Normally, those would be a major attraction for the 145 well-heeled attendees who ponied up $750 each to attend the auction and raise money for a worthy cause. The Pistons, who play a short drive away, are the local NBA team. And for decades, residents in this finger of sprawling Ontario have thought nothing of making the quick trip from Windsor across the river that separates Canada from the United States to attend a sporting event, go shopping, or have dinner in Detroit.

Despite the border, the two cities have had a symbiotic relationship, tied tightly together for decades by the major auto industry presence on both sides of the Detroit River.

Then President Trump stormed into office in January, levying tariffs against Canada and suggesting it should become the 51st US state. His actions and rhetoric have strained that cross-border kinship like nothing since the War of 1812, jeopardizing the Windsor area’s economy and doing something thought nearly impossible: making the easygoing Canadians mad as hell.

Those Pistons tickets (including unlimited food, drink, and a hotel stay), were valued at $6,000, but only brought in $1,500, Hetherington said. Bids on a luxury vacation in Florida featuring private jet transportation, worth $30,000, topped out at just $12,000. And a seven-night trip to Las Vegas, which sold for $6,000 last year, fetched only $1,500.

People were hesitant to bid on anything involving the United States, he said, while everything else was in high demand on a night that raised more than $160,000.

“We don’t hate the United States. We love the United States. I mean, we’re partners, we’re neighbors,” Hetherington said. “It’s just that there seems to be one guy in your country that is being a real jerk to our country, and we’re not happy about it. And I think that was the vibe in the room.”

That was also the vibe around Windsor just days before Monday’s federal elections. Trump has become the pivotal issue, helping propel the ruling Liberal Party from a large polling deficit at the start of the year to projections it will hold onto power.

“We should all light candles to Donald Trump,” said John McKay, a liberal member of Parliament from the Toronto area for three decades. “He has brought Canadians together like I’ve never seen in my lifetime.”

Canada had record turnout for its advance voting from April 18-21, up 25 percent from the last nationwide election in 2021. And Trump stayed in the spotlight in the campaign’s final days by ripping into Canada in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

“We don’t need their oil. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need anything,” Trump said while significantly overstating the US trade deficit with Canada. “Why are we spending $200 billion to support and subsidize another country? Because if they didn’t have us, and if we didn’t spend that money . . . they would cease to exist.”

Those threats hit the Windsor area as hard as any place in Canada.

Some of the Canadian-only products sold at Whiskeyjack Boutique in downtown Windsor, Ontario.Jim Puzzanghera/Globe Staff

The Ambassador Bridge connecting the city to Detroit is the busiest border crossing in North America, carrying about $323 million in goods a day — an estimated one-quarter of all trade between the two countries. A second bridge set to be completed this year demonstrates the close economic and cultural ties between the two cities. It’s named after Gordie Howe, the Canadian-born hockey legend who led the Detroit Red Wings to four Stanley Cup championships.

But since Trump hit Canada with a slew of tariffs — on steel, aluminum, cars, and other products — border crossings here are down and weekend discretionary traffic to Detroit is off by 15 percent, according to Ryan Donally, president of the regional Chamber of Commerce.

Canada retaliated with its own tariffs on a variety of US goods. Businesses here now tout their use of local products. (Smoke’s Poutinerie boasts “100% Canadian Cheese Curd” while trucks for McDonald’s, the ultimate American company, are plastered with “Egg McMuffin? Not without Canadian Farmers.”)

Business is booming at Whiskeyjack Boutique in downtown Windsor, a shop that sells only Canadian products, including chocolate bars in wrappers emblazoned with “Elbows Up,” the hockey-inspired slogan Canadians have adopted as a rallying cry in their battle with Trump. And Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens recently stopped city funding for a bus to Detroit and ended years of sponsorship of the Detroit Grand Prix, acknowledging those were his limited options to show the city’s displeasure with Trump as people grapple with the tariff fallout.

“It’s the uncertainty that’s impacting business, impacting people, impacting investment, and it has everyone, frankly, on edge,” Dilkens said Wednesday from a conference room in City Hall with a view across the river to the Detroit skyline. “I’ll tell you, my mother hates Donald Trump. I said, ‘You’re giving yourself a coronary. He’s not your president. Like, let it go. There’s nothing you can do.’ ”

Canadians say they feel stabbed in the back.

While Trump talked a lot about tariffs during his campaign, the United States and Canada have a free-trade relationship that stretches back to the Canada-US Auto Pact in 1965. That was expanded by the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, a deal that was renegotiated by Trump himself in his first term. He praised the new pact when he signed it in 2020 as “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law.”

For decades, the auto industry has operated seamlessly here, with major assembly plants and parts makers on both sides of the Detroit River. Auto parts cross the border multiple times in a manufacturing process that can feature many different companies, including the specialized tool, dye, and mold-makers that Windsor is known for.

In addition to a 25 percent US tariff on cars imported from Canada, Trump has said he’ll decide by May 3 whether to extend that to Canadian auto parts. Canada already has responded with tariffs on some US vehicles and could retaliate on auto parts as well. Hitting those parts with tariffs each time they travel from one country to another would significantly drive up the costs for vehicles.

“It’s taken years, like literally half a century, for some of these relationships to get to where they are today. And then, in one fell swoop, you see that those relationships and those agreements are now in question, in doubt, or are being canceled,” said Jonathon Azzopardi, president of Laval, a mold and equipment manufacturer just outside Windsor that supplies auto parts. “So it’s pretty dramatic.”

The Stellantis Windsor Assembly Plant, a sprawling factory dating to 1928 that makes Chrysler minivans and the Dodge Charger Daytona, shut down for two weeks in April while the automaker assessed the impact of the tariffs.

The uncertainty that has swept through the region and the rest of Canada has made Trump the focus of the federal elections. That’s dramatically boosted the prospects of the Liberal Party after polls heading into this year showed voters eager for a change.

But the populism and rhetoric of conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has drawn comparisons to Trump. And the liberals were energized when former central banker Mark Carney took over as party leader and prime minister after incumbent Justin Trudeau announced his resignation from both posts in early January.

Carney and Poilievre have both criticized Trump’s tariffs and threat to Canada’s sovereignty. Dilkens, a conservative, said he’s dubious of polls pointing to a big liberal victory while acknowledging Trump has hurt his party’s attempt to focus on other issues, like the cost of living.

“I think Pierre is speaking to Canadians and their concerns better than Mark Carney,” Dilkens said. “But I think a lot of the political communication is still being overshadowed by the Donald Trump cloud.”

Carney, a former Harvard goalie, has leaned into the hockey metaphors in billing himself as the best person to take on Trump.

Keith Pickard, a liberal candidate for the Canadian Parliament, with some of the food labels made by his company, Eclipse Packaging, at its factory in Kingsville, Ontario. Jim Puzzanghera/Globe Staff

“Donald Trump made the Canadian people say, ‘Who’s the best leader that we want in Ottawa?’ It’s not about the politics of yesterday,” said Keith Pickard, a business owner in Kingsville, Ontario, about 45 minutes southeast of Windsor.

The son of a former member of Parliament, Pickard said he had never thought about running himself until Trump came into office in January. The looming tariffs forced him to put on hold a $30 million factory project to make corrugated boxes that he had been developing for two years. It would have employed 400 people using paper from Indiana and served the region’s large greenhouse farming industry as well as foreign producers.

Given his extensive business experience with cross-border trade, Pickard said he felt compelled to challenge the conservative lawmaker in his district and work to battle Trump’s tariffs.

“A real fear struck me of what’s going to happen with our kids. . . . Eighty percent of what we manufacture is exported. So what happens to those jobs?” Pickard said in the office of his company, Eclipse Packaging, which also makes food labels. “Canadians feel betrayed.”

Sam Brodey of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.