“I don’t think we should be punished,” said a Point Roberts, U.S. gas station manager. “We’re just a very small community that’s separate from the real world.”
Point Roberts is a slow and sleepy peninsula owned by the United States, which one can only access, by land, by driving through Canada.
It juts south into the U.S. waters of the Salish Sea, dotted with acreages, forest lots, blackberry bushes, and a marina that has seen better days.
The roughly 1,000 residents, half of whom are dual citizens of Canada and the U.S., don’t want the place to become even slower and sleepier.
They still remember being hit hard when the pandemic led to the border crossing being virtually closed for almost two years, except for “essential” travel.
As former Vancouver city councillor Brian Calder sees it, this piece of land where he and his wife have made their home for about 20 years and is only three times the size of Stanley Park, is unique in North America.
It is also uniquely vulnerable. In light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s growing war of words and threat of tariffs with Canada, Calder believes it needs a unique response from all levels of government.
He is running around Point Roberts getting residents — who live in a range of dwellings, including mansions, summer cabins and ramshackle homes — to sign his petitions.
As Calder chatted up patrons of the café inside International Marketplace, the peninsula’s only grocery outlet, he was having no trouble getting signatures.
Among other things, one of his petitions asks the U.S. government to “abandon proposed tariffs on Canada.”
His second petition requests the governments of Canada and B.C. provide “relief from retaliatory taxation and/or tariffs on humanitarian grounds.”
Feelings are running high on both sides of the border, which some residents fear will become harder to cross if there is a push to control the movement of fentanyl and unauthorized migrants.
“There’s a bad taste in everybody’s mouth about Americans right now,” said Sherril Nemeth, who manages several gas stations in Point Roberts.
As an American citizen who commutes almost daily across the border from her home in Delta, Nemeth said Point Roberts’ gas stations, which offer somewhat cheaper prices than those in Canada, are struggling.
Not only is the Canadian dollar low, she said many Canadians, on whom Point Roberts relies for almost all its economic activity, just want to boycott anything to do with the U.S.
“But I don’t think we should be punished,” Nemeth said. “We’re just a very small community that’s separate from the real world.”
With Trump threatening 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian goods entering the U.S., Calder described how crushing that would be for Point Roberts’ real-estate industry, which accounts for more than half the local economy.
The construction business is almost entirely dependent on Canadian products, such as appliances, drywall and lumber, said Calder, who sat on Vancouver’s city council from 1968 to 1972.
As a result, he said, if Trump imposes tariffs on all products from Canada, it means a small dwelling that would normally cost $300,000 to build would come in at almost $450,000.
And things would get much worse, he said, if Canada’s federal government, or B.C. Premier David Eby, retaliate against Trump — and thereby all Americans.
After all, Point Roberts gets all of its electricity and water from Canada, as well as its sewage treatment.
Although Eby has not said he will cut off such resources to the U.S., Calder says the threat has been made explicitly by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. So Calder feels it’s a potential danger.
“I feel sorry for the people here. They rely on B.C. for everything,” said Canadian day-tripper Colin Iverson. He was in Point Roberts in part to fill his SUV with gas because, he said, “I hate paying B.C.’s carbon tax. It doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s so hypocritical.”
While Trump makes bully-boy remarks about turning Canada into the 51st U.S. state, there is no shortage of people in Point Roberts who wouldn’t mind the opposite: being annexed by Canada.
“When Americans down here start talking about how we should probably be part of Canada, the Canadians say, ‘We’ll take you!’” said Dave Duncan, manager of International Marketplace, which features American and Canadian flags on its storefront sign.
Three out of four residents of Point Roberts vote Democrat, the same ratio as Washington State. But Duncan acknowledged business at International Marketplace has been hurt because many of the usual customers from Canada “feel they don’t want to shop in the U.S. because of the way they’re being treated by the U.S. government.”
A lot of things would be easier if Point Roberts was part of Canada, say some residents. Many U.S. citizens already pay privately for medical care in nearby Tsawwassen, rather than head over to the Peace Arch border crossing into Washington State.
And the roughly 14 students in Point Roberts who are in Grade 3 to Grade 12 would no longer have to get bused to Blaine. They’re currently required to travel almost 100 kilometres each day, going through two border patrol stations in both the morning and evening trips.
“We’ve got every view there is to be had on whether to join Canada,” said Calder, former head of Point Roberts’ Chamber of Commerce. Although he was born in Vancouver, his ancestors were among the first people the U.S. government invited to homestead on Point Roberts in the late 1800s.
For his part Calder doesn’t play up the idea of Point Roberts becoming one with Canada, because he knows the U.S. in its long history has never given up or sold one square inch of territory.
Instead, he tries to promote the uniqueness of Point Roberts. “There’s no other place like it in North America. And we need governments to give us a unique solution.”
He is focusing on the well-being of residents. There were once nine restaurants on Point Roberts, he said. Now there are two. “We’ve been economically eroding for 25 years.”
And he is hearing that some Canadians who own recreational property in semi-rural Point Roberts are already beginning to phone realtors to find out how much their dwellings are worth.
“They’re not selling yet, but they’re hedging their bets,” Calder said, noting that a house in Point Roberts costs less than one quarter what it does immediately across the boundary in Delta.
Getting out of his car in the International Marketplace parking lot, Steve Holland, a semi-retired executive from the high-tech industry, said many residents are worried it will soon get more difficult to cross the border into Canada.
With all the attention being given to illegal drugs and migrants, he said heightened security checks at the border “could be an unintended consequence” for Point Roberts, which he referred to as “Mayberry, R.F.D.,” a TV sitcom from the 1970s about a quiet, tiny fictional town.
And recognizing that many Point Roberts businesses had to close during the pandemic, Holland is eager for Canadians, and their governments, to not over-react to the “posturing and bluffing” of Trump, which could again hurt their beleaguered community.
The U.S. president, he said, is “unpredictable on purpose.”