A DIVIDED CITY

In Windsor, Ontario, lives, careers and family ties have transcended the Canada-U.S. border for generations. Today, Trump's trade war is an existential threat for Canada's most American city.

- JASON MCBRIDE

LIKE VIRTUALLY EVERYONE ELSE who’s grown up in Windsor, Elaine Weeks spent much of her youth over the river, in Detroit. As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, she went to the Detroit Zoo and visited Santa at Hudson’s department store downtown. When she got a little older, she caught ball games at Tiger Stadium, ate tacos in Mexicantown and attended exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The city felt big, dramatic and thrilling; with a metropolitan population greater than four million people, it was more than 10 times the size of Windsor. It was also shockingly close. The Detroit River, which separates the two cities, is only a few hundred metres wide. Even when Weeks wasn’t physically in Detroit, she could hear and see it: the thump of concerts, the flashing of police sirens, the whine of race cars at the Detroit Grand Prix. In so many ways, living in Windsor was like living in a suburb of an exciting American city. It was certainly the one that loomed largest, much more than Toronto, a four-hour drive away. And nowhere was the porous, undefended border between Canada and the U.S. more permeable. “We're divided by water, but also connected by it,” says Weeks. “Our border is literally fluid.” In 2004, Weeks and her husband, Chris Edwards, started a small press called Walkerville Publishing. They’ve produced several books about local history and culture, and just about every one includes a bit about Detroit, too.