West Glover, Vermont

It’s not on the road from anywhere to anywhere. You need a reason to visit West Glover, Vermont, and one of the biggest reasons in recent years has been Parker Pies, known for its live music and trivia and open mic nights along with its pizza and microbrews. At the peak of the summer season, Parker’s employs as many as 30 people, including a parking guide for the times when the lot is full and customers need help finding a place for their cars.

This summer, though, business has been down by about 20 percent, and Anne Eldridge, Parker’s owner, has no doubt about why: an absence of Canadians. While she doesn’t check passports, she’s seeing fewer Quebec license plates and hearing a lot less French than she’s accustomed to.

“Restaurants have very thin margins as it is,” Eldridge told Vermont Public Radio, “so the effects of economic upheaval and international drama, for lack of a better word, it really affects the bottom line.”

At Parker Pies, the bottom line faltered early in Donald Trump’s second term as president, after a round of what Eldridge describes as his “unnecessarily aggressive” talk of making Canada the 51^st U.S. state and hitting it with stiff tariffs as punishment for what he suggested, without evidence, was a failure to properly control the cross-border flow of fentanyl and immigrants.

West Glover lies just 25 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border, in a part of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom, where other towns and businesses have also been hurting. In Newport, less than ten miles from the border, Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase puts the drop in summertime business at between 35 and 40 percent. “My basic observation is that this is as bad as we feared it would be,” he told VPR. Running a small business is always hard, he added, “especially hard here in the northern part of Vermont” and “remarkably hard in the wake of the president’s — I don’t what else to call it — lunacy.”

Canadians still show up at Parker Pies from time to time, and when they do, Anne Eldridge makes a point of telling them “Thank you for being here,” although “my French is not great,” she says.

In the same spirit, the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing is partnering with a retailers on discount programs and other promotions for Canadians. A business group in Newport has been distributing a bumper sticker that reads, “Canada — On vous respect” (“We respect you”), and Mayor Ufford-Chase recently organized a mini-summit meeting with the mayors of two nearby Quebec towns.

But he’s holding his hopes in check. “They made it clear that until there’s some kind of clear sign of reconciliation or respect,” Mayor Ufford-Chase explained, “there’s just no way that we’re going to push back against the anti-U.S. tide that exists right now.”

Posted on September 17, 2025