Along Canusa Street, American and Canadian homes face one another across an invisible border. For about a third of a mile, Canusa — named for the two countries it splits — marks the international divide between Beebe Plain, a community in Derby, and sister village Beebe, Québec.
Here, neighbors standing on front lawns in different countries can easily chat across the two-lane road. Crossing the street, however, requires a detour to a tiny border checkpoint at the end of the road.
For generations, these communities have lived a blended existence. They share drinking water and sewer systems. Firefighters on either side assist their foreign counterparts when called upon. Many residents have relatives on the other side and travel back and forth multiple times a week to buy bread, pump gas and visit friends.
“A lot of us feel we’re one community here,” said Lynn Rublee, 70, who grew up nearby on the Vermont side of Lake Memphremagog, which straddles the border, and runs a small bed-and-breakfast. “We depend on each other and really always have.”
As the once-friendly relationship between Canada and the U.S. erodes, however, that way of life is disappearing. Canadians, incensed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada as the 51st state, have boycotted or cut back on travel to the U.S., crippling the border towns that have long depended on their business.
Tensions between the two nations peaked in August, when trade negotiations collapsed and Trump imposed staggering 50 percent tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney struck back with his own retaliatory tariffs, matching Trump’s “dollar-for-dollar” and announcing that Canada will pursue a closer relationship with the European Union.
The fallout has already hit Vermont’s economy. Canadian credit card spending in Vermont dropped by nearly half in 2025 and was just beginning to recover this spring and summer before the latest political rupture.
But in the towns and villages in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where daily life is shaped by proximity to the border, something much more profound — and less easily measured — is at stake. On Canusa Street, some American homes fly Canadian flags from their porches as a message of apology to their neighbors. Lawn signs proclaim: “I stand with Canada.” Yet Trump won in every one of Vermont’s border towns in the 2024 election.
Nearly two years into Trump’s second term, Canadians’ initial shock over his attacks has hardened into something that could be far more enduring. In late August, as the trade talks were failing, Steve Wright, president and general manager of Jay Peak Resort, posted a statement on the ski area’s Facebook page appealing to the Canadians who make up nearly half of the resort’s skiers, reminding them that they are “part of this place” and always welcome. Wright had released a similar statement a year prior, after Trump’s “51st state” comments sparked outrage north of the border. This time, he signed off by inviting Canadians to “drop him a line” and shared his direct email address.
When you have a partner — whether it’s a personal partner or business partner — if they’ve betrayed you in some way, the trust will never come back 100 percent.
Stanstead mayor jody stone
Nearly 6,000 messages poured in over the next four days. Thousands more replied to the post on Facebook. Many expressed fury.
“Last year, Canadians were disappointed. They were disillusioned. They were sad,” Wright said during a September 1 roundtable discussion organized by U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.). “This year, around trade policies, they’re angry. And you can’t talk to anger.”
Seven Days traversed the border region for several days this month to learn how deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Canada are transforming daily life on the ground. Conversations with residents, local leaders, historians and artisans revealed that the political tensions have divided families, communities and economies whose close ties were long taken for granted. Many residents on both sides expressed regret and a hope that things might one day return to how they used to be. Others wondered if it was already too late for that.
“I don’t think it’ll ever go back to the way it was,” said Jody Stone, the mayor of Stanstead, a Québec town of fewer than 3,000 people just across the border from Derby Line. He remembers walking across the border as a boy to attend swimming lessons in Vermont with just a wave to the American customs officer.
“When you have a partner — whether it’s a personal partner or business partner — if they’ve betrayed you in some way, the trust will never come back 100 percent.”
Mayor to Mayor
Stone’s American counterpart, Newport Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase, dashed into his bright downtown office and snatched up a bumper sticker he had designed himself.
“Canada, on vous respecte,” the sticker reads in French. Canada, we respect you.
“I wouldn’t go into Canada without it,” said Ufford-Chase, an animated 62-year-old with tousled gray hair and ruddy cheeks, a leather satchel slung over his shoulder.
The sticker is his personal attempt to improve international relations in his northeast Vermont town.
Newport’s brick-clad downtown, perched on the shore of Lake Memphremagog, is full of such symbols of conciliation. Above the doorway of the historic Montgomery Ward building, which is home to a popular natural food store, Canadian and American flags hang side by side.
Ufford-Chase, who assumed office in March 2025, thought hard about his sticker’s message. He’d seen signs in some storefronts declaring love for Canadians but thought they struck the wrong note.
“It’s not about whether or not we love them,” he explained. “It’s the lack of respect that really is driving the current crisis. They’ve been badly dissed by the country they thought was their closest friend and ally.”
Since 2021, Ufford-Chase has been working to revitalize Newport’s struggling economy, first as executive director of the nonprofit Newport Downtown Development and now also as part-time mayor.
From his Main Street office above the natural food store, he looks out over a vacant, overgrown lot where decrepit buildings were razed 10 years ago. “The pit,” as it’s called, has come to symbolize the city’s stagnation. The loss of Canadian visitors hasn’t helped.
“The impact on our retail has been huge,” he said. “And the lack of knowledge of where this is all going to go is as hard as anything.”
Ufford-Chase has plenty of experience cultivating cross-border relationships during troubled times. He spent 20 years working along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, where he cofounded a nonprofit called BorderLinks during the 1980s; he helped launch another in 2004 called No More Deaths. Both grew out of the faith-based sanctuary movement in response to increased U.S. border enforcement and the deaths of hundreds of migrants in remote stretches of the desert as they sought to skirt beefed-up defenses on foot. He has also held the top elected leadership position at the Presbyterian Church (USA).
That work across divides has proven unexpectedly useful in Newport. As tensions between the Trump administration and Canada mounted, Ufford-Chase began talking more often with Stone.
Both mayors say the political strife has strengthened their relationship.
“We’re thinking long term,” said Stone, 48, a Stanstead native who has been mayor for five years. “When this stuff is over, we want to continue to be great neighbors.” In addition to his role as mayor, Stone owns a company with his wife that manufactures and distributes industrial lubricants.
Stanstead sits on the border. Walking on the sidewalk on the Canadian side of Canusa Street on a recent sunny morning, Stone peered at the Canadian flags and apologetic lawn signs that had sprouted on the American side in recent months.
“This is all new,” he said.
Like many of his neighbors, Stone is trying to figure out how best to protest. His family recently vacationed in Maine, a place Stone said he loves too much to boycott. But he no longer fills his gas tank in the U.S. or goes out to fancy dinners in Newport.
“We pick and choose more carefully what we do,” he said.
Because Stanstead shares a water system with Derby Line that is comanaged through a binational entity known as the International Water Company, Stone has always maintained open lines of communication with local leaders on the U.S. side. In these conversations, he tries to put national politics aside.
“I’m a local leader — I like to think that they are, too,” Stone said. “Federal politics really should not have an impact on how we make decisions on the ground level.”
Yet the repercussions of federal decisions can be difficult to avoid. Tourism and granite processing are Stanstead’s two main economic drivers, Stone said, and Trump’s tariffs have already hurt local companies that export granite countertops to the U.S.
He’s aware that some Derby leaders he works with voted for Trump but doesn’t take it personally. Stone believes Trump’s popularity was motivated by other issues, such as immigration: The number of migrants detained trying to cross the northern border into the U.S. reached record highs during the Biden administration.
“I don’t feel that because there’s strong Trump support in the northern part of the state, that necessarily means they have something against Canadians,” Stone said. “None of them I’ve spoken to ever felt mistreated by Canadians in any way or that we were anything other than good neighbors, good partners and good clients.”
But something has been broken, he said.
“I think everybody feels the same,” Stone said. “We feel mistreated.”
One Community
In June, the local history museum in Stanstead unveiled an exhibition about life on the border. The timing — amid a diplomatic firestorm — was pure coincidence, museum director Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande said.
The Colby-Curtis Museum, housed in a 19th-century granite villa off this border town’s main drag, had chosen the theme in 2023. Staff members set out to interview locals about the evolution of their relationship to the border and their connections to the other side. Those questions soon took on new weight.
The exhibition, spread across three rooms on the museum’s second floor, tells the story of a once-fluid frontier that gradually has become less permeable. Photographs of contemporary cross-border singing groups and curling clubs hang on the walls, alongside historical maps depicting Stanstead and Derby Line as what appears to be a single village — their main streets spanning the border in a continuous line.
Visitors can listen to recordings of residents reminiscing about the days when Canadian women crossed into the U.S. to give birth because that’s where the nearest hospital happened to be. The town doctor in Stanstead had medical licenses in both countries.
“What really struck me was how the two communities were very, very integrated” through the 1980s, Gaudreau-Lalande said as he guided a visitor around the room. “It was part of their daily life to go to the U.S. They didn’t think of the border as a border.”
That began to change as security tightened after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and then again when passports became a requirement to cross in 2008. Then the COVID-19 pandemic halted cross-border travel altogether for months. Border communities were just recovering when this latest rift drove them apart again.
Gaudreau-Lalande said many Canadians are expressing their displeasure with the American government using the only leverage they have — by withholding their spending.
“People stopped buying American oranges,” he said. “They would simply rot on the shelves of supermarkets.”
People stopped buying American oranges. They would simply rot on the shelves of supermarkets.
Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande
Gaudreau-Lalande has joined the campaign. He moved his fall camping trip from Vermont to Québec this year. Unfortunately, he acknowledged, the loss of commerce from such boycotts tends to most hurt businesses close to the border, “which are the ones with whom Canadians feel a sense of community.”
On the other hand, he’s noticed a renewed commitment to keeping the cross-border connections alive.
As an example, he cited the Haskell Free Library & Opera House, a building famous for straddling the border in Stanstead and Derby Line that serves as the cultural center for both villages. For more than a hundred years, Canadians were allowed to walk across the border unchecked to enter the building’s main entrance on the American side. But last year, American officials announced that Canadian patrons would have to go through an official border checkpoint down the road first, citing security concerns.
The change made news around the world. Locals on both sides banded together to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate an entrance on the Canadian side so that members of both communities could continue entering the library without having to pass through customs. The new entrance opened in June, at a ceremony attended by officials from both countries.
“It made people more aware that they took this access for granted,” Gaudreau-Lalande said, “and that this is something you have to cultivate, or it will go away.”
Since the Haskell found itself in the political spotlight, the number of visitors has shot up. Some 400 people from both sides of the border, most of them tourists, visited on a recent Saturday. Volunteers have been working double time to give tours while continuing to check out books for locals.
The building has also become a cultural refuge amid the political tensions. On October 20, best-selling Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny held a sold-out event in the Haskell Opera House to celebrate the release of her latest book, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.
Penny lives in Québec’s Eastern Townships, and her immensely popular novels are heavily inspired by the border region. In March 2025, however, Penny announced that she would no longer hold in-person events in the U.S., in protest of Trump’s tariffs and threats toward Canada.
The Haskell’s neutral ground is the one exception.
Elbows Up
Kathy Curtis hasn’t been to Vermont since January 19, 2025 — the day before Trump’s inauguration. She never imagined staying away for so long.
Curtis, 63, and her husband live on a small beef farm in Stanstead. A large Canadian flag flutters from the porch of their white farmhouse. She used to cross the border often to buy gas in Derby Line, get dinner in Newport and stock up on groceries at the Walmart in Derby.
“We didn’t think about it all that much,” she said. “It’s just part of who we are and where we live.”
Now, she sees crossing as a political act — one that would tacitly convey that she approves of Trump’s rhetoric toward Canada. Most of her neighbors aren’t crossing either, she said. Some have even pledged never to return.
Curtis hasn’t gone quite that far, but she no longer feels the kinship she once did with communities in the Northeast Kingdom, or the U.S. as a whole.
“I realize now just how different our countries are,” she said.
Curtis has reshaped her daily habits. At the grocery store, she looks for items with a maple leaf label that signals they’re Canadian-made. She no longer buys U.S. products.
Curtis is not alone: Across Canada, people have come together in common cause, she said. “Elbows up,” an expression borrowed from ice hockey to suggest a willingness to fight back, has become a national rallying cry for Canadians standing up to the U.S. There’s a renewed sense of national pride, she said.
“I don’t know if the American people know how that united our country,” she said.
But Curtis claims no pleasure in cutting America out of her life. She and her husband retired a year ago with plans to travel to Washington and Oregon. Those plans are now on hold. The two no longer visit relatives in Vermont and feel hurt that every town along Vermont’s border voted for Trump.
“It is painful,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be like this. At first, I thought, When he’s gone, things will go back to normal. Now, not so much.”
“This doesn’t mean I don’t care about the United States,” Curtis said. “If I didn’t care so much, it wouldn’t bother me so much.”
Curtis said she’s thrilled when she sees American visitors in Canada and hopes they feel welcome and “see what good neighbors and allies we’ve always been.”
As much as Curtis would like to resume crossing the border, the appeals she hears from American leaders often sound flat.
“It always seems to come across like, ‘We miss our Canadian friends,’” she said. “But do they really understand what we’re standing up for?”
A few weeks ago, Curtis went grocery shopping for Canadian Thanksgiving, which falls in October. As she walked the aisles, she checked the labels on each item. Much to her delight, she found locally grown celery, which is often imported from the U.S. She threw a few extra bunches in her cart to freeze for winter.
Republicans Divided
In downtown Newport, two Republican shop owners differ over Trump’s policies.
Chris Hamblett, 54, and his brother run the Pick & Shovel — a massive hardware and general store their father founded 50 years ago. Hamblett voted for Trump, and while he said he understands the emotional toll that tariffs and harsh rhetoric are taking on his neighbors to the north — his wife is a dual citizen, and the couple visit Québec often — he supports the administration’s goals.
“Part of me feels it’s a necessary evil,” he said. “It’s easy to get angry at the tariffs, but maybe there’s a greater vision that in the long term will benefit us all.”
Hamblett’s store was bustling on a Thursday afternoon in mid-October. Customers lined up outside the ice cream window on one side of the shop, basking in a warm fall day. Hamblett — wearing a button-down, blue jeans and a red vest embroidered with his name — worked the counter in the sugaring department, which was having a sale.
The Pick & Shovel is a certified distributor for CDL Sugaring Equipment, a Québec company with a location in St. Albans. Vermont companies used to make the equipment, Hamblett said, but over the years Canada has slowly “monopolized” that market. He lamented the loss of local producers.
“Will this spark a new U.S. manufacturer to be able to grow and strengthen?” he asked of the new tariffs. “It’s hard to say.”
Prices of some equipment Hamblett sells, such as storage tanks for maple sap, have gone up as much as 50 percent in the past few years, he said. But he attributed that to a mix of shifting tariffs, general inflation and increased fuel prices. As for the drop in Canadian visitors, he noted that the current exchange rate is unfavorable for Canadians — 100 Canadian dollars is worth $71.
“Our country is not in great shape and is headed deeper into debt if we don’t make changes,” he said. “At this point, I’m willing to accept anyone trying to make a change.”
Just down the road, a fellow Republican, Michael Marcotte, has come to a different conclusion. Eight years after casting a ballot for Trump in 2016, the owner of Jimmy Kwik Store, a gas station and convenience store, voted for Democrat Kamala Harris.
Marcotte, 68, who identifies as a moderate, has served 22 years in the Vermont House, from which he will retire in January. He’s grown increasingly disillusioned with Trump’s hard-line brand of MAGA Republicanism.
As chair of the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development, Marcotte said, he’s heard from many Vermont business owners in a panic over the loss of Canadian visitors. Rising prices are already hurting his constituents, he said, and some worry about having to choose between paying for heating oil or food this winter.
“The governments have a lot to lose,” Marcotte said, “but it’s the businesses and the people, right down to the single person, that are going to lose the most.”
Marcotte traces his own family roots across the border. His grandparents migrated from Québec to Newport, where they ran a beauty salon for 50 years. His wife is from Québec, and his in-laws still live there — and now refuse to visit. Marcotte said he doesn’t expect to see trade — or the trust it was built on — restored during his lifetime.
“Some people here have bought into the idea that Canada has been playing the U.S. all these years, which I think is sad,” Marcotte said. “When things are repeated and repeated, they become factual, and they’re not.”
Across the Whey
In September, cheesemakers from both sides of the border gathered in Vermont to celebrate the end of the harvest season.
Mateo Kehler, 56, cofounder and head cheesemaker of Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, hosted peers from Québec’s Fromagerie La Station in Compton, an hour north.
The two artisan cheese companies are strikingly similar. Both are run by brothers and have been making cheese at small family farms on opposite sides of the Vermont-Québec border for about two decades. Both make some of the very best cheeses in North America and have top awards from the American Cheese Society to prove it.
Another commonality: The two had just begun building their markets abroad before the trade war erupted.
Kehler spent a decade trying to break into the highly regulated Montréal cheese market. Soon after he found an importer and began shipping to Canada, Trump took office for his second term, and the orders stopped cold, he said.
Tensions seemed to be easing this summer, and Kehler’s Canadian importer reached out with an order for the winter holidays. Within a few weeks, though, the trade war inflamed things anew, and the order was canceled. That one order was small, Kehler said, but it represented a toehold in “a million-dollar market.”
“There’s no economic philosophy underpinning the Trump administration’s actions,” he said on a recent afternoon at Jasper Hill’s cavernous cheese cellars, which are tucked into the hillside. “Who’s winning? It’s nobody around here.”
There’s no economic philosophy underpinning the Trump administration’s actions. Who’s winning? It’s nobody around here.
Mateo Kehler
Up north, Fromagerie La Station experienced a parallel nightmare. After starting to gain momentum in the U.S. market during the past few years — selling its cheeses in specialty stores in Boston, New York City and California — Trump’s tariffs suddenly made its cheese unaffordable to Americans. The orders dried up.
These wounds were still fresh in September, when three representatives of La Station drove to Jasper Hill for the party. Along with them was a special treat: the American Cheese Society’s Best of Show trophy — the continent’s highest cheesemaking honor.
Like a cheese world’s version of hockey’s Stanley Cup, the trophy gets passed from one winner to the next each year. La Station won it twice in a row, in 2024 and 2025. This year, Jasper Hill took the crown for its creamy Winnimere, made with raw milk from its own cows and wrapped with a fragrant ribbon of spruce bark.
The trophy usually gets shipped to the new winner. This year called for a more personal delivery, Kehler said.
“We probably would have invited them one way or the other,” Kehler said, “but the fact that there was all this economic bullshit going on made it seem even more apropos and important to celebrate that we have the winningest cheeses in North America right here.”
Under a party tent in a field, the cheesemakers tapped kegs of local Hill Farmstead Brewery beer and scooped up Jasper Hill mac and cheese, which blended its clothbound cheddar, velvety Whitney and nutty variety called Alpha Tolman, named for a dairy farmer who lived in the area more than a century ago. Nearby, a towering bonfire made from two years of accumulated scrap wood burned through the night and days after.
When the time came to exchange the trophy, Simon-Pierre Bolduc, La Station’s head cheesemaker, delivered a speech in labored English celebrating the two groups’ mutual passion for the craft, Kehler said.
“There’s no bitterness; there’s no anger,” Kehler said later, reflecting on the party. “There is an acknowledgement of this almost artificial line that runs across our landscape that separates our economies — and it’s real. But the work that we’re doing on both sides of the border is the same, and we’re doing it for the same reasons.”
In other words, the artisans share a bond across borders that might serve as an antidote to politics — a hard-earned knowledge of what it takes to make a damn good cheese. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Oh, Canada | Historic ties between Vermont and Québec communities are fraying. Reporting on both sides of the border suggests they could break.”
This article appears in October 28 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
