During his 1969 visit to the United States, Canada’s then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held a news conference at which he described his American hosts in a memorable analogy. “Living next to you”, he said, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt”.
The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in the Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.
