The Tiny Border Town Getting Battered by Trump's Tariffs on Canada

Yahoo

10-06-2025

Nick Kiniski is selling.
After four decades running Kiniski's Reef—one of only three restaurants still operating in the tiny peninsula town of Point Roberts, Washington—the former professional wrestler has landed in a choke hold he can't break.
'It's very hard to do business in Point Roberts,' Kiniski told me. 'This is the first time in 38 years that I actually bartended by myself.' On weekdays, he has taken to cooking and serving alone, the only staff member in what was once a bustling social hub.
Kiniski used to own Breakers, a bar right across the street, in addition to Reef. On weekends, they would get as many as 4,000 customers—needing 28 doormen and four sheriffs working overtime just to maintain order. At one point, he had 120 employees—'kind of a zoo,' he said.
But it's Saturday night in early May, and the Reef is dead. The line for karaoke is a girls-night-out septet taking turns murdering Stevie Nicks. Two waitstaff work an area that used to require a dozen. The spacious beachfront patio offers the softer sounds of Jimmy Buffett piped over outdoor speakers, but there isn't a soul to hear it.
Point Roberts's economy isn't just dependent on tourists—it's almost entirely dependent on Canadian tourists, making this five-square-mile spit of land a unique barometer of the U.S.-Canada relationship. When Canada closed its border at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the town's economy shrunk by 80 percent more or less overnight. Point Roberts spent the next 19 months cut off from mainland Canada and the rest of the United States. It had only just begun to find its legs when, in January, its economy collapsed again—this time, maybe for good. Surviving a global pandemic is one thing. Surviving Donald Trump is another.On January 7, less than 24 hours after Congress certified the presidential election results, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that he would use 'economic force' to coerce Canada into becoming the fifty-first state. He soon followed with threats of tariffs and personal jabs at then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Canadian response was quick, and it was not polite. Almost immediately border towns felt the squeeze.
With water on three sides, Point Roberts is a geographical oddity, sharing no physical connection to the United States of America. Its only land border is a two-and-a-half-mile stretch along Canada; from there, it's a 25-mile drive through Canuck farmland to the Washington line. The elementary school reaches only the second grade, after which children take a daily bus to the mainland, crossing two international borders on the way. With only 1,200 year-round residents, it is quaintly regarded as the safest gated community in America.
But Point Roberts can't survive without Canadian visitors—and the Canadians aren't coming. The thousands that would normally pop in over the weekend for some cheap gas and a burger by the ocean have answered the call for 'Elbows Up'—the Canadian equivalent of 'Don't Tread on Me'—and are keeping their dollars at home.
'It's rough times,' Kiniski said. 'There's not a whole lot I can do. It's out of my control and I don't know what's gonna happen. I just wanna sell the bar [and] move on.'
Point Roberts is shrinking, shuttering, exhausted. The quirky little exclave has become an early victim of Donald Trump's trade war, and a potent metaphor for the fraying relationship between the United States and Canada.
Addressing the Canadian Parliament in June 2016, President Barack Obama delivered a simple message: 'The world needs more Canada.' Now America is getting less.
All along the 5,525-mile stretch of the U.S.-Canada boundary—the largest international border in the world—traffic is down, and businesses are suffering. In Blaine, Washington, the closest mainland U.S. town to Point Roberts, the number of visitors from the north has dropped by nearly half compared to the previous spring.
In the outlets and shopping malls that pepper the Niagara Falls area some 2,700 miles east, sales tax receipts have slipped 7 percent. The Peace Bridge duty-free shop on the Ontario/New York border has gone into receivership after a dramatic loss in traffic. At the Haskell Free Library and Opera House—where the front door is in Vermont and the stage is in Quebec—a rude late-January visit from Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem ended a 120-year-old tradition of unfettered cross-border access by Canadians looking to read a book and catch a show.
Even hundreds of miles from the border, popular tourist destinations like Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Fort Lauderdale are feeling the pinch, as flight bookings from Canada to the United States have dropped 70 percent.
At Kora's Corner—a literal mom-and-pop shop named for its precocious three-year-old general manager, Koraline—Neil and Krystal King are up to their asses in ducks. As proprietors of the Rubber Duck Museum that takes up the back half of their store, they're being forced to close shop and move 15 minutes north to Tsawwassen Mills, British Columbia. They will continue to live in Point Roberts, but the drop in Canadian customers—their February business was down more than 75 percent from last year—and the unpredictability of Trump's tariffs have literally driven their museum out of the country.
'We're operating in a zero profit margin,' Neil explained. 'It's an unsustainable business model. We don't know how to plan for our future months not knowing if we're gonna be charged 145 percent more on our ducks or 20 percent more on our ducks.'
Directly or indirectly, all of the rubber ducks they sell originate in China, which controls nearly 80 percent of the global toy market. Without warehouses and capital to store a year's worth of inventory, small businesses like the Kings' are subject to the whims of the administration and the tariff of the month. Trump's initial 145 percent tariff on all goods from China, for instance, would raise the $1.99 toys to $5. Adjusting for the currency exchange rate, Canadians would be shelling out about $6.75 per duck.
Once they relocate to Canada, the store can order its product from domestic distributors, pay nothing in tariffs, and keep its prices fair and its business predictable.The Canadian backlash started on uneven footing. It was like looking out your window and seeing your neighbor peeing on your lawn. The country took a pause to rub its eyes and process the moment.
But when uber-Canadian Mike Myers spoofed Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live on March 1, he put a name to it, mouthing 'Elbows Up' in the curtain call. A hockey term popularized by legendary winger Gordie Howe, the phrase was soon plastered across the Great White North, on stickers, T-shirts, and flags. The message was unmistakable: This is a fight you do not want to pick.
But not every Canadian was ready to scrap. 'I'm seeing that in Vancouver people are getting carried away with the anti-Trump sentiment, Trump Derangement Syndrome,' said Gary Morrison, a Vancouver resident originally from the U.K. 'That is a road to nowhere. All this tension can't last.'
Morrison frequently crosses the border to visit his weekend cottage in Point Roberts. Though not overtly a Trump fan, he supported Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in the recent Canadian election. Poilievre Conservatives had been heavy favorites for months, only to see their fortunes evaporate when Trump turned his attention to his northern neighbor. On April 28, Canada's Liberal Party won a decisive victory that would have been shocking a few months earlier, fueled by Poilievre fanboy adulation of Trump and Poilievre's half-cocked response to the attack on Canadian sovereignty.
Eager to convince his fellow Canadians to return to Point Roberts, open their cottages, and support local businesses, Morrison created an event called 'Elbows Down, Sunglasses On,' inviting his neighbors to reconnect in person on the south side of the border.
'We went to Kiniski's Reef about two months ago, right in the height of the tension between the communities,' Morrison recounted. 'It was a Saturday night, and it was dead, like seriously dead. That for me was panic mode, because if we lose the places where we can socially hang out, Point Roberts wouldn't be the same.'
The first event brought about 50 customers to the Reef and no doubt had the intended ripple effect of adding much-needed coin to the tills of other local merchants. Three weeks later, a second event brought two dozen warm bodies to the struggling Pier Restaurant at the Point Roberts Marina.
As well-intentioned—and briefly helpful—as these events have been, they aren't the sea change Point Roberts needs to stay alive. Many businesses are operating at a loss and deeply concerned about surviving the summer if things don't turn around. Some—like Point to Point Parcel, a family-run mail-forwarding company in business for 24 years—have already closed their doors.
Tamra Hansen, owner of the Pier Restaurant and the Saltwater Cafe—Point Roberts's remaining eateries that aren't attached to a gas station or a deli aisle—is losing money every day. 'It's a seasonal town,' she said. 'We go into a deficit in the winter and pull out of it in the spring and make our profits in the summer. I have little spurts of busyness, but not enough to pull me out of this deficit.'
Hansen's restaurants are earning about half of what they made in March and April of last year. Two of the three festivals she had planned for the summer have been canceled—both American and Canadian bands are wary of crossing the border.
'Had I known what I know now, I would have never opened that restaurant,' she said of the Pier. 'I am in a lot of debt, and it doesn't look like I'm getting out of it.'
Larry's Liquor Locker—a hole-in-the-wall booze outlet that rents space from Kiniski next door to the Reef—has seen its profits drop by a third over this time last year. Owner Larry Musselwhite, a Tennessee native who commutes to his store from the U.S. mainland, is not shy about who's to blame.
'When you have rhetoric coming out of the White House like that, I don't blame Canadians for being upset and wanting to boycott the United States,' said Musselwhite, who has a different FUCK MAGA hat for every day of the week. 'I don't see anything that he's gonna do to help mend these fences. It's just not in his nature. He's never one to say, oh gee whiz, I'm sorry. That just doesn't happen. People are gonna lose their jobs, and businesses are gonna close.'Around the pushed-together tables on the patio of the Pier, two dozen neighbors share plates from the buffet, catching up from the previous summer and talking about current events. It's round two of 'Elbows Down,' and the topic isn't sunglasses—it's fear.
'Number one concern, take a guess,' said Morrison. 'Hassle at the border.'
Although the lone station that eases cars in and out of Point Roberts is currently a ghost booth, crossing into the mainland is a different tale. The stories range from having cars searched to being asked unusual questions to dogs sniffing glove compartments. The Border Patrol has even begun pulling over vehicles on the highway instead of at the crossing—which usually only happens during an amber alert or a criminal pursuit. Some complain that they are targeting only Canadian license plates. And even though the border traffic has been partially cut in half, the waits are longer than they were a year ago.
These aren't the people you usually think of when you're talking about fearing the U.S. authorities. Many of them are dual citizens. All of them are white, over 50, and financially comfortable enough to own a summer cottage in this oasis of towering firs and constant ocean breeze.
What started as an economic boycott has turned into a simmering brew of confusion and concern. 'We've really shifted into a place of fear,' Neil King told me. 'We've talked to a lot of people in Canada who just refused to go over the border because they are afraid of what's gonna happen. There are too many stories coming out where people are getting stopped or being detained for unknown reasons.
'We have had conversations as a family where, if we have to go to the mainland for anything—doctor's appointments, dentist, whatever—do we go separately? Do we go together? What happens if all three of us with Koraline get detained for whatever reason? What do we do next? And if it's happening with us, who are U.S. citizens, I couldn't even imagine being a Canadian who wants to come over here, or go anywhere in the U.S. at this point.'
'Because of the rhetoric, the tension, people were afraid of the reaction of the border guards,' said Morrison. 'Once that chatter starts, people don't want to cross, especially seniors. Don't wanna deal with it.'On May 6, as he prepared to meet with newly minted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Donald Trump took a moment to reflect on America's relationship with its neighbor to the north.
'I very much want to work with him, but cannot understand one simple TRUTH,' Trump wrote on social media. 'Why is America subsidizing Canada by $200 Billion Dollars a year, in addition to giving them free Military Protection, and many other things? We don't need their Cars, we don't need their Energy, we don't need their Lumber, we don't need ANYTHING they have, other than their friendship, which hopefully we will always maintain. They, on the other hand, need EVERYTHING from us!'
This is, of course, pure fiction. To say America doesn't need Canada is like saying a bakery doesn't need flour. Canadian exports power American homes, fertilize American crops, and build American cars. The United States relies on Canada for 60 percent of its crude oil imports, 60 percent of its aluminum imports, and 23 percent of its steel imports. Without Canadian potash (85 percent), American crops would be devastated. Without Canadian nickel (46 percent), the American tech industry would slow to a crawl.
All of these critical imports, once duty-free, now face tariffs of 10–25 percent. Trump's childlike grasp of economics and his thirst for chaos have thrown U.S. businesses, big and small, into turmoil, threatening every corner of industry and pulling the rug out from under our very infrastructure. Moreover, he's endangered the largely symbiotic relationship with America's continental BFF, sending Canada overseas to seek trade deals with more loyal friends, which will only further isolate the United States—and border towns like Point Roberts—until America eventually returns to the international community a lonelier, weaker, and diminished nation.