Twenty-five years ago today, US airspace shut down and 38 planes carrying 6,500 people dropped into Gander, Newfoundland — a town of about ten thousand that wasn’t expecting any of them. The people of Gander emptied their fridges, opened their churches, dragged cots into community halls, and took care of complete strangers for days. They didn’t negotiate terms. They didn’t send an invoice. They just did it, because that’s what you do when your neighbor’s house is on fire.
Today, on the anniversary of that, the president of the United States is banning Canadian beer. Canadian rye whisky. Canadian motorcycles. Canadian whey protein. He’s using Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — the same Depression-era law he dusted off in July — to outright prohibit Americans from buying a beer brewed ninety miles from the border. On September 29 the ban takes effect, and until then those products carry a 50% tariff as a warm-up. He also threatened to ban Bombardier from selling jets in the US unless they move manufacturing here, apparently unaware that the wings are already built in America. The man’s trade policy has the research depth of a parking-lot argument.
Six thousand five hundred strangers were fed and sheltered by a Canadian town that had nothing to gain from it. A quarter century later, the thank-you note is a beer ban and a threat to ground their planes. Gander’s mayor said he hopes the anniversary is “a bit bigger than all that.” He’s right. It is. But somebody should tell that to the guy who keeps making it smaller.