As President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and place steep tariffs on its exports, many have worried that a mutually beneficial and longstanding cross-border partnership would be threatened.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared to cement that new reality during a speech Tuesday night after his party’s electoral victory.

“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” Carney said in his speech this week. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.”

Maine businesses and communities along the border, many already nervous about Trump’s antagonistic attitude toward Canada, are bracing for what comes next.

“If we read directly into (Carney’s) message, that means an economy like Maine will be hurt. Canada’s focus on the U.S. and states like Maine will be less so,” said Stefano Tijerina, a professor at the University of Maine, who researches and teaches courses on Canadian/U.S. business.

Canada is Maine’s largest trading partner by a wide margin. As a result, the state’s economy is deeply intertwined with its neighboring Canadian provinces.

Last year alone, Maine imported more than $4 billion worth of goods from Canada. The state’s tourism economy also leans heavily on Canadian visitors.

Dozens of sister communities straddle the international border and rely on one another. Many cross the border every day to go to work, visit family, or buy goods that are cheaper on one side than the other. Municipal officials in many of those communities declined to speak about what the how the recent Canadian elections might affect relationships with their towns.

Carney and Trump, meanwhile, have each vowed to dismantle that system of international cooperation, which both Canadian and American officials say will have wide-reaching effects on local economies in Maine and across both nations.

Trump has claimed Canada is “ripping us off” on trade and implemented 10% tariffs on Canadian gas and 25% tariffs on all other products. Canada responded with 25% tariffs of its own. Carney said Tuesday that “Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.”

Carney’s victory represented a surprising turnaround for his Liberal Party – a turnaround experts attribute directly to Trump, who has threatened steep tariffs and repeatedly called for Canada to became the 51st state. Just three months before the election, more than 40% of Canadian voters planned to cast their ballots for the Conservative Party, compared to only 20% for Carney’s Liberals. By early April, those numbers had nearly flipped.

Tijerina said the massive electoral shift towards Carney would not have happened if not for Trump’s threats.

Carney, in his victory speech, said he plans to reduce Canada’s dependence on America for trade by building partnerships with Europe and other global markets. While good for Canada in the long run, Tijerina said a more Canada-centric economic policy will hurt Maine’s businesses built on trade with the state’s northern neighbor.

“That forces the state of Maine to think, ‘Do we also need to diversify?’ But Janet Mills’ administration has acted the opposite way,” he said.

Mills issued a radio address in April where she urged Canadian tourists to continue visiting Maine as the number of people visiting the state fell three years in a row and the state’s tourism office warned it would only continue dropping.

Nearly 1 million Canadians vacation in Maine each year, but the Maine Office of Tourism is expecting only 675,000 this year. Just across the border from Calais in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Mayor Allan MacEachern said that impact is already being felt on both sides of the border.

“We rely on people and product crossing through our communities, and we’re not seeing them right now,” MacEachern said. “There will be some healing that has to take place. People have been affected in a lot of ways.”

“I’m hoping now that this election is over and the dust is settling and everyone got elected to their positions, they can start doing their work,” he added.

Logging is another Maine industry heavily reliant on trade with Canada. Many of the state’s more than 100 mills harvest lumber on one side of the border and process it on the other. Some, like the Twin Rivers Paper Co. mill in Madawaska, leverage currency exchange rates by beginning the manufacturing process in Edmundston, New Brunswick, and completing it in the U.S.

More than 500 jobs at the mill hang in the balance, says Edmundston mayor Eric Marquis. Many of those jobs could vanish if the trade war continues escalating, he warned.

“We’re hoping both the President and the Prime Minister will be able to sit down and take care of the situation so that the people that are working really hard every day don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen or about prices going up,” Marquis said.

Maine exported more than 2 million tons of logs and imported about 2.3 million in 2021, the most recent year with Maine Forest Service data available. The vast majority of that business was done with Canada.

“One has to work with the other. You can’t say one day ‘Well, one will close and one will stay open.’ It doesn’t work that way,” Marquis said.

Maine’s logging industry has declined in recent decades as plants shuttered and demand has waned. The industry had just started to regain its footing after the COVID-19 pandemic when global demand softened from 2023 to the present. The trade war has added a new layer of uncertainty, according to Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, a nonprofit organization.

So far, tariffs haven’t meaningfully impacted loggers themselves in terms of markets for wood, Doran said. Instead, they’ve affected the industries logging can’t exist without like steel and aluminum and oil and gas. Through it all, uncertainty in the markets has driven down already-declining demand.

“We’ve lost 40% of the harvesting capacity in Maine since 2020, and that has nothing to with what’s happened in the first quarter of 2025,” Doran said. “But what (tariffs) really do is take any growth off the horizon for the near future.”

Resultingly, Doran is worried less about tariffs’ immediate impact and more about the larger economic ripple effects in the coming years.

Many Maine mills have been purchased by Canadian companies who are able to mitigate the impact of tariffs, Doran said. While he agrees with Trump that America’s lumber industry should be less reliant on Canada, Doran doesn’t think tariffs are the only approach.

“Tariffs are certainly going to put people on notice, but I think we’ve got to take a different approach to how we invest in manufacturing here in Maine and across the Northeast,” he said.

Though uncertainty lingers on both sides of the border following this week’s elections, businesses and officials are aiming to continue doing business as usual.

The Maine State Chamber of Commerce said they’re working with policymakers in both Canada and the U.S. to mitigate the impacts of tariffs and economic uncertainty. The organization’s president, Patrick Woodcock, has previously called the tariffs “particularly damaging” and warned they would largely only serve to increase consumer costs and disrupt international relationships built up over the course of decades.

“While challenges have emerged in recent years, particularly regarding tariffs and trade uncertainty, Maine’s business community remains committed to fostering a stable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial partnership with Canada,” the Chamber’s spokesperson, Katie Clark, said in a statement Tuesday.

MacEachern, in St. Stephen, hopes for the same. He thinks back to when 9/11 and the pandemic made the invisible line separating the two countries feel more real than ever. He views the tariffs as another hurdle for Americans and Canadians to cross together.

“We’ve adjusted to so many things in my time living on the border. They’re strong communities up here,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to take some time to get back where we were. But we will get there.”

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