BOSTON — As the leaders of the world’s largest economies convened Monday in Alberta for their first summit-cum-intervention with President Donald Trump over his tariff addiction, a group of American governors and Canadian premiers were across the continent tallying the fallout from Trump’s preemptive trade war in dollars and cents.
Premiers from five of Canada’s 10 provinces and five Northeastern governors gathered in the Massachusetts state house, which was flying the flags of both nations, for a private and then public conversation strategizing about what they can control and lamenting what they cannot — namely “a tweet in the middle of the night,” as one premier put it.
It was a largely amiable, at times awkward and bizarre-if-fitting culmination of the Trump Decade: Who else could hurl America into a fight with our friendly neighbor to the north, eh?
Nobody was amused under the golden dome on Beacon Hill, though.
“It was a sobering discussion this morning,” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, said of their private meeting before addressing the cameras.
While Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was doing his eggshell walk with Trump deep in the Canadian Rockies, the prime minister’s provincial counterparts gathered with the governors a floor above a convening of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and just down the hall from a t-shirt clad summer tour group hearing of Kennedys, Curleys, Cabots and Lodges.
All the political talent this state has ever produced could not together solve a problem like Donald J. Trump, though.
Yet with state and provincial revenue numbers at risk, it’s these officials paying a price for America’s war of economic aggression.
Healey, who with fellow Democrat and Maine Gov. Janet Mills came up with the idea for the session, unspooled the cold facts of Canada’s de facto travel boycott: “Our tourism numbers are down, anywhere between 20 and 60 percent, in all of our states.”
With summer here, those are ominous figures in a region that’s hugely dependent on seasonal hospitality: namely June to September.
Ontario’s Doug Ford said that, while he’d prefer Canadians would come spend their tourist dollars in his province, he wouldn’t urge his countrymen and women to stay away from a nation with which they are so intertwined.
Then New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt spoke up, more in sorrow than anger: “I can’t tell Canadians to come visit the U.S. right now.”
Holt said she’d tell her constituents “to go and see my neighbors in Nova Scotia, I’m going to tell them to spend some time at home because the relationship has been challenged by leadership and we need to get back to normal.”
Growing less Canada Nice by the second, Holt said that the American economy needed to feel some pain. “We need a certain person to hear that this is hurting jobs for Americans,” she said, alluding to Trump. The American voter should speak out, she said.
The American governors, at least those here, tried to empathize. The conversation veered from high-fiber discussions about their shared reliance on hydropower and natural gas to more of a family therapy session, where the guilty party tells the aggrieved that they have every right to be upset.
“It’s not the tariffs that are affecting them so much as the hurt pride, and boy, I understand that,” said Mills, adding: “We want the Canadian people to know that we cherish our relationships.”
As if to prove her point, the governor said she would do a little Canadian tourism herself this summer and planned to explore the Atlantic provinces.
In her to-the-point Maine style, Mills said she had posted fresh, bilingual welcome signs in English and French at all 13 of Maine’s border crossings with Canada — and then held up a miniature likeness of one she had brought with her and placed next to her name placard.
Trump’s name was scarcely invoked even as he hovered above the conversation, which featured all Democratic governors and Vermont’s Phil Scott, a Republican who voted for Kamala Harris.
“We need each other to survive in the future,” said Scott.
Such warm words were appreciated, and returned, by the Canadians. Yet as much as representatives of the two nations are allies, they’re also friendly rivals. Privately, one of the governors told me that the Canadians were happy to be reaping the benefit of Trump’s global unpopularity as more tourists and students were coming to Canada rather than the U.S.
Even in the public forum, Holt, addressing the flow of STEM personnel and innovation, said that Canada would “borrow your talent for a while” before the U.S. gets “back to normal” and the two countries can become best friends again.
For now, it was unclear what concrete actions all parties were willing to take to defrost the tensions. The governors are largely at the mercy of Trump’s preferences, absent a lasting court intervention, and the premiers, who enjoy broader powers than American governors, showed no appetite to unilaterally disarm.
Former Bank of America executive Anne Finucane, who moderated the public discussion, introduced Nova Scotia’s premier by recalling how Bostonians helped save Halifax after a fire tore through the Canadian city over a century ago, an event marked each year when Halifax, in gratitude, sends down a Christmas tree to Boston. Finucane then said directly to Tim Houston, the premier: “We need you to keep putting our products on your shelves.”
Houston responded by saying Halifax has not forgotten Boston’s kindness in their hour of need.
But before long, Houston, who is thought to have national political ambitions, said that when Canadians hear “talk of the 51st state stuff we’re pretty ticked off, it makes us really upset.”
He cited energy as a place where the states and provinces can work together, but never addressed putting American products back on Nova Scotia shelves.
Tariffs on Canada, warned Ford, are “nothing more than a tax on Americans.”
He was preaching to the choir.
The governors vented exasperation toward Washington, but there was a sense that, while it’s their state budgets that will see red, there’s only so much they can do. Leaders from both countries expressed hope that the G7 could produce some sort of trade accord or at least make progress toward an agreement.
There were, however, soundings about leaving Washington and Ottawa aside and attempting discrete state-and-province relationships.
“It’s time to start healing and having our own individual relationships between our states and the various provinces to secure our energy future regardless of what happens in Washington,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. “We have to operate as independent actors in this space and think of ourselves.”
Healey was blunt about Canadians looking elsewhere for reliable partners.
“For the first time, we know that our friends to the north, some of them, are exploring partnerships with other countries that never would have been contemplated or been necessitated without President Trump’s actions,” she said. And she wasn’t the only person here to say out loud who would benefit from the unlikely and inane Great North American Trade War of 2025.
“China,” Healey added, “is the one winning in all this.”
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