It’s been a provocative year and a half for the relationship between Canada and the U.S., two countries celebrating birthdays this week. Canada turned 159 on Wednesday, and the U.S. is celebrating its 250th year today.

Since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, he has imposed punishing tariffs on some of Canada’s most important industries, insulted two prime ministers by calling them “governor” and frequently suggested that Canada become the 51st state.

Canadians have expressed hurt, anger and even confusion at their once closest ally turning on them. Many stopped traveling to the U.S. and buying American products. International sporting events between the two countries feel like the War of 1812. It got us thinking about how we understand each other and how much we really know about each other.

And so, in honor of the countries’ birthdays, we put together a quiz we hope will be fun (and a little bit challenging) for everyone. To our American friends, we even made it a little bit about you. If you find it difficult, of course we’re sorry.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Times’s Canada bureau chief, reported on the multibillion dollar investments, including a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Coast, along with natural gas facilities, that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Thursday, as he aims to diversify trade away from the U.S.

There were a few surprises in the projects in British Columbia, which will include expansions for the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert, as well as the development of five liquefied natural gas terminals in the North Coast, which will keep in place the politically important restriction on the movement of tankers in those waters.

And despite the Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s monthslong advocacy for a pipeline to the North Coast of British Columbia, the current plan is for it to run alongside the TMX and exit on the south coast, near Vancouver. The last-minute change of heart suggests that Ms. Smith was convinced by the federal and British Columbia governments that a northern pipeline would have encountered a wall of resistance from coastal First Nations and required lifting the tanker moratorium, leading to unpalatable delays. Read the full story.

Canada at the World Cup

Canada plays Morocco in the World Cup round of 16 today at 1 p.m. Eastern time in Houston, and the team has created a national hysteria that, depending on the outcome, may or may not peak with this match.

No. 6-ranked Morocco is heavily favored, but Canada has been on a historic run. Coming into the tournament, the Canada men’s national team had never won a World Cup game. They opened the tournament with a 1-1 draw with Bosnia and Herzegovina, beat Qatar 6-0, lost 2-1 to Switzerland and beat South Africa 1-0 in a round of 32 thriller this week to advance alongside the powerhouse nations France, England, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Throughout the tournament, fans across the country have been gathering by the thousands at outdoor and indoor watch parties, as well as in bars and at home, to cheer on the team. This week, Canada’s coach, Jesse Marsch, said that preparing for Morocco was like “a gory, horrible nightmare.” But with the way underdogs have been performing at the World Cup, it would be a mistake to count them out. Tariq Panja, a global sports reporter for The Times, will be covering the match.

The free trade stalemate

My colleagues Ana Swanson in Washington, Ian Austen in Ottawa and Emiliano Rodriguez Mega in Mexico City reported that the Trump administration on Wednesday declined to renew the trade deal President Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term, a pact that he later came to criticize.

“It was the expected result,” Ian told me. “All three countries, overtly and otherwise, had suggested that the 16-year extension of the trade deal Canada and Mexico requested was unlikely to be approved by the Trump administration.”

He added: “The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, as Canada calls it, will continue for another 10 years, but as a zombie agreement. The three countries will formally review it every year and, for the time being, continue to meet and negotiate its terms and the American tariffs that violate it. At some point, perhaps after President Trump leaves office, those talks may lead to a 16-year extension. But at meetings later this month, Canada will most likely push for an end to Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos.” Read the full story.

The Interview: Robby Hoffman

Robby Hoffman, a comedian and actor who grew up in Montreal’s Hasidic community after relocating from New York, sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for a wide-ranging interview that touched on her being raised by a single mother, coming out as gay in high school and cutting her teeth as a young comic in Canada.

“I am simultaneously the most nervous and confident person,” she said. “I don’t know how that happened, either. But I’m always nonbinary, not just in the gender sense. I’m Canadian, I’m American, I’m nervous, I’m confident. The whole thing is a disaster.” Read the full story or watch the video.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

Last spring, Ephrat Livni reported, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. Suddenly, the community saw its trees in a different light. Read the full story.

• Canada faced a prolonged heat wave this week, with some areas experiencing their first major heat event of the season as temperatures surged well above normal levels. Read more about how heat domes work and how without climate change, the current heat wave wouldn’t even be possible. Track the heat across the country with The Times’s Canada heat tracker.

• Canada will compete in the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest. The decision, announced on Canada Day, came less than a week after the CBC became a full member of the organization that runs the high-camp singing competition.

• A beaver statue representing the U.S. was smashed to pieces in Toronto, Vjosa Isai reported. It was one of dozens of statues of Canada’s national animal and part of a public art installation for the World Cup located in the city’s downtown. Was the destruction random or a political message?

• A woman’s morning walk with her dog in Kananaskis, Alberta, took an unexpected turn after a grizzly bear galloped toward her, stood on its hind legs and continued to move closer as she shouted, grunted and slowly retreated. Incredibly, she captured the entire encounter on video.

• A Chinese dissident who fled by sea to South Korea has landed in Canada. Dong Guangping reached Toronto after a decade of failed attempts to escape China. He traveled to South Korea last month in an inflatable rubber boat.

The Canada Letter is edited by Shawna Richer, who oversees Canada coverage on the International desk at The Times. She lives in Toronto.

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A Tibetan activist lit himself on fire and outside of the United Nations headquarters in New York on Thursday to protest China’s control over his homeland, declaring in a video before his self-immolation that Beijing’s policies were “destroying the Tibetan people.” He later died.

Friends of the activist identified him as Lobga Rangzen, a 52-year-old resident of Queens, originally from eastern Tibet, who had been an advocate of Tibetan independence for more than a decade.

The police said that around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday they responded to a call for help at East 42nd Street and 1st Avenue, next to the U.N. headquarters, where they found a man with severe burns throughout his body. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Lobga Rangzen appeared to have recorded his self-immolation on a livestream on his own Facebook page, which was verified by a friend of his. In it, he could be seen walking across a street outside of the U.N. building with a large Tibetan flag. Moments after he erected the flag on a street corner, he lit himself on fire. He stepped on to the street as his body was engulfed in flames then collapsed on the ground. (The video was later taken down.)

In another video posted on his Facebook page also on Thursday, Lobga Rangzen called on his compatriots in exile to unite and do more to fight for Tibet’s independence. He hinted that he planned a demonstration that day and said that it was purely for political reasons.

“So if I do a big action today, I want you to know it is not for any personal reason. It is not because I have nothing to eat or nothing to wear, but because I am doing this for my country. For the Tibetan nation,” he said.

The protest took place a day after China implemented a new “ethnic unity” law that requires Mandarin be the main language of instruction in schools and includes other measures aimed at assimilating minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs into China’s mainstream Han Chinese majority.

Since 2009, there have been more than 150 self-immolations of Tibetans in China in protest of Beijing’s hard-line campaign against what it sees as Tibetan separatism. The Communist Party has placed the region of Tibet and neighboring Tibetan areas under close security, tightly controlled its monks and monasteries and emphasized the teaching of Mandarin Chinese over Tibetan.

The self-immolations in China were initially carried out by monks, but nomads, farmers and others also began staging the protest. They were so frequent that in 2012, the top human rights official at the United Nations at the time, Navi Pillay, criticized China for the suppression of Tibetan rights, saying that it had driven them to “desperate forms of protest.” Ms. Pillay appealed to Tibetans to seek other ways of expressing their feelings and urged China to allow them to do so without retribution.

Even as the self-immolations became central to the Tibetan protest movement, some Tibetans were anguished over the deaths of their young men and women and asked how the acts reconciled with Buddhist teachings. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader-in-exile, has described the religious issues surrounding the self-immolations as “very, very complicated.”

Such protests have been rare in the United States, according to Tenzin Dorjee, director of research and advocacy at Tibet Action Institute, who was a friend of Lobga Rangzen’s. He said that Lobga Rangzen’s clarity and calm during his last statement suggested he had been planning this action for a while.

Tenzin Dorjee described his friend as a central member of the Tibetan community in New York, helping with cultural events and participating in countless demonstrations. “He would come to every single protest rally we ever organized,” he said.

“For him, there was no other goal or value in life that was higher than national liberation,” he said. “That was the singular thing that occupied and preoccupied him.”

According to Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan writer and another friend of Lobga Rangzen’s, the activist was born in the Kham region of Tibet and went into exile in the 1980s. He attended a Tibetan monastery in India before moving to the United States, where he worked in construction and eventually became a cab driver.

Jamyang Norbu said that Lobga Rangzen had a brother in China who had been imprisoned.

On Thursday night, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside of the U.N. building to commemorate Lobga Rangzen, according to Jamyang Norbu, who was at the rally. It was evidence of his friend’s popularity, as someone who frequently helped people with odd jobs.

“He was funny, he was generous,” he said of his friend.

The presence of the demonstrators embodied Lobga Rangzen’s hope that the community would unite, overcoming differences over how to deal with Beijing. Some Tibetan activists support negotiating with the Chinese government for greater autonomy, rather than full independence.

“He drew a line in the sand here today. He’s saying unless you hold out for Tibetan independence, there’s no hope at all,” Jamyang Norbu said.

Tenzin Dorjee said that the last time he spoke with the activist was by phone in June, while he was hosting a fund-raiser in Queens. Lobga Rangzen called just as the event was wrapping up, apologizing that he could not make it but asking Tenzin Dorjee to call an Uber for an elderly man who had come but did not know how to order a car.

“This is who he is, helping people all the time,” Tenzin said.

Claire Fahy contributed reporting from New York.