LETTER: Fireworks lit up the sky over a troubled Canada

LETTER: Fireworks lit up the sky over a troubled Canada-U.S. relationship

Published 7:00 am Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Fireworks light up the sky over Semiahmoo Bay during the finale of White Rock’s 2026 Canada Day by the Bay event. (Sydney McCracken/Contributed to Peace Arch News)

Every summer, two small towns on opposite sides of an invisible line put on a show for themselves, and end up putting it on for each other anyway.

White Rock, BC, lights up Semiahmoo Bay every July 1st for Canada Day. Blaine, Washington, lights up the same stretch of water every July 4th for Independence Day. Neither town ever formally scheduled its fireworks as a gift to the neighbors across the water — it’s simply that the bay is small, the border is a line on a map rather than a wall, and a fireworks show set off from one shore is, by definition, visible from the other.

Over decades, that accident of geography turned into something more: a genuine, unscripted tradition of Canadians and Americans standing on their own beaches, watching the other country celebrate itself, and quietly enjoying it.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment, because it’s rarer than it sounds. Somewhere along the way, watching your neighbor’s fireworks became a small, unspoken statement about what kind of relationship this was — close enough that a birthday celebration didn’t need a passport to be shared.

This year, both shows actually happened. White Rock’s Canada Day by the Bay went off as planned on July 1st, and Blaine held its “America 250th” Old-Fashioned Fourth of July, fireworks and all, marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. So the tradition, technically, survived 2026. But anyone who thinks that means the relationship is fine hasn’t been paying attention to what’s happening around those two fireworks displays.

Blaine’s economy runs substantially on Canadians crossing the border to buy gas and groceries — one estimate put Canadian spending in Whatcom County at roughly $140 million a year. Since the tariff fights escalated, that traffic has cratered: southbound crossings at Blaine dropped so sharply that border wait times fell from 19 minutes to five, a shipping business built almost entirely on Canadian customers closed its doors, and a Blaine gas station owner reported business down 45 percent.

Blaine’s own mayor put it bluntly: boycotting a blue state like Washington doesn’t hurt Trump — it hurts Blaine.

Layer onto that the rhetoric — the “51st state” jokes that Canadians don’t find funny, the on-again-off-again tariffs, and the fact that on July 1st of this year, the very day White Rock was setting off Canada Day fireworks, the Trump administration announced it would not renew CUSMA/USMCA, instead forcing annual renegotiations over trade deficits, steel, aluminum, and dairy access. Canada wanted a clean 16-year extension. It didn’t get one.

So here’s my honest read: I don’t think this was ever about the fireworks. Both towns still lit their skies.

What’s changed is everything underneath — the goodwill, the casual cross-border errands, the sense that the line between these two countries was more suggestion than wall. A huge share of that erosion traces directly back to this administration’s choices: the tariffs, the annexation talk, the CUSMA brinkmanship. Those aren’t background noise to Blaine and White Rock — they’re the whole plot. A tariff regime that specifically targets a neighbor you depend on for a third of your retail base doesn’t stay abstract; it shows up as Canadian licence plates disappearing from Blaine’s parking lots.

Do I think the White House intended to dim a hundred-year-old firework tradition in two small towns nobody in Washington, DC thinks about? No. That’s not the point, and it’s also the point.

This is what it looks like when a fight conducted at the level of national trade policy and Truth Social posts lands, without much ceremony, on two towns that never had a beef with each other in the first place. The bay is still small. The fireworks still went up on both sides. But the easy, unbothered warmth that used to make that mutual show feel effortless — that’s the thing actually flickering.

Canada didn’t boycott the fireworks. It boycotted the country. And Blaine, which never asked to be collateral damage in someone else’s trade war, is the one paying for it.