These border towns in Maine and Canada seemed inseparable. Now Trump and tariffs are putting them to the test.

Boston Globe

9 hours ago

The international border between Calais and St. Stephen was once little more than a formality between towns entwined by generations of marriage, history, and economics. Now, their relationship is being tested by global politics beyond their influence. Some Canadians here are refusing to cross into America, even to visit longtime friends or to buy cheaper gas and groceries.
'I wouldn't be comfortable crossing,' said Bruce Craig, 73, who handed out Canadian flag pins on the parade route in downtown St. Stephen, within sight of Calais.
Border crossings into Calais from St. Stephen began falling in February, after President Trump announced steep
'economic force' if necessary.
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People started on Main Street in Calais, Maine, as they participated in the International Homecoming Festival Parade on Aug. 9. The parade ended across the border in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Canadian flag pins lay on a Liberal party table at the festival in St. Stephen.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
'There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,' then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said early this year. He encouraged
Since March, monthly passenger vehicle crossings from St. Stephen to Calais are down about 30 percent from 2024, according to US Department of Transportation figures. The dropoff is even worse elsewhere along the US-Canada border: Canadian authorities have reported that nationwide, the total number of Canadians returning by car from US trips in June was down 33 percent.
Craig is one of the Canadians now refusing to cross into the US, a decision he made out of principle – and some concern about being hassled or detained for his political comments on social media. He's going to great lengths to avoid even stepping foot in America.
How great?
On a planned road trip this month to see a grandson in southern Quebec, he will not follow his usual route cutting through Maine – a roughly five-hour drive that would mean twice crossing the international border.
Instead, he will head north, staying in Canada and motoring the long way around the rounded top of Maine and then back down – a journey that will balloon a half-day trip into two days and require staying in a motel. It's going to be a big inconvenience, for sure, but his national pride is bigger.
'It was the fifty-first state thing, the slap to our sovereignty,' Craig said. 'That punched everyone in the head.'
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It may be hard to find two communities anywhere that have been as closely connected as Calais and St. Stephen, never mind two communities in different countries. People here have long shopped, worshiped, dated, and married across the border. Fans on both sides even cheer for the same sports teams, including the Red Sox and Bruins. Residents of the towns 'blithely tangle up their transborder economic and social lives without thinking twice about it,' a
Saturday Evening Post
reporter observed in 1946.
The precursor to the towns'
Bob Treworgy, of Calais, was elected to serve mayor of both Calais and St. Stephen for a week in 1961. The event, called Frontier Week, was the predecessor to the current International Festival.
Courtesy of St. Croix Historical Society
The 1961 event also featured Red Sox great Ted Williams, who played in the international softball game and competed in the fishing derby.
Courtesy of St. Croix Historical Society
Today, if you spend any time speaking to people in either town about their shared history, you will hear the gunpowder story. The flourishes change from person-to-person, but the basic thrust is this: During the War of 1812, when Calais and St. Stephen were technically enemies, St. Stephen gave their gunpowder reserves to their friends across the river in Calais, so the Americans could properly celebrate the Fourth of July.
The point of the story is not the facts, which may be apocryphal, but the truth beneath them. For hundreds of years, the towns have been inextricably connected.
Take Johnny Chambers, 50, who says his family has been here for five generations. He was born in Calais, lives in St. Stephen, and serves as the pastor of Common Ground Church of God, which sits in Calais. His wife is from St. Stephen. His parents live in Calais and own an inn in St. Stephen. He has a brother in Calais and a sister in St. Stephen, who in turn owns a business in Calais.
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'We're all a bunch of half-breeds up here,' he said.
Chambers crosses the border multiple times a day, he said, for work, for banking, for fun. To keep himself on track, Chambers keeps his wristwatch set to Eastern time, for when he's on the American side, and his phone to Atlantic time, for when he's in Canada. It's confusing and yet he loves it.
'What they say – 'two communities, two towns, and one heart'– is very, very true,' he said.
Though there have been articles in the Canadian press about Canadians detained at the US border, Chambers says the border has also been a magnet for social media misinformation. He has taken it upon himself to be a voice of reassurance for concerned friends – no, you're not going to be charged a fee to enter the US, he tells them, and no, the Customs and Border Protection officers are not going to tear your car apart conducting a search.
Chambers is confident that the vast majority of Canadians in the area still have no problem crossing into the US,
though those who won't make a lot of noise. It perhaps hasn't helped international relations that Calais, like almost all border towns in New England, voted for Trump in 2024.
'There are some people who hate the Orange Man – that's what they call him – and some who don't,' he said. 'I can tell you, it is difficult as a patriotic American to listen to Canadians bang on about American politics. Because they live under the umbrella of freedom and security provided by America.'
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Runners passed a pair of US Customs and Border Protection officers during a 5-mile race that crosses the border twice.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Calais and St. Stephen aren't rich places, and businesses in each town depend on border-crossing customers. Calais, population of about 3,100, has a median household income of about $48,650, some $25,000 below the Maine statewide average. Many locals work in the service industry, in health care, or at the paper mill in nearby Baileyville. The cost of living is low: if you can make $50,000, one man said, you can live a decent life.
But without through-traffic to and from Canada, Calais would be a poor town at the end of a dead-end road, as one American businessperson put it. When the international parade seemed in danger of being canceled this year, it was small business owners who rallied to help save it.
The parade began under a beating sun in the parking lot of a Calais motor inn, about a mile from the border. It included classic cars, floats advertising local companies, an ancient fire truck with a motor that wheezed and coughed, and members of a Canadian ATV club on their tricked out machines, some decorated in the theme of the Minecraft video game.
A US border officer in her black uniform ran alongside the parade handing out candy and tiny American flags to kids.
Along Main Street, the procession passed Jan McPhee, 72, of Calais, holding a sign at the curb that read: 'We love you! Canada Thank U 4 coming.'
'I have good friends over there and they are not coming over,' McPhee said of her St. Stephen pals, her voice thickening with emotion. She is 'embarrassed and heartbroken' by the Trump administration's provocations toward Canada, but feels powerless to do anything about it.
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'It's particularly hard for people on the border because we have more connections than people from, like, the Midwest,' she said. 'We see it, we feel it, we're sad about it.'
At one point, a woman passing in a parade float spotted McPhee's sign and jumped down, running over to hug McPhee like a long lost friend, though they'd never met. 'Thank you for bringing the sign,' the woman said.
In downtown Calais, the parade passed a table of laser art on birch and maple boards, by Bob Fitzsimmons, 61, a retired Baileyville chief of police. He, too, grew up in a blended family: A dad from Maine and a mom from New Brunswick.
Baby Miss International Rylee Holmes took part in the festival in St. Stephen.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Dallas Murray (right) took a sip of water as he competed in Jo's Pizza Eating Contest during the festival (he'd place second).
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Fitzsimmons said he and his buddies, from both Calais and St. Stephen, talk border politics all the time. 'Some messages could be better said with sugar than a kick in the butt,' he said. 'We've been not only neighbors but families for generations. To have the US kick our friends and pull the rug out, it's disheartening.'
Several Calais residents said they have noticed fewer Canadian license plates outside their bigger retailers, such as Walmart, where American and Canadian flags still hang from the ceiling inside. Local news organizations published stories this spring about the economic hit to Calais businesses.
As the parade turned toward the river, it passed Jo's Diner & Pizzeria, one of the first businesses you encounter when crossing from Canada into the US. The restaurant's owner, Tim Crowe, emceed the International Festival's pizza-eating contest (medical personnel stood by in case it turned into a Heimlich-maneuver contest).
Crowe has run the restaurant for about 16 years. He's cautious about saying anything disparaging that could offend a customer – people of all political persuasions and national allegiances buy pizza. Or at least they used to. He acknowledged business is down about 20 percent, due to Canadians staying on their side of the border.
'It gets worse depending on the news cycle,' he said. Pizza sales fall when harsh words are exchanged between Washington and Ottawa. When the rhetoric calms down, the numbers begin to tick back up, as Crowe waits nervously for the next clash. He just has to watch the morning news to anticipate the effect on his business. 'I think the only people who are experiencing this are the border towns.'
On the St. Stephen side of the border, the parade floats traveled parallel to the river for more than half a kilometer, past a sports bar with a wall mural of Boston Bruins general manager and former player Don Sweeney, the pride of St. Stephen. (Sweeney recalls attending the International Festival with family throughout his childhood, he said through a Bruins spokesman.)
Tracey Matheson, of St. Stephen, said she is among those who no longer cross the border to shop.
'It sucks because we like our deals over there,' she said. She empathizes with Calais business owners, but how else can ordinary Canadians take a stand against American government policy? 'What you're doing is wrong and there has to be consequences.
'We're Canadians,' she said, 'we love everybody, but don't [expletive] with us.' After the curse word slipped out, she covered her mouth with a hand. 'Oooo! I mean don't
mess
with us.'
Throughout Canada, companies are trying to cash in on the wave of nationalistic feelings, pushing their Made-in-Canada bona fides, said JP Lewis, a professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. It's already proving to be effective. The CEO of the big-box retailer
The Canadian government, Lewis said, is also encouraging Canadians to keep their money at home by reducing trade barriers between provinces. On Aug. 1, the toll on the Confederation Bridge connecting New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island was slashed from $50.25 to $20, making it cheaper for Canadians to enjoy their own Atlantic coast, rather than vacationing in the US.
The American side is feeling the squeeze. Last year, some 800,000 Canadian visitors spent almost $500 million in Maine, according to the state's Office of Tourism. Governor Janet Mills
People on the Canadian banks of the St. Croix River watched fireworks shot off from the Maine side.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Vicki Hogarth, a Canadian journalist covering the festival with CHCO-TV, a community television station in nearby St. Andrews, New Brunswick, said that the conflicts with the Trump administration are a coming-of-age moment for a country that has long been cast as understudy to the US star on the world stage.
'Before this we didn't really have the best idea of a Canadian identity,' she said. 'When you have these moments when you're being threatened, it was impressive that we could rise to the occasion. It is a really interesting moment to be a Canadian.'
Around the corner from the Don Sweeney mural, 33-year-old Michael Jacobs helped staff the welcome tent for Canada's Liberal Party, which rode anti-Trump sentiments to an election victory in the spring. 'President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us,' Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his victory speech. 'That will never ... ever happen.'
To Jacobs, who grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, about 90 minutes north of St. Stephen, it's all quite sad. 'Atlantic Canadians and New Englanders are so similar,' he said. He recalled his many vacations to the US – to Camden, Maine, Bar Harbor, and Boston. 'Every year our back-to-school shopping trip was to Freeport' – the Maine outlet store haven.
'I can't wait to go back to New England. We love America. We love visiting.'
Just not right now.
Out of principle and national pride, Jacobs said he won't cross the border until a new US president is in office. 'The alternative,' he said, 'is me giving tacit permission' for Trump's policies.
'Any Canadian who grew up along the border has fond memories of going to the US, and we look forward to making more memories – when the time is right.'
Mark Arsenault can be reached at