Riding in Canada, eh?

I’m having trouble with this whole USA - Canada thing.

I cannot abide the heavy-handed approach the US is taking with our country. More than a matter of poor manners and injured Canadian pride, it is likely to be terrible for business on both sides of the border.

I have seen posts encouraging us to Buy Canadian. I am all for that. And I can see that traveling to the US right now could be seen as supporting the American economy, and, by extension, current US policy. So not traveling to the US would be seen as one way to Fight Back.

But is it really? Who are we actually punishing? If the B&B we stop at on our ride through Connecticut doesn’t support current US policy, are we simply failing to punish the right person by boycotting staying there?

I have ridden through 30 of the 50 states, and have encountered people on both sides of the political fence; and, believe me, in the US it is a fence…a tall one. It is not the sort of 1950’s fence you used to lean over to chat with your neighbour, it’s the type with razor wire on the top, designed both to keep the Others out, and also to hold people in, hemming them into a specific rhetoric, and narrow, isolationist philosophy. There is no discourse.

Are we, as Canadians, possibly falling into that same trap? Not just in our own political discourse, but also that discourse as it applies to our friends to the south? I am proud to be Canadian, born and raised. But I’m also a proud family member of and friend to lots of Americans, many of whom are as appalled by this tariff situation as we are.

So I’ll end by saying that I’ll do the most Canadian thing I can do…

I’m going to refuse to ride in the US for now, in a fit of nationalistic pride…

But, to those Americans who also disagree with the current US policy on tariffs, I’m going to say I’m Sorry!