HISTORY LESSON: How Trump's influence is keeping Canadians' tourism dollars out of Detroit

In April, I led a walking tour of Walkerville, Ontario, the historic Canadian company town located in Windsor where, long before he was known as the Architect of Detroit, Albert Kahn left his mark. We explored his early work: the Hiram Walker & Sons Distillery Headquarters, Willistead Manor, some commercial blocks, and workers’ housing. And despite It raining the entire time, no one left.

The tour was a part of the Jane’s Walks festival, an annual international festival inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs, the legendary American-Canadian urbanist who used grassroots efforts to stop slum clearance, urban renewal, and other Robert Moses-inspired efforts of the 20^th century. Jane’s Walks offer free, community-led tours and walks that highlight people focused on urbanism. My tour was one of several in Windsor that weekend. 

The energy was high, the interest real. People wanted more. But when I offered to book them on a tour across the river, they hesitated. The reason wasn’t cost, convenience, or a lack of interest in Detroit. Their answer? Politics.

Multiple people told me they will no longer be entering the United States while Donald Trump is in the White House. “We’re not crossing that river until he’s gone,” one couple said. Others on the tour, including a public historian, told me he’s focusing his attention - and his tourism dollars - on Canadian attractions “while they’re still ours.” One attendee who expressed fear for American Cultural institutions said she just flat out won’t put a dollar into the American economy while its immigration and trade policies are so hostile towards her country.

These choices may seem small, but they do snowball. Foreign citizens can’t vote here, obviously, but their influence in shaping our economy and our culture is felt their feet, wallets, and minds. And now, they’re choosing to stay home.

Cultural tourists are hardly the only Canadians staying on their side of the Detroit River. In recent months, fears over tariffs, border confrontations, and political disagreements have engendered a decrease in border crossings not seen since the pandemic. In April alone, border crossings in Detroit were down nearly 60,000 compared to last year. Factor in the shuttering of Windsor’s tunnel bus, and it seems they will continue to dip.

This could potentially hurt Detroit in the long run. Canada is still the United States’ largest trading partner, and Detroit accounts for a large portion of that. A quarter of all trade between the two countries comes through the Detroit-Windsor border and some estimates say upward of $100 billion in commerce is facilitated through Michigan’s multiple ports of entry with Canada. Furthermore, thousands of Canadians cross the border to work in metro Detroit each day. Damaging the U.S.-Canada relationship, whether on a macroeconomic level or on a personal level, will continue to devastate this famously seamless international border.

In 1965, the City of Detroit produced a video called A City on the Move highlighting its growth and positioning the City as an industrial boomtown growing into a cosmopolitan metropolis. Its narrator, then-Mayor James Cavanaugh, celebrates the city’s skyscrapers, schools, cultural attractions, and importantly, its neighborhoods.

The opening of the 18-minute video highlights Detroit’s connection to Windsor, Ontario. To hear Cavanaugh, the City’s closeness to Windsor was the culmination of its post-1701 history. In a town where French, British, and American flags flew, the City’s connection to Windsor served as a tie to its past and a symbol of its present “international character.” To Cavanaugh (or at least to his speech writers) Detroit was the country’s “front door,” attracting people from all around the world through our Canadian border crossing. He boasted that the Detroit River was the key portal of the “world’s longest undefended border.” 

This mindset is what brought my family to Detroit from Canada in the 20^th Century.
My paternal great-grandfather arrived in Walkerville from Wales in the early 20^th Century. Eventually, his son John migrated to Detroit and joined the military. My father was born here, but I’ve spent decades chasing my Canadian heritage and its past. My life and my interest in Canadian history exists, in part, because of my grandfather’s freedom to migrate to North America and to freely cross the Detroit River.

On my way back into the U.S. after that Walkerville tour, there was a telling moment illustrating how far away we are now from the days of my grandfather and Mayor Cavanaugh. As I exited the tunnel and approached the armed security booth, a U.S. border agent asked what I was doing in Canada. When I told him I was leading a free history tour. He looked confused. “Who works for free?” he asked. “Nobody works for free. What history do they have over there anyway?” In Trump’s America, the idea of doing free work for a foreign neighbor, or caring about their history, is starting to sound, well, foreign. 

With all the noise, it can be hard to properly contextualize what is happening to American cultural institutions right now; museums are losing funding, the administration is at war with public broadcasting, historic preservation programs are being gutted; and even the Kennedy Center couldn’t avoid the hammer.

But it is hard to think of a place in the country where tariffs, immigration, cultural disinvestment, and American jingoism collide more than in the city of Detroit. The policies being pushed by the current administration are hurting our border crossings, our commerce, our collaboration, our personal relationships, and, of course, our cross-border cultural exchange.

For the first time in a long time, there is conflict between the people of Windsor and the federal government across the river, and we’ve only just begun to see the fallout. The Detroit River might not be getting any wider, but the gap between the two countries seems farther than ever.