Growing up on New Brunswick’s Campobello Island, library manager Stephanie Gough said she’d cross the bridge into Lubec, Maine, sometimes four or five times a day to go shopping and see friends. But now, like many Canadians, she’s deliberately avoiding the U.S. as much as possible, in protest of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and repeated comments about making Canada the 51st state.
“We don’t take it lightly that the president of the most powerful nation in the world, jokes — or not jokes, who knows — about, you know, invading our country,” she said.
But Gough, a dual citizen, said it’s hard to avoid the U.S. entirely, because the island has no gas stations, one small grocery store, and only seasonal ferry service to Canada.
“We are vulnerable here because we have no way, most of the year, on and off the island, unless we travel through the United States,” she said.
The new uncertainty in U.S.-Canada relations puts Campobello in a complicated spot. Many residents have family on both sides of the border, and the top visitor attraction is the Roosevelt Campobello International Park, home to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s summer cottage, preserved as a memorial to binational friendship.
The Canadian government has carved out a special, limited tariff exemption for the island’s 900 or so year-round residents to bring household goods back from the U.S. And, so far, the most recent data from the Eastport port of entry, which includes Lubec, show monthly border crossings holding steady.
For Campobello resident Dale Calder, longstanding restrictions on bringing plants across the border mean he has to wait until the seasonal car ferry starts running to pick up seedlings and other supplies for his gardens, a lifelong hobby.
“First thing I remember growing is taking my mother’s dried beans that she had for baked beans, and I planted them,” he said with a laugh, standing among garden beds at his home. “She wasn’t happy, but they grew.”
Now, he said the political uncertainty has fueled a new sense of urgency to establish year-round ferry service to Canada.
“Some people who were either silent or opposed or whatever, prior to all this happening, are coming around saying, ‘Boy, it would be nice to be able to get to our own country,’” Calder said.
Calder, a lifelong Campobello resident, is a dual citizen by birth, because the nearest hospital just happened to be across the water in Eastport.
He made a career working at the island’s small border checkpoint, and said the confrontational stance of the Trump administration marks an entirely new chapter in the island’s history.
“We’re just so astonished at what has happened since January,” he said. “How bad can it get?”
The political tremors rattling U.S.-Canada relations at a federal level are also destabilizing a foundational story of Campobello’s identity.
Jon Southern is superintendent of the Roosevelt Campobello International Park, which overlooks the channel to Eastport.
“If this was in the time of FDR and Eleanor [Roosevelt], you would have seen well over 100 sailing vessels, trading ships, all going back and forth freely,” Southern said, standing on the cottage’s sprawling lawn one recent morning.
FDR put good relations with Canada at the center of his presidency, once calling the shared border “the noblest monument to peace and to neighborly economic and social friendship in all the world.”
Southern said it was first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s idea to preserve the summer home as an international park, jointly funded, staffed and administered by the two countries.
“That this could be not only a memorial to FDR, but also a symbol of the friendship, unity and mutual respect between the two nations,” he said.
But while the park pays homage to a former president, it is subject to the policies of the current one.
And this year, Southern said as of early June the U.S. had released less than half of its share of the funding, leaving the park with a roughly $1 million shortfall and no clear guidance from agencies on the American side, forcing the park to leave about 20 positions unfilled.
But he said he believes the park — and its message — can help to light a path beyond this low point in U.S.-Canada relations.
“To show that as people, we’re stronger than that. We’re stronger than political divide. We’re stronger than borders,” he said.
And, in fact, some islanders said they’re not losing sleep over international relations.
On a recent morning, Dianna Parker took a break from working the griddle at her restaurant, The Porch at Friar’s Bay Inn and Cottages.
“I don’t feel any different with the U.S. than I have for 30 years,” she said.
Parker, who serves in local government on the island, said she does hear more customers talking about tariffs these days. But as a service industry veteran on an island buffeted by the political currents of two countries, she said at the restaurant, her job is to play it straight.
“Nobody needs to know what your political views are when you work in customer service, especially in a restaurant in a border town,” she said.
For other islanders, the rift is too big to ignore.
Just down the road, library manager Stephanie Gough was helping volunteers set up for a presentation on a new nature trail.
She said she has canceled an annual family camping trip to Maine to avoid spending money in the U.S., opting instead to visit Grand Manan or somewhere else in Canada.
Still, here at the far end of the longest international border on Earth, Gough is holding out hope that the ties that bind across the water will endure.
“We’re more than just neighbors. We’re blood,” she said. “The sooner we get back to that, the better.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
