OPINION:
Jacqueline Pinto was flying home to New York from a vacation in Italy on Sept. 11, 2001, when her pilot announced a delay.
She had no idea how serious that delay would become. Hours later, her plane touched down not in New York, but 1,000 miles away, at a small airport in Gander, Newfoundland, one of 38 aircraft diverted there that day.
More than 250 flights were rerouted to Canada when American airspace slammed shut, carrying nearly 7,000 passengers who had no idea what they were flying into.
Ms. Pinto spent more than 24 hours confined to that plane before she and the other passengers and crew were finally cleared to disembark. What awaited them wasn’t confusion or bureaucracy. It was a town of fewer than 10,000 people that opened its doors to strangers in an extraordinary act of benevolence dubbed Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Canadians — good-natured as they are, eh? — called them the “plane people.” In Gander, Newfoundlanders shut down schools and businesses so residents could volunteer. Churches, legion halls and gymnasiums became shelters overnight. Pharmacies filled prescriptions for free. Banks of donated phones sprang up so strangers could call home.
The Gander Community Centre’s ice rink became, in the words of then-Mayor Claude Elliott, “the largest walk-in freezer in the country,” packed with food donated by locals who had nothing to gain and everything to give.
Mr. Elliott had no contingency plan for any of it. “We have an emergency plan, every municipality has it,” he said. “But there’s nothing in that plan to tell you what to do with 7,000 people if they decide to drop in for four or five days.” Gander improvised with casseroles, cots and compassion.
Beulah Cooper was one of the volunteers who stepped up. She brought sandwiches to stranded travelers, shuttled them to pay phones, invited them into her own home to sleep and shower. “I said, ’Thank God they’re coming here, ’cause I know they will be looked after,’” she said.
And when asked why she gave so freely of herself to people she’d never met, her answer was almost embarrassingly simple: “Oh, my gosh, it does so good in here to know that you’re doing something to help somebody. And that’s what I’m all about anyway.”
That instinct, to help simply because help was needed, wasn’t confined to Gander. It was Canada’s national reflex. In all, more than 33,000 passengers aboard 224 flights arrived in Canada after the terrorist attacks. Within hours, Prime Minister Jean Chretien addressed his country and pledged solidarity with a grieving neighbor: “Canadians will offer whatever help we can. … We shall be there when needed.”
Tens of thousands gathered on Parliament Hill for a moment of silence, one of the largest public memorials held anywhere outside the United States. Three years later, President George W. Bush traveled to Halifax to say what so many Americans felt but hadn’t yet found words for: “Thank you for your kindness to America at that moment.”
This is who Canada has been to the United States, not just on one extraordinary week in 2001, but across decades. It stood beside American troops in Korea, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. (For the record, Canada declared war on Germany on this exact day 87 years ago; the United States would not follow suit for more than two years.)
Canada shares the most sophisticated air defense partnership on earth through NORAD. It helped smuggle six American diplomats out of Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis, an act so daring that it became the plot of an Academy Award-winning film. It is, and has long been, America’s most reliable ally, not a rival, not a punchline, not a target.
Which is what makes the current chapter of this relationship so infuriating. In 2025, President Trump reignited a trade war with the very nation that once turned its ice rinks into refrigerators to feed stranded Americans, slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum while floating the idea, apparently with a straight face, that Canada should simply become “the 51st state.”
In a fit of pique last month, he changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” (how petty can you be?!).
Social media filled with mocking, artificial-intelligence-generated images of the president lording over Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, a joke that landed with all the grace of a gut punch to a country that has never treated the United States as anything but a friend.
It is not just bad policy. It is an insult to history, and frankly, it’s idiotic. You do not punish the neighbor who took you in after your house burned down. Nations, like people, remember how they were treated when it mattered most.
Twenty-five years ago, Gander didn’t ask what was in it for them. They just opened the door. President Trump ought to remember that before slamming it shut.
But then again, he was busy lying about being at ground zero when, in fact, he called into a radio station that, after the fall of the Twin Towers, he now owned the tallest building in New York City.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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