U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney meet in the Oval Office in Oct., 2025. Trump pauses trade talks and threatens an additionally 10-per-cent tariff on Canada over a Government of Ontario ad campaign.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
There was the fentanyl emergency, the auto emergency and the steel emergency. There is an emergency because importing kitchen cabinets might damage the fabric of the United States of America. Now there is the TV ad emergency.
This is the emergency that has led U.S. President Donald Trump to cut off talks and threaten an additional 10-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods, because an Ontario government ad featuring former president Ronald Reagan saying tariffs are bad for the U.S. economy and jobs could warp the minds of Americans.
One has to suspect that maybe, just maybe, Mr. Trump isn’t really protecting the people of the United States from imminent disasters but is in fact using these slim pretexts to threaten his trading partners. This is a shakedown.
Mr. Trump really is upset at Ontario Premier Doug Ford. It’s not too hard to believe that he was annoyed by the TV commercial that accurately featured a Republican icon attacking tariffs and doing it so well that Mr. Trump called it “FAKE.” Mr. Trump was perhaps enraged when the ad then ran during a World Series game. If there is one thing U.S. politicians are sensitive about, it’s someone running TV ads against them. He probably enjoyed his threat.
Still, it was also predictable in the sense that Mr. Trump likes to turn up the heat before any deal is done.
Explainer: What you need to know about Ontario’s anti-tariff ad
U.S.-Canada negotiations on trade in some sectors – steel, aluminum and energy – were close to a deal, despite rumours the Canadian government wanted more in the way of details and guarantees. The Globe and Mail reported last week a deal might be ready for signing at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea this week.
The ad emergency allows for a little extra U.S. leverage just when a deal was supposed to be done. That’s the way Mr. Trump likes to do things.
There’s no need to guess about that. Mr. Trump has talked about his negotiating strategy many times over many years, going way back to his (admittedly ghost-written) 1987 book The Art of the Deal. He wrote that he makes excessive demands and then pushes hard. He uses aggressive tactics to make a non-deal seem unacceptable. And he periodically cuts off talks.
That’s a tactic he used in negotiations with Justin Trudeau in 2018, when he refused to meet the then-prime minister and threatened a new round of tariffs less than a week before a deal was struck.
Maybe there will be a deal. Maybe not. Mr. Trump likes to crank up pressure by suggesting there may be a disaster instead. Mr. Carney, travelling to Asia, had to revert to his line that Canada can’t control U.S. trade policy so it has to build its own economy – and is ready to talk when the Americans are.
It may be that one of the things Mr. Carney wants to see controlled now is Mr. Ford and his advertising team. It’s probably wise to have fewer trade tacticians at this point in time. But even if he triggered Mr. Trump, the Premier didn’t make a mistake in trying to make the case against tariffs.
Mr. Carney is under pressure to get a deal done, but that line about not being able to control what the U.S. does under Mr. Trump will certainly ring true to Canadians. The U.S. President has imposed tariffs on every other country and in some cases added new conditions even after signing a deal to reduce them.
In the meantime, there’s the Ronald Reagan TV Commercial Emergency, which will apparently see the White House draft an executive order declaring the invasion of Ontario TV ads to be a threat to national security. Since it is Congress, not the president, that has jurisdiction over trade, Mr. Trump needs to declare an emergency to impose tariffs.
Some U.S. experts have already noted that the legislation he has repeatedly used to invoke non-trade national emergencies, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, specifically prohibits the regulation of “information or informational materials” – such as TV ads. And the whole issue of whether the IEEPA gives the president any authority to apply tariffs is already to be considered by the Supreme Court in November.
But in real-world terms, Mr. Trump has conclusively exposed his own emergencies as a sham by declaring a TV commercial to be a threat. But the pretext doesn’t matter.