Thank you and "we apologize" - Messages from Americans to our friends in Gander Newfoundland

A New York Times guest opinion essay by Glynnis MacNicol

This Tiny Canadian Town Took In Americans on 9/11. It Would Again.

GANDER, NL:  The gift shop in the North Atlantic Aviation Museum in Gander, Newfoundland, sells a T-shirt emblazoned with the numbers nine and 11. The ones evoke the twin towers of the World Trade Center and are shaded in with flags: one American, one Canadian. 

Below is written “Beyond Words,” and below that “Gander - Canada.”

It’s a jarring image to encounter so far from ground zero. Gander sits some 1,100 miles northeast by air of New York City, yet the attacks that happened 25 years ago on Friday hit this tiny slice of Canada profoundly. When the airspace over the United States was shut down that day, 38 passenger planes that were in transit over the Atlantic landed here, nearly doubling the population of the town in a few short hours. Residents rallied and housed and fed close to 7,000 stranded and scared passengers over the following days. It was — and remains — an inspiring show of unconditional generosity and support from one country toward its closest ally in a time of crisis. The tale was even turned into a Tony Award-winning musical, “Come From Away.”

Things feel very different today. I landed in Newfoundland just as news broke that Prime Minister Mark Carney had pulled out of tariff negotiations with the United States, later telling reporters, “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked.” 

The good will and unity celebrated in Gander suddenly seemed a distant relic.

Donald Trump’s trade war with America’s northern neighbor has produced innumerable headlines on Canadian rage — compelling because they are so at odds with Canada’s reputation for being nice. Canadians are famous for starting sentences with “sorry.” 

But nice is too often mistaken for being easygoing, and Canadians have not taken Trump’s insults lightly. And while the anger is real, Canadian feelings toward the States are more complicated than the rage narrative suggests.

Perhaps no place captures the unique, lopsided intensity of this relationship, nor the strange turn it’s taken, like Gander.


These days, instead of Americans seeking shelter, the people in Gander have been encountering, according to almost everyone I spoke with, an entirely new phenomenon: apologizing Americans.

No one comes to Gander accidentally. The town is in the northeastern part of the province of Newfoundland, which is so far east into the North Atlantic that it occupies its own time zone: one hour and a half ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Gander’s airport, a marvel of midcentury architecture, was once the largest in the world. Before jet travel advanced to longer-haul flights, planes routinely landed there to refuel, and the airport hosted a glamorous array of stars including Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein and Muhammad Ali.

These days there are only about five daily flights into Gander. The more reliable way to arrive is to drive the more than three hours up from the provincial capital, St. John’s, along the Trans-Canada Highway, past signs for towns with names like Come By Chance and Little Heart’s Ease and glimpses of the ocean along the wild Newfoundland coast. I was cautioned not to make the trip at night for fear of hitting a moose.

Even on a Saturday afternoon in August, the height of tourist season, Gander evinces a drowsy small-town energy. 

On Sundays, locals congregate at Rosie’s Restaurant and Bakery, which serves both a Jiggs dinner, a traditional Newfoundland boiled meal of salted beef and vegetables, and a cookie called Moose Farts. The arts and culture center is home to an annual production of “Come From Away,” which draws visitors from across Canada and around the world. Each year the town commemorates September 11, a bigger event this year because of the 25th anniversary. Local schoolchildren are part of the production.

Size notwithstanding, Gander has long been more accustomed to taking in people from “away” than many other places. In addition to the town’s history as a fuel stopover, its residents have assisted stranded passengers on other, less storied occasions.

During my weekend there, at the height of trade war talk, there remained no question that the citizens of Gander would still be willing to help Americans in a time of crisis.

“We would probably do the same thing,” said Brian Day, who works as a porter at Sinbad’s Hotel. On September 11, he was working at the KFC, where he spent 22 straight hours making food for the stranded passengers. “You help your fellow man. Newfies are good people,” he said, using a nickname for Newfoundlanders. “We would treat a stranger like we knew them all our lives.”

“Trump is a bully,” Mr. Day added. “Time for him just to go away.” I heard versions of Mr. Day’s comments from those who had been teenagers and adults, and even babies, that day: It’s the president, not the people.

“I don’t think people have anything against people from America,” Amanda MacPherson told me as I was waiting at the theater to buy a ticket to that night’s performance of “Come From Away.” 

Ms. MacPherson was a teenager in 2001. She helped turn her high school into a temporary shelter and served stranded passengers food for days.

Canadians may have an easier time than citizens of other countries separating Americans from their government. That’s partly because many Canadians, until this administration at least, spent a lot of time in the States. 

A short list of reasons to cross the border (used to) include: grocery shopping, visiting family, sports events. There’s also the television connection: Canadians get their American TV through local affiliates. As a child growing up in southern Ontario, where more than a third of the country’s population lives, I had a strangely extensive knowledge of Buffalo.

Even so, Canadians were not quite prepared for the sudden change among Americans now landing in their midst.

Charlotte Brown, who works at a coffee shop and is too young to remember September 11, told me it’s not unusual these days for visitors from the States to lead with something like: “I’m American. I promise I’m not with them. I’m so sorry. It’s not our fault.” 

Brooke Gidge and Tamara Oxford, who were working the desk at the Gander Information Center when I arrived, confirmed the “American apology tour” was now the norm.

It’s a strange experience for Canadians, citizens of a country accustomed to being left out of America’s perception of itself and of history. Despite the close cultural and physical ties, America’s general obliviousness toward its northern neighbors has long been a source of exasperation, frustration, insecurity, identity crises and comedy. (Though it’s doubtful even Canada’s long-running satire show “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” or “South Park” in its “Blame Canada” heyday could have dreamed up “Lake America.”) Canadians, despite fighting heroically alongside the Americans and the British on D-Day, helping rescue Americans during the Iran hostage crisis and joining the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, are rarely noted in America’s retelling of these events.

If Trump has turned America into a nation of apologizers, he’s also making it an object of pity for the next generation of Canadians — a far more dangerous emotion in the long run than rage.

“I feel sorry for all the young women who have to live there,” said Ms. Oxford, referring to women’s shrinking reproductive rights in the United States. For Ms. Oxford and Ms. Gidge, who were both born after September 11, the date has become a historical footnote. (“It’s big for the older generation,” Ms. Oxford told me with a shrug.) They have spent more than half their lives next door to an America dominated by Trump, she said: “Last summer you guys had fires, and we were the first people to send over aid, and now you’re complaining about the Canadian wildfire smoke.”

It’s a reflection about how diminished the idea of America has become outside its borders. While older Canadians have stronger memories of a different United States, and sometimes seem to be operating under the belief (or hope) that bygone America will return after Trump’s term ends, the younger people I talked to in Gander have no such experience to return to.

These days expectations have begun to shift: Americans are moving into a future where they will have to earn the good will that used to come so easily. That’s as true in Gander as it is elsewhere in Canada.

But Ms. Gidge still extended a hand. “If you actually respect our country,” she said, “and you’re kind and talking to us, we would, in my opinion, love to have you.”

Reader response from Nova Scotia:  I was so proud that we could help our neighbors during this terrible time, and I know that we will always come to each others aid in times of disaster because that is what good neighbors do. But the USA that I grew up knowing is gone, and I don't think it will return, even when Trump is gone. This is the new reality, as Mr. Carney said, we can't trade on nostalgia for what we used to have, we have to seek new allies. It was good for a long time, but we can't go back.

Mass Deportation in North American history was prelude to hundreds of years of historical upheaval

Echo opinion published in the Conway New Hampshire Daily News (Also in the Berlin NH Daily News and in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, by David M. Shribman:  At this link here.

David M. Shribman: Donald Trump’s planned ‘Great Upheaval’ has a dismal precedent.

Le Grand Dérangement

This is an excellent opinion by Mr. Shribman and I thank him for taking time to write about how devastating the Great Upheaval continues to be among descendants of Acadians and how this horrible history is a prelude to what is in store for the Trumpzi administration especially with real time media coverage to document the terror. IMO, I have said, Rep. Elise Stefanik is like the Lady Macbeth of the Congress and now, if she is approved to be the United Nations Ambassador, she will be the face of this Mass Deportation fiasco to the world and, indeed, she will be washing the figurative blood of genocide off of her hands.

CHETICAMP, Nova Scotia- In the middle of the 18th century, Great Britain undertook a deportation program in the New World with many of the elements of President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to expel hundreds of thousands of immigrants, perhaps even mor than a million, from the United States. It did not go well.

This episode is lost in the memory of most North Americans, but is vivid today, some 270 years later, in the lives and cultures of descendants of the French colonists who lived, generally peaceably, among Indigenous peoples for a century and a quarter.

It was a mass deportation known variously as the Acadian Expulsion or the Great Upheaval (in French, Le Grand Dérangement).

This episode remains a blot on British history- and, perhaps, an object lesson for the new U.S. administration as it is contemplating an even more massive expulsion.

Acadian flag with "Stella Maris" star

What Trump wants to do in terms of moving people has a eal parallel,” said Donald Savoie, Universite de Moncton, scholar with Acadian roots. “It was extremely painful and Acadians have not forgotten that experience.”

Here in the land of what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in “Evangeline,” called, “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss,” ae the successors to the Acadian ruthlessly expelled from Nova Scotia (Acadie), between 1755 and 1763, and deported to the American Colonies, Great Britain and France. In all, about two-thirds of the Acadians were expelled in a brutal effort that provides the backdrop of Longfellow’s epic poem about lost land and lost love.

Some of the Acadians and their descendants later returned here, to the fishing village of Cheticamp on Cape Breton Island, where Acadian culture is nurtured and Acadian ercipes are renewed and revered. Everywhere flies the flag of Acadia, a yellow star (the stella maris, or “star of the sea”, signifying the Virgin Mary) affixed to the familiar blue-white-red rectangles of the French flag.

Just as the Acadian lovers Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse were separated during the Breat Upheaval in the Longfellow poem, so too were hundreds of Acadians in an expulstion that began when Colonel John Winslow summoned males over the age of 10 to the Grand-Pre Church, where he read a decree ordering, “That your Land & Tennements, Cattle of all Kinds and Livestocks of all Sorts are forfeited to the Crown with all other your effects Savings you money and Household Goods, and you yourselves to be removed from this Province.”

The appointment of Tom Homan, who has promised, “a historic deportation operation,” as the Trump administration’s border czar, and the strong role that Stephen Miller, the administration’s leading anti-immigrant figure, will play as Trump’s deputy chief of staff make it clear that the new president intends to set in motion what he has called, “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”

There are, however, obstacles to a mass deportation of those in the country illegally that could affect as many as 11 million peple- about a quarter of the immigrants in the United States now.

One is the backload of cases in the nation’s immigration courts, the Supreme Court has ruled that migrants facing deportation have the right of due process. The American Immigration Council, sometimes criticized for being an advocacy group for immigrants, puts the cost of such an operation above $315 billion for arrests, detention, processing and eventual removal. The group argues such an operaton would reduce Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent and would lead to a reduction of more than #47 billion in federal tax returns and $29 billion in state and local tax revenue.

More than half of the country wants drastic changes in the border. A year ago (circa 2023) 41 percent of Americans wanted immigration decreased, according to the Gallup Poll. The figure now is 55 percent. The poll found that 42 percent consider immigration a crisis. Only four years ago, the public was split between those wanting to admit fewer immigrants and those favoring more.

The number of foreign-born people in the United States reached a record 47.8 million last year, about 14.3 percent of the population, according to the Pew Research Center, just below the record (14.8 percent) set in 1890.

Stephen Miller has spoken of creating staging grounds that would include runways for military aircraft near the Texas border. Trump confirmed the other day that he would use military personnel for deportations and has talked of using local police in the effort. No plans have been made in Mexico for the reception of those sent back across the border, no shelters have been created, and no means of feeding or employing the migrants are available- challenges that face Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president for less than eight weeks.

“This will be a great burden on President Sheinbaum, who will need time to put a plan in place, and it will be highly disruptive to the U.S.- Mexico relations,” said Patrice Franko, a Colby College (in Waterville Maine) expert on Latin America. “This is going to be a complex process that merits great discussion, a lot of interagency work, and negotiations in how to do this in a way that does not spill over into other areas, including the drug war.”

The acadian precedent offers no comfort, only disruptions in the short term and anxieties in the long term.

Professor Savoie, the leading Canadian expert on government operations, rmembers the 1955 bicentary commemorations of the Acdian expulstion.

The celebration was that we were still alive and kicking,” he said. “To this day, Acadians have never let go. They have demanded an apology. It’s still a part of who we are. I think people andentire generations will be marked forever by the Trump expulsions. The United States will make enemies for generations.

The big difference between the 1755, expulsions and the ones that Trump is planning is the media technology of the time. The Trump expulsions will be visible globally in a way that was inconceivable when the Acadians were deported after refusing to swear owths to the British crown without assurances that they would be free to practice their religion and could remain neutral in the case of war with France.

The Acadian precedent to the Trump plan didn’t work out very well,” Savoie said. “It did not work out for us, as it is still a bone in our throat. We Acadians have never turned the page. And, it didn’t work out for the British crown, because centuries later it is still a stain on their history.”

David M. Shribman is a Dartmouth College graduate and the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.