When Canadians say they don’t want to be part of America, they really mean it. And they know what they are talking about. Canada, where I was born and raised, has always had a peculiarly intimate knowledge of the United States, and not only because many Canadians spent winter breaks in the back seat headed south on I-95.

But if Canadians are at all times aware of their southern neighbor, the reverse isn’t true. I’ve lived in New York City for more than half my life, and I’ve learned that Americans generally refer to Canada only when it’s an election year and they’re threatening to move there. I long ago recognized they were not actually talking about the country Canada, but rather the idea of Canada, which seems to float in the American imagination as a vague Xanadu filled with polite people, easily accessible health care and a relative absence of guns.

This has changed, and not in a good way. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, he’s repeatedly threatened to pummel Canada with crushing tariffs and upend century-old border agreements. He seems determined to annex a sovereign nation, with a population of 40 million people, and delights in referring to it as the 51st state.

This has been, to put it mildly, unwelcome news to some 90 percent of Canadians, who do not want to exchange their citizenship for a U.S. passport, according to a January Angus Reid poll. Indeed, Canada is experiencing an unusual surge in nationalism in response to Mr. Trump’s bloviating. The Boycott America movement is going strong, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, now led by newly sworn in Prime Minister Mark Carney, has experienced a breathtaking turnaround in the polls.

What seems to get lost in much of the recent news coverage is that a large part of the Canadian identity — frustratingly so, at times — has long been based on not being American. (When the Canadian kids in my life are looking for a way to mock me, they tell me I’m acting like an American. That I’ve nearly lost the ability to tell the temperature in Celsius does not help my case.)

As Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau — Justin’s father — told Richard Nixon in 1969, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” adding, “one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

The elephant was everywhere. Before my compatriots began booing it, Canadians routinely sang the American national anthem at hockey games alongside our own. When I was growing up, the American stations on our 12-channel television dial were interspersed with Canadian ones. We could thus get the flashy American coverage of any event, which almost exclusively focused on how news or sports affected Americans, and then flip to the more sober Canadian take on the same, which told you everything else. (ABC News was a double win because Peter Jennings was Canadian American.)

This awareness even trickled down to my Speak and Spell toy — I would often have to decide between a perfect score or the correct spelling of words like honour and colour.

In the early 1990s Canada decided the country needed another way to think about itself and started the Canadian Heritage Minute: 60-second, highly produced public service announcements that recalled important moments in Canadian history. During commercial breaks from, say, “The Young and the Restless,” one would learn how Canada did great things — maybe, secretly, all the great things, despite what American textbooks or Hollywood might suggest. (Superman was co-created by a Canadian-born comic book artist; basketball was created by a Canadian; and on D-Day Canadian forces pushed farther inland than those from either America or Britain.)

The goal was to help Canadians know our distinct identity as well as we knew our neighbors’.

Until recently, the idea of America annexing Canada was a scenario that belonged in a “Blame Canada” “South Park” episode. America declaring war on Canada was, in fact, the plot of the 1995 comedy “Canadian Bacon,” starring John Candy, a Canadian, about an American president who lifts his ratings by turning Canada into an enemy.

There’s a long history of uncomfortably oblivious treatment from our American “cousins.” In recent weeks, I’ve been reminded of the 1992 World Series in which the Toronto Blue Jays faced the Atlanta Braves. The first games were held in Atlanta, and during the Canadian national anthem the U.S. Marine Corps color guard marched onto the field with the Canadian flag upside down. President George H.W. Bush had to formally apologize to Canada for the apparent accident.

It was less funny when President George W. Bush forgot to include Canada in his 2001 speech to Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks, thanking the countries of the world for their support. (He remembered Iran and El Salvador.) This, after Canada took in some 33,000 stranded American travelers, including 7,000 in Gander, Newfoundland, population 9,650, where they were cared for and fed by locals. “Come From Away,” the Tony Award-winning musical, was born of that experience.

Ignored though it might be, Canada, rest assured, is a real place — one with plenty of its own problems and a deep understanding of its neighbour. It’s been downright infuriating to see some Americans contemplating how Canada becoming the 51st state might be a good thing … for American Democrats. As Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Mélanie Joly, recently said, “If there’s a country on earth that understands the Americans, it’s us.” In other words: Canadians have been to America; they are not moving in.

Glynnis MacNicol is the author of the memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” host of the podcast “Wilder: A Reckoning With Laura Ingalls Wilder” and creator of the newsletter Good Decisions.

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