There’s a civilization north of the American border. Even among those who know of it, this “Canada” tends to be enigmatic. It is a place bigger by land mass than any country in the world apart from Russia and with a population smaller than Yemen’s, a place where the primary language is English but also French, and a place where people are uncommonly polite and friendly yet incongruously fierce and violent — when they play ice hockey.

Canada has occupied more of the American public imagination recently than it has typically. One reason is that Donald Trump is again the president of the United States, and as part of his opening act for the 47th presidency, he’s launched a trade war with Canada, along with Mexico and China. Unlike Mexico and China, however, Trump has given Canada the special attention of suggesting repeatedly that he’d like to annex it into the U.S. as a giant “51st state.” He even now refers to the country’s prime minister as “Gov. Trudeau.”

Recommended Stories

• Gene Hackman, 1930-2025
• Trumpworld goes global
• Congress needs to update the Nixon-era law on how the Postal Service operates

Another reason is the 4 Nations Face-Off.

This is a new institution, a tournament organized by the National Hockey League among teams representing Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the U.S., each rostered exclusively by NHL players. Going in, all four countries were ranked within the world’s top six by the International Ice Hockey Federation, which governs the sport globally. Germany was ranked fifth but didn’t have enough NHL players for a roster. Czechia had enough players but was ranked eighth. Russia was ranked third, but it invaded Ukraine.

Until this year, and since 1947, in various formats, the NHL, like every other major North American sports league, has hosted an annual all-star game. Last year, though, as a preview to its players’ participation in the 2026 Winter Olympics, for the first time in more than a decade, the league announced that in 2025, it would host the 4 Nations instead.

Like many changes made after 78 years of relative continuity, the new format triggered some skepticism — the bases for which included a lack of established rivalries. Going back to the legendary Summit Series of 1972, the Canadians versus the Russians was hockey’s version of the Cold War, in which universe it never ended.

That’s where the second reason that Canada has occupied more of the American public imagination recently has intersected, quite randomly, with the first: After Trump initially announced his intention to impose massive, possibly crippling tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S., in parallel with his fantastic suggestion not only that Canada would be better off absorbed into the U.S. but that he might somehow go ahead with the notion even if Canadians were for some reason not into it, Canadians started to brace.

Suddenly, the uncommonly polite and friendly Canadians were plotting retaliatory tariffs, pulling American consumer products from their shelves, and booing the American national anthem at NHL games.

Four Nations had a rivalry.

In the tournament’s opening game on Feb. 12, the Canadians edged out the Swedes 4-3 in overtime. A day later, the Americans thrashed the Finns 6-1. And on Feb. 15, the Finns, bruised, managed to replicate the Canadians’ 4-3-in-OT result against the Swedes.

That night, the fourth game was between Canada and the U.S. at Montreal’s Bell Centre. Montreal is the biggest city in Quebec, Canada’s only predominantly French-speaking province — and since the 1960s, at least, a locus of intermittently passionate debate about whether the multinational Canada is properly a country at all. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in the stands.

Here, in an emotional superstorm cracking through the arena, the crowd loudly booed “The Star-Spangled Banner” before thundering out “O Canada.” Once the puck dropped, there were three fights in the game’s first nine seconds. The U.S. won 3-1. But with the results on Feb. 17 — Canada 5-3 over Finland and Sweden 2-1 over the U.S. — the round-robin format ended up pitting Canada against the U.S. in the tournament final on Feb. 20.

Early that day, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State. I will be speaking before the Governors tonight in D.C., and will sadly, therefore, be unable to attend. But we will all be watching, and if Governor Trudeau would like to join us, he would be most welcome. … So exciting!”

More than 16 million North American viewers watched the game, with 9.3 million in the U.S. and 6.3 million in Canada. It was the second-most-watched hockey game in the last 10 years, behind Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers. It was the most-viewed non-NFL game ever on ESPN+. And it went to overtime, when Canada won 3-2 on an absolute bolt by alternate captain Connor McDavid.

Just after midnight, Trudeau posted on X, “You can’t take our country—and you can’t take our game.”

Right?

Remarkably, this was the same Trudeau who, for the previous 10 years, had been advancing a new, putatively super-progressive view of Canada as the world’s first “postnational state,” the same Trudeau who’d amplified to-this-day-unsubstantiated claims that there were mass graves of First Nations children on the sites of the country’s infamous residential-school system and that these claims justified the accusation that Canada is a “genocidal state,” and the same Trudeau who consistently put Canada both above the idea of nationalism and beneath the station of national self-worth.

TRUMP THREATENS TO MATCH CANADA’S RETALIATORY TARIFFS BY A ‘LIKE AMOUNT’

Virtually to a person, Canadians were in the stands with Trudeau through 4 Nations — as, whatever their politics, they’re still shoulder-to-shoulder with him about tariffs or annexation or any ancillary aggressions from the south now. But it’s all in spite of Trudeau’s antinationalist ideas about Canada — as much as it is of Trump’s anti-Canadian ideas about nationalism. If your only understanding of this country is through today’s official channels, Canadian or American, it’ll be hard to blame you for missing the obvious, implicit, deep reality of its response to 4 Nations:

Canada abides.

John Jamesen Gould is the editor of The Signal.