An American sent to Canada was shocked by how furious Canadians are at the U.S.
Canadians are well aware of the trade pressures and annexation talk from south of the border. But what do Americans think? New York magazine has devoted a sizeable portion of a recent issue — and its cover, featuring an angry beaver with a chokehold on a scrawny bald eagle — to the topic. Its headline: You Have No Idea How Furious the Canadians Are.
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Features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood flew into the war zone that is Canadians' anti-American sentiment. He writes that he reoriented his algorithms to flood him with CanCon, turned on push notifications from Canadian news sources, 'and temporarily moved my family north of the border,' travelling with his wife and child, and making Toronto his new home for a month.
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'I totally tried to Method-act and really put myself in the shoes of a Canadian,' he told National Post in an interview. 'To the extent that I was buying Canadian groceries and going to the Canadian LCBO. I tried to become one.'
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Van Zuylen-Wood said he and his editors hit on the idea for the article after the election of Prime Minister Mark Carney in March, which he described as 'an entire election … seemingly decided as a kind of referendum.' It solidified when Carney met with U.S. President Donald Trump two months later at the White House, during which Trump continued to talk about Canada becoming the 51st state.
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'As I started to make phone calls from New York, it became clear that I wasn't fully aware, and Americans in general weren't fully aware, of the scale of the reaction against America and the depth of feeling behind that,' van Zuylen-Wood said.
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And so he got on a plane to Toronto. He'd been to Canada before, and had what he called 'a journalist's baseline awareness of global affairs with our northern neighbour (and) a little bit of of added know-how due to … extended family.'
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'I know what the National Post is,' he said. 'I know what the Globe and Mail is. I know what the Toronto Star is. But nothing preparing me for what it's like to really live there, and to enter what I've been thinking about as a parallel universe.'
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'Anti-American resistance was visible as soon as I landed,' he writes in his article of his time at Toronto's Pearson airport. 'At a news kiosk … the cover of Maclean's, the de facto national magazine, teased '20 Reasons to Eat Canadian.' Inside was a letter from the editor about canceling a vacation to Cape Cod.' When he picked up the following issue, it contained articles about 'Why Canada Will Never Be an American State,' 'How to Fight Back Against Trump's Tariffs' and 'Fear and Loathing in a Canadian Border Town.'
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