There is one road crossing between Michigan and Canada for hundreds of miles in either direction. It's the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge, and it connects two cities with the same name — one in Michigan, one in Ontario. People up there don't really think of it as a border.

"We don't like to say there's a border there, because we're twin cities. We're one family, the countries of Canada and the United States," Don Gerrie, the mayor of the Michigan Sault, told a crowd of about 1,100 people gathered for the annual bridge walk in late June.

Now look at what's happened to that bridge under Trump's trade war, as ProPublica reported on July 31, 2026:

• 270,000 fewer crossings last year — nearly a 24% drop from 2024, a steeper fall than at any of Michigan's other border crossings.
• $82.9 million in local spending gone, according to the International Bridge Administration that runs the span. $62.7 million of that came off the Michigan side.
• Halfway through 2026, commercial truck traffic has fallen another 15%.

The bridge pays for its own upkeep out of tolls. Its own December risk assessment warned that "border challenges negatively affecting bridge traffic, trade and tourism may significantly reduce bridge revenue or increase expenditures beyond operational sustainability."

The person who represents all of this in Congress is Jack Bergman.

What he has said about it: nothing

ProPublica went looking for what Bergman has had to say about the tariffs hammering his own district. Here is what they found.

Since Trump started his second term, there has been no mention of tariffs at all in the press releases, articles, and op-eds on Bergman's website. Not one. The only times Sault Ste. Marie comes up on his site in that entire period are an infrastructure project and a February 2025 letter to the president about a man he said was a Venezuelan gang member crossing the border.

ProPublica contacted Bergman, his office, and his campaign — multiple times — asking what he plans to do about what's happening to his constituents. They got no response.

He didn't show up at the bridge walk, either.

He used to talk about Canada constantly

This is the part that makes the silence deliberate rather than accidental.

In 2020, Bergman was appointed to an interparliamentary group that exists so American and Canadian lawmakers can talk to each other. He used the occasion to brag about the Soo bridge as a place where "millions" cross every year "to conduct business, shop, work and enjoy what each country has to offer."

During Trump's first term he vowed to work with the Canadian Parliament to "expand market access between both our nations." He championed Trump's own North American trade deal, pointing to what it would do for Michigan's farmers, small businesses, and consumers.

That's the same trade deal Canada's government now says the new U.S. tariffs are "in direct violation" of. The Trump administration declined to give the pact a long-term extension when it came up for review this year.

Bergman was loud when the trade relationship was a win he could take credit for. He went quiet the second it became a cost his constituents had to eat.

Who's actually paying

Wilda Hopper co-owns Bird's Eye Outfitters in the Michigan Sault. Between fewer Canadian customers and rising costs, she told ProPublica her business is down about 27% from last summer. The hurt is worst in the off-season, when a gear shop and cafe in the U.P. survives on locals — and for her, "locals" has always included the people on the Ontario side.

Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University, put the cause plainly: "What Canadians have done, of course, is they're boycotting the U.S." Ordinary people can't do much about federal policy, he said, "but what they can do is they can vote with their feet." Nationwide, the number of Canadians returning home from the United States dropped more than 25% last year.

It isn't only tourism. Michigan's agriculture department found that exports to Canada fell 12.3% last year, which its report called a sign of "severe strain with a country that is our strongest trading partner." Agriculture is Michigan's second-largest industry. We've written about what the same trade war is doing to Michigan's 10,000 soybean farms, and about the 119-year-old New Hampshire dairy farm the Canada tariffs are crushing — the pattern is not unique to the U.P. It's just especially brutal there, because the U.P. has one bridge.

Even Republicans who hold state office are saying it out loud. State Sen. John Damoose, a Republican who represents the area in Lansing, told ProPublica: "I can tell you that I've spoken to business after business up in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and in the eastern Upper Peninsula, and they're all feeling the pressure from this. Mackinac Island's feeling the pressure, everybody is feeling the heat from this deterioration in our relationship with Canada."

Damoose remembered that after last year's brutal ice storm, Canadians drove across the Soo bridge to help Michiganders put the electrical grid back up. "This is our best friend in the entire world," he said.

He'll blame Canada — just not Trump

Bergman is not incapable of criticizing Canada. Two weeks before the ProPublica story ran, he and three Michigan colleagues wrote a letter demanding Canada do more about wildfire smoke drifting over the state — a letter that came with a 0% League of Conservation Voters score attached to his name.

So the pattern isn't that Bergman avoids Canada as a subject. It's that he'll pick a fight with Canada when Trump is picking one, and go silent when Trump's policy is the thing costing his district $82.9 million.

The other reason nobody can ask him about it

There's a simple reason this has gone on for two years without Bergman ever having to answer for it.

He doesn't appear to have held a public town hall in the district since his first year in office — 2017. Nine years. Constituents told ProPublica they've had almost no chance to talk to him in person.

That is not an accident either. Asked about town halls last year, Bergman compared his own constituents to "a bunch of middle-school kids" who "weren't paying attention to the teacher or the principal," and said: "we will always be available to meet with constituents and small groups and talk about issue things — but we're not doing drama, sorry."

When voters in Escanaba, Houghton, and Traverse City organized town halls anyway, he didn't come to those either. They put out an empty chair.

There's one more detail ProPublica turned up. Bergman owns a house in Louisiana, and has faced years of allegations that Michigan isn't really where he lives. Julie Hoffmeyer, who used to work on Bergman's staff and backed one of his primary challengers, said the congressman calls his property in the western Upper Peninsula a "cabin" or a "camp." Bergman has answered past challenges to his residency by saying his Michigan home is his primary residence and that he's a registered voter in the state.

Where this leaves the U.P.

Bergman won his August 4 primary with Trump's endorsement. His reelection is also backed by the Michigan and U.S. chambers of commerce. He faces Democrat Callie Barr again in November.

His constituents are down a quarter of their border traffic, $82.9 million in spending, and a working relationship with the only country they share a bridge with. Their congressman has issued not one word about the policy that did it — while separately being investigated over his top aides' side consulting business, and while refusing for nine years to stand in a room and take questions.

A congressman who won't say anything about the biggest economic story in his district isn't representing it. We deserve better.

Source

Anna Clark, "Trump's Canada Tariffs Decimate Border Crossings, Business in Upper Michigan" — ProPublica, July 31, 2026. Photography by Emily Iris Elconin for ProPublica.