Fear and Loathing in Canada’s Most American City
Like virtually everyone else who’s grown up in Windsor, Elaine Weeks spent much of her youth over the river, in Detroit. As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, she went to the Detroit Zoo and visited Santa at Hudson’s department store downtown. When she got a little older, she caught ball games at Tiger Stadium, ate tacos in Mexicantown and attended exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The city felt big, dramatic and thrilling; with a metropolitan population greater than four million people, it was more than 10 times the size of Windsor. It was also shockingly close. The Detroit River, which separates the two cities, is only a few hundred metres wide. Even when Weeks wasn’t physically in Detroit, she could hear and see it: the thump of concerts, the flashing of police sirens, the whine of race cars at the Detroit Grand Prix.
In so many ways, living in Windsor was like living in a suburb of an exciting American city. It was certainly the one that loomed largest, much more than Toronto, a four-hour drive away. And nowhere was the porous, undefended border between Canada and the U.S. more permeable. “We’re divided by water, but also connected by it,” says Weeks. “Our border is literally fluid.” In 2004, Weeks and her husband, Chris Edwards, started a small press called Walkerville Publishing. They’ve produced several books about local history and culture, and just about every one includes a bit about Detroit, too.
After Donald Trump was re-elected last November, it all changed. Weeks already had strong feelings about the president—she calls him “the orange maniac”—and when he began to publicly mock Justin Trudeau and muse about annexing Canada, Windsor’s proximity to Detroit suddenly seemed to Weeks less like an asset and more like a threat. The night of Trump’s inauguration, she lay awake imagining an American bomb attack on Windsor. “I was scared right away that they would send drones across the river,” she says. “Because they want Canada. I thought, We’re sitting ducks here.”
That particular fear subsided. But as the 51st-state rhetoric ramped up, and Trump unleashed his impulsive, incoherent tariff policy, Weeks fought back. This spring, she helped organize the Canadian side of a cross-border rally. In late March, about 500 Windsorites gathered at the foot of the Great Canadian Flag, an enormous maple leaf installed at the foot of Ouellette Avenue, facing the Detroit skyline. Across the water, in Detroit’s Hart Plaza, hundreds of Americans joined in solidarity. Protesters on both sides carried American and Canadian flags, brandishing homemade anti-Trump signs taped to hockey sticks.
Weeks made a speech, as did local politicians, poets and actors. “The American people have a very tough fight ahead of them,” she said, “and they are going to need the encouragement of their lifelong Canadian friends.” The two sides did the wave at the same time. It was pretty genial, as protests go—more like a block party, an expression of friendship and a rebuke to the cruel chaos of the American government.
It was also poignant, due to the countless points of connection between the two cities. Detroit is where many Windsorites have friends and romantic partners. It’s where their kids play in hockey tournaments. It’s where they go to dine or to watch major-league sports. It’s where more than 5,000 people from Windsor’s metropolitan area commute every day, including nearly 2,000 health-care professionals. Since 1983, the University of Windsor and University of Detroit Mercy have offered a joint program that allows lawyers to get degrees from both schools and practise on either side of the border. The two cities’ enormous Arab communities are so deeply entwined that you can buy shawarma poutine in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb. Windsorites use Fahrenheit when it’s hot and Celsius when it’s cold.
Most significantly, the two cities have been lashed together for more than a century by auto manufacturing and trade. Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1903 and, a year later, formed a joint venture across the river with the Walkerville Wagon Company. The partnership was mutually beneficial. The Canadian wagon maker’s fortunes were revived by Ford’s promising new technology, and—in an ironic twist of history—manufacturing in Canada allowed Ford to avoid tariffs levied in the British Empire on American goods. By 1924, Ford employed 3,400 people in and around Windsor. Every major American carmaker eventually followed: General Motors, Dodge, Chrysler. Combined, Detroit and Windsor were dubbed a “motoropolis.” At the same time, the city became a hub for Canada-U.S. trade. As of 2022, nearly $400 million worth of goods, about a quarter of all trade by value between the two countries, crossed the Ambassador Bridge or passed through the Detroit Windsor Tunnel every day.
Until the trade war, those connections were only deepening. In early 2022, Stellantis, the Netherlands-based company that now owns Chrysler, joined forces with LG to build a $5-billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Windsor, the first of its kind in Canada. That same year, Stellantis announced it would retool its Windsor and Brampton factories to produce EVs, pumping another $3.6 billion into that effort. The Canadian government is spending $6.4 billion to build a new multi-modal bridge, the Gordie Howe International Bridge, to further bolster trade and co-operation. It’s scheduled to open this fall. The result of all this integration was, until very recently, an uncharacteristic boom. Last year, Windsor’s economy was among Canada’s fastest-growing, and its population was exploding after years of modest growth.
The White House’s tariffs—including 25 per cent levies on steel and aluminum, as well as passenger vehicles and light trucks—have put a sudden stop to the boom. They’ve also effectively pitted Windsor and Detroit against each other. No Windsorite blames Detroiters for the situation; the city and its suburbs voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris. But that didn’t stop them from feeling a confusing mix of anger and betrayal. Renaldo Agostino, the city councillor for downtown, put it to me this way: “It’s like we’re next-door neighbours, our parents are fighting and we want to sneak out and play.”
Most Canadians have responded to the trade war, and Trump’s threats of annexation, with a defiant, unifying nationalism—and an instinctual protectionism of our own. We’ve cancelled vacations and academic conferences, boycotted Budweiser and avoided Amazon. This has been relatively easy in Toronto and Ottawa and Vancouver. Windsor hasn’t had that luxury; its elbows can only go up so high. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce said in February that the three Canadian cities most vulnerable to tariffs were Saint John, New Brunswick (because of its oil refinery and dependence on exports to the U.S.), Calgary (where the oil industry is headquartered) and Windsor.
In March, when tariffs went into effect, overall exports to the U.S. from Canada fell 6.6 per cent, and auto manufacturers began layoffs. Stellantis paused production in Windsor and in Mexico and laid off 900 workers at five U.S. factories. At a GM plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, hundreds more were laid off when the plant shut down. A plan to reopen at half capacity was announced later. In April, Windsor’s unemployment rate surged to more than 10 per cent—the second-highest urban unemployment rate in the country, 1.4 per cent higher than the month prior and three per cent higher than a year prior.
Canada has always grappled with its relationship to the U.S.: how similar we are, how different we are and how much we need one another. What is Canada without America? For Windsor, such speculation has always been sharper: without Detroit, would Windsor even exist?
I’m the rare Torontonian who spends at least a week or two every year in Windsor. I’ve got old friends there, both of whom work at the university, and I’ve developed a deep attachment to the city. It’s a modest, rough-and-tumble, boom-and-bust kind of place, struggling to get a handle on poverty, housing and sprawl. But, like its Rust Belt counterparts in the U.S., it has been reinventing itself as a multifaceted urban centre, complete with cutting-edge innovation, flourishing small businesses, inviting green spaces and a vibrant food scene. There are surprising pockets of physical beauty, such as the new Ojibway National Urban Park, the second national urban park in Canada. There is also more to experience culturally than non-locals might think. My perfect (admittedly touristy and bougie) day in Windsor would start with coffee at Chance in Ford City, followed by a long bike ride along the waterfront trail, a couple of hours browsing at Biblioasis—one of the finest bookshops in the country—and Lebanese food at Mazaar.
When I went down in early April to see exactly how trade turmoil was affecting Windsorites, the city felt like it always did. The cafés and restaurants were bustling. The mall was busy. The Stellantis factory—which normally employs more than 4,000 people—was in the midst of a two-week, tariff-induced shutdown, but even without a midday shift change, the afternoon traffic along Walker Road was bumper-to-bumper. Border crossings had slowed, but there were still plenty of people coming and going over the Ambassador Bridge.
Of the dozens of Windsorites I spoke with, almost everyone had been across at least once that week, for work or play or both. Some Detroiters were doing the same. A couple of Windsor locals told me about the surge of people coming over, some for the first time, to spend money and show support for Canada.
But all of this concealed a pervasive sense of dread. The border has thickened before—9/11, Trump’s first-term Muslim ban, COVID—but the trade war feels qualitatively different: more personal, more perplexing. One day, I passed by a landmark in Little Italy, a small residence known as Canada Dan’s house, famous for its flagrantly patriotic exterior, with a red-and-white fiesta of flags, polar bears and inukshuks. It sported a new message to Trump that captured the city’s conflicted mood: “Read our lips, Canada is not for sale. You can kiss us where the sun don’t shine and you can put a big ‘C’ in front of it.” It concluded with a more inspiring appeal to American patriotism: “Just like the Liberty Bell, let freedom and justice ring for everyone.”
Things are most tense at Stellantis and Ford, the city’s remaining auto factories. While the automotive industry has struggled for decades, battered by recessions, the pandemic and the loss of local jobs to automation and lower-wage jurisdictions, it still contributes more than $18 billion a year to the Canadian economy. As of last year, manufacturing directly employed 42,000 people in Windsor, one-fifth of the region’s entire employed labour force. Most of that is auto manufacturing, and the industry’s economic activity supports jobs throughout the city in restaurants, banks, hardware stores. Auto manufacturing has also influenced other local industries, spurring new developments in medical technology, agriculture and other advanced manufacturing. It’s fair to say that if the auto industry folded, the reverberations would reach far and wide throughout Windsor.
James Stewart, the president of Unifor Local 444, which represents Stellantis workers, seemed shell-shocked when I met with him. “We don’t sleep a whole bunch,” he said. “The hardest part of this is that it’s out of our control.” The sense of impotence, the inability to do anything, was something I heard often, but it seemed particularly painful and frustrating for a union leader. Stewart’s raison d’être is negotiation. Trump’s zero-sum disregard for trade agreements—even ones he’d signed himself—leaves no room for bargaining and nobody to bargain with.
Stewart has busied himself instead by talking to the Canadian leaders who’ll listen: Mark Carney and Doug Ford. When he had those conversations, he said the same two things over and over. One, eliminating tariffs has to be the number-one priority, no matter what Trump says or does on a given day. Two, respond strongly. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Sit back and don’t make it worse,’ ” Stewart said. “You do that, well, then our industry’s done.” He and other like-minded auto workers were apparently persuasive. In late March, Carney pledged a $2-billion “strategic response fund” to support the sector. Soon after that, the government hit back with a matching tariff on U.S.-made vehicles coming into Canada.
By the end of April, workers had returned to the Windsor Stellantis assembly plant. But there was no long-term schedule in place, and it was still uncertain how long the plant would stay open. Around the same time, the company announced that it was moving some Mexican production to Michigan. Such uncertainty, Stewart feels, has suddenly become a way of life in Windsor. “Canada could resolve this in the next month,” he said, “and then, two months down the road, Trump might say, ‘Ah, I’ve read Lord of the Flies and I’ve changed my mind and I’m doing something different.’ ”
Over at the Ford engine plant down the street, a similar mood prevails. Krysten Lawton’s family has been working at Ford for five generations. At 52 years old, she’s been there for 30 years, currently working as a health and safety trainer. Her husband, Chad, works there too, as do their two sons, both in their early twenties. “Automotive has always been a rollercoaster,” she told me. In the ’80s, during a recession and with interest rates upwards of 20 per cent, her family lost their house. She’s been laid off twice, most recently in 2011. Over the last three decades, she’s watched five other auto plants close in the city, mainly due to U.S. automakers’ exodus to countries with cheaper labour.
But the current trade war has been a whole other maddening and mystifying ordeal. Trump has positioned tariffs as a strategy to bring auto jobs back to the U.S., but to Lawton, such thinking betrays ignorance of the region’s shared history. American automakers have been in Windsor for more than a century—one of the city’s trendiest neighbourhoods is Ford City, formerly the company town that sprung up around Ford’s plants in the early 20th century. “We are not taking American jobs. These are Canadian jobs.”
Besides, Lawton argues, the tariffs threaten to destroy jobs in both countries. Her plant makes the 7.3 and the 6.8 Godzilla engines, which go in the company’s bestselling Super Duty trucks. There are about 2,000 parts that comprise each of those motors, and they’re made all over the world, including in China. Putting tariffs on those parts, she believes, is financial suicide. “Stellantis and Ford can absorb some costs,” she says. “But I don’t believe the companies can sustain a 25 per cent loss across the board with all their parts suppliers. Ultimately, it will bankrupt them.”
Don Rodzik Jr., the director of operations and general counsel at Narmco, one of Windsor’s biggest parts suppliers, is in complete agreement. The family-run metal stamping business has been around for 80 years. It sells, among many other products, body panels, oil pans and bumper systems to just about every major car company. It has plants in Windsor and the nearby communities of Chatham and Guelph, as well as in Alabama and Mexico. It employs about 1,500 people, half of those in Windsor.
When I met Rodzik in April, the tariffs were already taking their toll—the Stellantis shutdown had forced them to lay off 40 employees. Trump had also threatened to hit vehicle parts with 25 per cent tariffs no later than May 3, a situation Rodzik said would be catastrophic for both Canadian and American industries, given that auto parts can cross the border up to eight times before final assembly. Suppliers wouldn’t be able to absorb the levies, he said at the time, and the car companies wouldn’t want to pay them.
“If auto parts stop going across the border duty-free, that’ll grind the U.S. to a halt,” he said. “And when the U.S. grinds to a halt, this town will basically shut down, including us. Within a week, we’d be laying people off across the board.”
In that moment, Rodzik had no backup plan—he’d never considered that the auto industry would be so profoundly threatened. Eighty per cent of his company’s products go to the U.S. market. While it can theoretically stamp other products, such as household appliances or agricultural equipment, it has no contracts in those industries. When Rodzik walked the factory floor this spring, employees kept asking him: would they have jobs in a few years? He didn’t have a good answer. “That’s the heartburn,” he says. “The not knowing, the unpredictability. I don’t know how many conference calls I’ve had in the middle of the night. ‘How do we figure out this executive order?’ It’s tiring and it weighs heavy on people.”
To Rodzik’s great relief, after some heavy lobbying from American automakers, Trump softened somewhat—auto parts compliant with the existing Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement were shielded from tariffs for the time being. But Trump’s whimsy means that nobody in the auto industry can feel safe for long. If there is one thing Rodzik thinks might ultimately save the industry, it’s the co-dependence of Detroit and Windsor. Because the two industries have grown up together and are now so comprehensively integrated, you simply can’t attack one without damaging the other. “It’s so interconnected here,” Rodzik says. “And that’s the beauty of it.”
Every time the auto sector hits a bump in the road, so to speak, talk in Windsor turns to economic diversification. It happened after the 1965 auto pact signed between Canada and the U.S. ended in 2001, after the 2008 financial crisis and after the pandemic. An economic development report commissioned by the city in 2020 stated that “diversification beyond manufacturing is the key to Windsor’s future.” Trump has inadvertently made that objective even more urgent, as well as much harder.
Ryan Donally is an ex–pro hockey player who played four years on the farm teams of the Calgary Flames and Anaheim Ducks in the 2000s. He previously held several planning and economic development positions in the municipality of Lakeshore, just east of Windsor. He became the head of the Windsor Essex Chamber of Commerce in late January, a week after Trump’s inauguration. Immediately, his days were consumed by the tariffs. By early February, he’d formed a task force with several of the region’s major business leaders to hammer out some kind of strategy. Part of that involved reaching out to Americans directly.
In interviews with Fox News and other U.S. networks, Donally reminded Americans how much Trump was undermining his own base in the Midwest, and reinforced the closeness between the two countries. “We can’t sell our house,” he told me. “Michigan can’t sell its house. This relationship isn’t going away. And it’s important for us to maintain it, because three years or four months or eight days from now, when the Trump administration has theoretically run its course, this relationship will need to continue.”
Maintaining Windsor’s closeness to the U.S., while simultaneously broadening its economy beyond it, has proven to be a thin, difficult tightrope to walk. Detroit is just a 10-minute drive away. The next province over is an eight-hour drive. And the relationship with Detroit is key to any kind of diversification. Just as open, mutually beneficial ties to the U.S. made the auto sector so strong for so many years, those connections have also been imperative for growing any other major local industry.
Agriculture was already flourishing in the region before the tariffs—about 28,000 jobs, if you count people who build the lighting for greenhouses, say, or manage logistics. So far, it’s still going fairly strong. The local tourism business is more complicated; it depends on friendly relations between the two cities. While there are a growing number of attractions for Canadian tourists in and around Windsor (a handful of nearby wineries, the new urban park, and did I mention the Lebanese food?), one-third of all visitors are American. That includes many looking to get a discount on their dollar at the casino and the mall.
Councillor Renaldo Agostino, who owned restaurants and nightclubs in the city before he went into politics, has long promoted what he calls a “two-nation destination,” in which the two cities mutually benefit each other. Americans go to Windsor-Essex because their dollar goes further—1.7 million Americans visited the region in 2023, most of them daytrippers. At the same time, Canadians might travel to Detroit to watch the Red Wings play, but still stay in a Windsor hotel and eat in Windsor’s restaurants. Every time a Detroit team gets into the playoffs, in fact, Agostino does a flag-raising in Windsor.
Even if local autoworkers are justifiably outraged by Trump’s behaviour, Agostino argues, the gravitational pull of Detroit is strong. “I don’t care what anybody says,” he told me. “If U2 books a show at Comerica Park this summer, you might say, ‘Ah, I hate America, but I’m still going—it’s U2.’ ”
The local tech industry, still relatively nascent but growing rapidly—more than 18,000 jobs in 2024, up 58 per cent over the previous year—has followed a similar script. Yvonne Pilon, CEO of WEtech Alliance, a non-profit tech incubator, says that Windsor’s competitive advantage has always been due to its status as a gateway to the U.S. market. Many of the local startups that Pilon works with make software, which doesn’t cross borders, per se, making it relatively safe from tariffs. A number of these startups are tied to the auto sector, but plenty aren’t. Speaking to Pilon made me think hard about a question that feels almost taboo in Windsor: should the city get out of the auto business altogether? Can it? Ryan Donally is aghast at the thought. “We’re talking double-digit unemployment rates within weeks,” he says. “There have been diversification efforts and, yes, they’re continuing, but you remove auto from our industry today and we’re in a very difficult spot.”
When I asked Pilon if the tech sector could replace those jobs, she suggested that it was possible, eventually, with the right long-term investment and infrastructure. “Don’t waste a good crisis,” she said. She rhymed off a couple recent economic developments that had put some wind in the sector’s sails—the battery plant, of course, but also a new automotive innovation incubator that Mercedes-Benz planned to open.
It’s unlikely that a small city like Windsor, especially with Waterloo and Toronto not too far away, could scale up its tech ecosystem enough to replace the auto industry’s impact. But if it ever could, it would be most likely to do so by exploiting its greatest advantage: its access to Detroit and the surrounding American market. For example, WEtech has long partnered with its cross-border counterpart TechTown Detroit, and the two organizations have, among other things, created an initiative called Hacking Health Windsor Detroit to connect entrepreneurs, students and investors on both sides of the border. While the trade war has certainly made things more unpredictable, those relationships have remained strong. “The nice thing about startups is that their job description includes uncertainty,” Pilon says.
Krysten Lawton, the Ford worker, can barely imagine Windsor without the auto industry. “It would be devastating,” she says. But she’s been through so many tough times before, and Trump has forced her to take this thought experiment further. She’s now telling her children that they need a backup plan. Prior to working at Ford, her oldest son had been in construction, and there is the chance that he might return to that. But her youngest has just started a four-year apprenticeship at Ford. At this point, he has nowhere else to go.
A 15-minute drive away, though, on the other side of the city, I found a glimmer of possibility. Optimotive manufactures autonomous wheeled and tracked robots for use in the construction, mining and oil and gas industries. The nine-year-old company, which has offices in Windsor and Miami (the American office will soon relocate to Detroit), has been extremely successful. Last fall it received US$2 million in new investor funding, and it has clients in North America and the Middle East. The company’s founder and CEO, Scott Fairley, gave me a quick tour and showed off a couple of the robots, proud as a dad at his toddler’s first T-ball game.
After a week of glum, fearful conversation, the positive vibes were comforting. Optimotive had to deal with the headache of the tariffs too—some of its parts had been hit coming into Canada from the U.S.—but Fairley experienced this less as an existential threat and more as the cost of doing business.
Based on the name of his company I could have guessed his perspective, but when I asked him what he thought about the potential collapse of the auto industry, he was sanguine. Building robots, he said, is not that different from building cars. He can easily imagine a future in which auto workers transition to the industry he is creating. In effect, he’s getting ahead of the challenge. “Every problem is also simultaneously an opportunity,” he told me. “There’s a lot of great talent here in manufacturing and industrial automation, which has parallels to what we do,” he says. “It might be bad for the region as a whole, but then we have our pick of the litter.”
If there’s one thing that’s characterized Trump’s nihilistic, irrational attack on democracy and the world order, it’s been his relentless attempts to turn people against each other. He’s divided Republicans from Democrats to a historic degree, but he’s also divided white Americans from Americans of colour, rich Americans from poor ones and America as a whole from other countries. The pernicious goal of such division, for a transactional, predatory mind like Trump’s, is to sever ties and create dependence—on him. Once isolated, it’s easier to dominate someone, coerce them, rip them off.
Windsor and Detroit offer a way, however imperfect, of resisting this. The story of the two cities is fundamentally a repudiation of Trump’s dark vision. It is a story of friendship, mutual aid and economic co-operation. Boycotts and reactionary nationalism were natural, inevitable responses, but they were also what Trump wanted.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the border closure felt different—less personal, more cruel—Elaine Weeks and Chris Edwards were working on a coffee-table book explicitly about the long, intimate relationship between the two cities. It contains stories about Detroit firefighters saving Windsor from fire in the 19th century and Windsor repaying the favour a hundred-odd years later, when buildings were set alight during the 1967 riots; about the evolution of border enforcement; about cross-border shopping. They titled it A River Runs Between Us, and in the preface wrote that it was “a tribute to two remarkable cities, bound by history, divided by water and, through thick and thin, united in peace, resilience and shared spirit.” It’ll be out in the fall.
But it won’t be launched in Detroit, at least not yet. Weeks hasn’t crossed the border in months, and doesn’t know when she’ll return. She’s started a Facebook group called “Hands Off/Elbows Up” and continues to organize rallies and protests. The sounds of Detroit still drift across the river. Like everyone in Windsor, she watches and waits. “It’ll be back,” she says. “I mean, it’s not going to be forever.”
