lover was shot and killed by her ex-husband; in 2005, she survived a gunshot to the face after a mysterious episode in her parents' house.
Only Rob, the youngest of the Ford siblings, grew up relatively insulated from the family's chaos, although his turn would come. Like Randy and Doug, he was a formidable specimen, a human tank topped with a turret of spiked blond hair. Following an uninspired spell working for his father in sales, he decided to try his hand at local politics. Doug managed each of Rob's campaigns for a seat on Toronto's council, which he first earned in 2000 and defended twice. In 2010, Rob was elected mayor, campaigning in part by randomly sticking magnets with his phone number on parked cars, and Doug took Rob's former council seat, his opening taste of front-room politics and a chance for the brothers to serve their city together.
In many ways, the Fords were proto-Trumps, proving adept at turning private scandal into surprising public popularity. In 2014, I was sent by Esquire to profile Rob Ford, who had become famous, and weirdly celebrated, for getting caught on video smoking crack. Doug remained his brother's keeper. 'We love Americans,' he told me, assuming I was one, and I didn't correct him. From the outside, Rob Ford's story was treated comedically because he was fat and some of the scenes from his tenure were surreal. During one press scrum, after he'd been accused of telling an aide that he wished to perform oral sex on her, the mayor issued an unusual denial: 'I'm happily married,' he said. 'I've got more than enough to eat at home.'
Rob Ford was in fact a tragic figure. He was addicted to drugs and alcohol despite his best efforts to quit them. When I met him, he claimed to have been sober for more than 10 weeks and to have lost nearly 30 pounds. 'I'm never going back,' Rob said. Not long after, a video surfaced of him drunk in a Jamaican restaurant speaking a butchered version of patois. He died two years later, at 46, of pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare and terrible cancer.
Today, the largest piece of art in the premier's mostly unused office is a giant photograph of a triumphant Rob being lifted into the air by a high-school football team he once coached. When Doug Ford looks over his shoulder and sees his lost brother, Rob is forever winning.
'A lot of people over the years have counted us out,' Ford said. He was sometimes known as 'Angry Doug' in his early years in office. He has since trained himself to have only two public expressions. One is flat and vaguely benign, like he's daydreaming while waiting for a bus; the other is a wide smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, like he's at a party that he wants to leave.
But every now and then, for a flash, his mask slips off and the real Doug Ford shines through.
'The last thing you should ever do is count a Ford out,' he said.
And there he was.
All along, Ford's stated goal was to get everyone to sit down and renegotiate the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, the free-trade agreement that Trump himself brokered in his first term and called 'great for all of our countries.' ('I guess he doesn't think it is anymore,' Ford said.) It's possible that Lutnick asked Ford to soothe the president with Tuesday's easy win, that a new free-trade agreement will be negotiated, and that Ford's brief electricity gambit will help Trump understand that it's time to pick on somebody else. (Trump called Ford 'a very strong man from Canada' after Tuesday's back-and-forth.)
But Trump, who by now may well have forgotten Doug Ford's name—Lutnick called him 'some guy in Ontario' on Tuesday—has threatened to tear up other long-standing border and water-sharing agreements with Canada. Appeasement seems impossible. Mutual trust has been replaced with Canadian resignation that the medium-term pain of finding new, more reliable friends (and trading partners) is the best of the bad options. It's going to hurt. Canceled vacations are just the start. 'We will never again put ourselves in the position of being so dependent on the United States,' David Eby, the leftist New Democratic premier of British Columbia, said last week. Someone else will buy Canadian aluminum, and maybe when the U.S. runs out of airplane parts, and the markets continue to tank, Americans will teach Trump the lessons that Doug Ford can't.
A more immediate change is coming to Canada's federal government. On Sunday, Trudeau was replaced as the Liberal Party leader by Mark Carney, an economist and the former governor of the banks of Canada and England who brought the U.K. through the calamity of Brexit. 'We will have to do things that we haven't imagined before, at speeds we didn't think possible,' Carney said after he'd claimed the leadership. He will reportedly rush to call an election to try to secure his mandate as prime minister. If he wins—he's already picked his slogan, 'Canada Strong'—he will take over as the brains of the Canadian operation, in concert with his colleagues in Europe. On Wednesday, the Liberals hit back at Trump with tariffs on more than $20 billion of U.S. goods, including computers and cast iron. Doug Ford, perhaps happily, might soon be reduced to the role of chief muscle.
First, though, Canadians, like Ontarians before them, will have to decide their votes by answering a single question: Who will best defend them from Trump's attacks? Before the president's bullying campaign began, the Liberals looked doomed, bound to suffer a beatdown at the hands of the federal Conservatives, led by a career politician named Pierre Poilievre. But Poilievre, who has often echoed Trump's anti-'woke' rhetoric, was surprisingly slow to react to the national mood. Only this week, Poilievre said Carney was using Trump 'to distract' Canadians from more substantive issues, an accusation that one columnist deemed 'insane.' Now the race is close to a dead heat.
'I couldn't answer that,' Ford said when I asked him why the same crisis that had elevated him, however temporarily, has diminished Poilievre, even though they represent the same party. 'I don't care about political stripes. You'd have to ask him.'