While Canada boycotts the U.S., don't most British Columbians have more in common with Washingtonians than Albertans?

I visited the state recently, here's an open letter to Bellingham Mayor Kim Lund in response to hers: 'Don't worry Mayor Lund, we are still coming'

Dear Mayor Lund,

Thanks so much for your letter of May 19, 2025, in which you expressed “kindness over animosity” and your commitment to your connection to Canadians along with deep-rooted social, cultural and economic ties.

I mean, shucks, it felt like a love letter, and while I get that it wasn't just about our economic relationship, we do love Trader Joe’s.

“Though we live in separate nations, we share longstanding, collaborative relationships with the Indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with the land and the water for thousands of years,” you wrote. “We share the same responsibility for the families who have come to depend on generations of uninterrupted, cross-border transportation and commerce; we share the same deep appreciation for the people from a wide range of cultures, identities, backgrounds, and experiences who have come to call this region home.”

Warm and welcome sentiments, each sentence of which I read in my head followed by an unwritten addition along the lines of “… despite what that *&@$ guy currently in the White House is doing.”

Your words fit nicely with Washington state legislature’s house resolution 4659 from April affirming a commitment to strengthen the bonds shared between our countries for more than 150 years. 

It’s been four months since Trump’s inauguration and for many of us, and I bet for you too, it’s felt like four years. 

Up here people were booing the Star-Spangled Banner at hockey games, sharing memes about how Trump is a fascist, all amid the backdrop of a growing campaign to boycott America. All of this was understandable, I'm sure you can understand, but boycott all of America? I don't know. I mean, there’s a big difference between Florida and Oregon, Utah and Tennessee. Y’all are acting pretty weird of late but we don’t want to hate America.

There is an argument to be made that most of us in and around the municipalities you sent your letter to have a lot more in common with the folks in Bellingham or Tacoma or Seattle than we do with most people in Lethbridge or Red Deer or Edmonton. (That's in Alberta. It's kind of like our Texas, north of Montana.)

A lot of people are consciously boycotting American products and avoiding travel to the U.S. but I’m not one of them. Well, I've always tried to buy as local as possible, but I'm not specifically boycotting Washington.

In August, I’m going down to Remlinger Farms in Carnation to see LCD Soundsystem. I’m disappointed I don’t have tickets to also hit Remlinger Farms to see one of my favourite bands, Modest Mouse, in September. (Can you get me tickets?) I also can’t wait to hit the Neptune Theatre in Seattle in December to see my favourite band, The Mountain Goats. A lot of great bands tour the U.S. and sometimes skip Vancouver for whatever reason but rarely do they skip Washington.

A Canadian visits Trump’s America

Let me tell you about my last visit since he was in the White House, a weekend a couple of months ago to see Comedian Tom Papa at The Moore Theatre.

I drove over the 49th Parallel at Sumas with a friend, went down to Seattle and stayed overnight. On the way down, we stopped at Sonic Drive-In in Marysville for double smash burgers and fries. We do not have drive-in burger joints in Canada. It’s weird and amazing and so American. We took our burgers and ate them at the Tesla Supercharger at the Tulalip outlet mall where I bought some sweet checkered shoelaces at the Vans store to go with my checkered Vans.

When we arrived in Seattle, we checked in to the Palihotel on Pine Street. As I went to park the car, I made a dumb tourist driving move, and a woman in a Subaru with a bumper sticker that said “I’m so gay I can’t drive straight” leaned on the horn for about five seconds and swerved around me. Love it.

Then I saw two larger female tourists stopped at the corner across from The Moore on rented e-bikes. I and other drivers watched in horror as one of them fell over in slow motion at the curb. I laughed and others did too, but only when we saw that she was OK and both women were laughing themselves. 

As I walked to the hotel, a woman on the street walked up behind me and told me she liked my hoodie with it’s positive message. Then a young man asked how long I’d had my dreadlocks. I gave my usual response to people in their 20s who ask: “Since before you were born.”

The cliché is that Americans are more commonly jerks and Canadians are so nice, right? Not so fast. None of that would have happened on the streets of Vancouver where everyone avoids eye contact and does their own thing. 

We wandered down to Pike Place Market, and the first thing we saw was a piano and a rough-looking older guy getting ready to play, I think. Then we watched a coiffed woman with a beige Burberry coat put a $100 bill on top of the piano and walk away. The man’s back was turned so my friend grabbed the bill noticing it was about to blow away. We handed it to him. His eyes lit up and he thanked us, but we quickly pointed out that it wasn’t from us: “It was that lady walking up the hill.” 

He looked closer, turned the bill over and instead of your great president Benjamin Franklin (whose words I have tattooed on my arm) it had Donald Trump’s face on it with a smarmy grin. It was a fake. So a wealthy turd thought it would be funny to punk a street performer?

We noticed the woman with her bottle blonde friend as they ducked down an alley, peeked out, watching and laughing. My friend gave these American Karens a Canadian middle finger for being so mean. 

America. So great. So far so nice. But there was a glimmer of nasty.

Pike Place Market is obviously a very popular tourist attraction, sort of like Granville Island in Vancouver but more eclectic like Kensington Market in Toronto. It’s much larger and more diverse than the latter, much less pretentious than the former.

We saw the fish throwing guys. The gum wall. Some great graffiti. Grabbed a pork stick and a bbq pork bun and walked around.

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Later we went out to dinner, then to the Moore. After that we went to the Black Cat Bar, described to us as a dive bar by a hipster at the hotel. To my mind it was more like a hipster bar, but I guess a hipster bar to a hipster is a dive bar because a dive bar is hip. There were great pinball machines, bad mixed drinks, and good music played loudly: Metallica, Tupac, Beastie Boys. We almost had to remind ourselves we were in the U.S. not East Vancouver. 

As a Canadian watching the news, it’s all too easy to see America as a nation tearing itself a part, going in the wrong direction, and to see us up here in Canada as holier than thou. But with your two-party system and incredibly tight races for president, you are a divided nation. It’s not like we aren’t somewhat of a divided nation as well with Conservatives (your GOP) and Liberals (our Dems) fighting the same fight. The latter narrowly won our recent election, likely because our right wingers have taken a page out of the MAGA playbook and most Canadians aren’t having it.

Trump might want to annex Canada as the 51st state, a ridiculous concept that has already started to disappear as if it was indeed a joke. But let me tell you, even here we have small, if loud, groups of right-wing evangelical Christians who would love that. They would rather be governed by Trump. 

This might be obvious to anyone who regularly visits Vancouver and Seattle, or Surrey and Spokane, or Abbotsford and Bellingham, but borders really are arbitrary creations of nation-states, and people on the "other" side are never that much different. Most military defended borders are between siblings: South Korea/North Korea; Russia/Ukraine; Pakistan/India; Ethiopia/Kenya; Brazil/Argentina.

All along the 49th parallel the folks right across that "undefended" border are more similar than the folks in the adjacent province or state. People in Nova Scotia are in some ways more similar to those in Maine than they are to those in Quebec. I grew up in Ontario and had a girlfriend in Michigan where the same applies. I suspect many people on the border of Montana and North Dakota have more in common with those over the border in Alberta and Saskatchewan than any of those people have in common with British Columbians and Newfoundlanders, Californians or New Yorkers.

As we left Seattle to drive back home, just on the outskirts on a highway overpass we saw people holding signs. I cringed at what they might be about because in the Fraser Valley we have endured homophobes and lunatics protesting on bridges against the LGBTQ community and pandemic science. In the U.S., a protest on an overpass? Everything is bigger and louder in America so this has got to be even crazier, I figured. No, the group were holding “Free Palestine” signs challenging the illegal genocide currently underway in the middle east.

I’m not sure why I was surprised. Take a look at the map of the U.S. with districts coloured red, blue, or a shade of purple to represent how they voted in your last election. As you know, and Canadians should know, Washington State is the bluest state in America and the area around Seattle is the bluest district in Washington. 

I know we are supposed to be boycotting America and buying local and I get that, but I’m left with the cognitive dissonance knowing that I’d rather have a drink with Washington Governor Bob Ferguson than Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and I’d probably rather break bread with you, Mayor Kim Lund, than with Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, no offence to him.

Boycotting Washington state seems silly and even a little cruel. You are already dealing with a lunatic in D.C. who is making catastrophic decisions for the future of your country and the world and you are left shaking your collective Democratic heads.

The world is watching America like rubberneckers at a car crash, and I hope you have airbags because you are the main victims of that car crash. If British Columbians boycott Bellingham and Seattle, that’s just pouring salt in your recent orange wounds. We’re not so different.

I’ll be back for the show in Carnation in late June and then in Seattle in December. And I will definitely stop in Bellingham for sure. I heard Trader Joe’s moved? Can’t wait to see the new location and spend a few dollars.

Yours truly,

Paul J. Henderson

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Paul J. Henderson
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