U.S. President Donald Trump says there’s a 'natural business conflict' between Canada and the U.S. over trade in cars and steel.
Mark Carney’s second visit to the White House as Prime Minister ended without any relief from punitive U.S. tariffs, but President Donald Trump predicted Canada and the United States would ultimately reach a deal even if some levies remain in place.
Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible for Canada-U.S. trade, remained behind in Washington to continue talks even as Mr. Carney heads home Wednesday morning. Mr. Carney was scheduled to dine with Vice-President JD Vance Tuesday evening.
Mr. Trump also signalled ambivalence about whether he would ultimately preserve the trilateral United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or sign “other deals,” but praised Canada for its work reducing fentanyl trafficking across the shared border and predicted Canadians would “walk away very happy” from the negotiating table.
Shannon Proudfoot: What Keir Starmer figured out about Donald Trump before the rest of us
The President also talked of a budding partnership between Canada and the United States to work on his Golden Dome anti-missile defence system, an ambitious and potentially expensive project to connect the U.S.’s systems and expand them, including with new defences in outer space.
“We’ll be working together on a Golden Dome for the two countries,” the U.S. President said.
In his comments to reporters in the Oval Office, the U.S. President suggested that the U.S. and Canada would ultimately reach deals that returned the two countries to managed and limited trade on autos and steel, such as existed before the start of the current free-trade era in the 1980s. The two leaders also met to discuss trade at the White House in May.
Mr. Trump offered a new explanation for why Canada and the United States have been unable to reach a deal after months of talks. He told Mr. Carney that the U.S. and Canada have a “natural conflict” over auto manufacturing and steel because the U.S. wants to stop importing cars and steel from Canada.
“The problem we have is that they want a car company and I want a car company. They want steel and we want steel.”
President Donald Trump meets Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office at a time when one of the world’s most durable and amicable alliances has been fractured by Trump’s trade war and annexation threats.
The Associated Press
Mr. Trump said he thinks the problem with Canada-U.S. trade is that the two countries are geographically close and so Canadian auto and steel production is not limited to domestic demand. He said this is less significant for overseas trading partners. “In other countries, they’re very far away, and there’s no problem.”
Mr. Carney told Mr. Trump that Canada estimated it would make US$1-trillion worth of investments in the United States in the next five years, if Canada gets the “deal we expect to get.”
Canadian officials have been working for months to add up all prospective investment that business or government would make in the U.S. in the foreseeable future, copying similar commitments by other U.S. trading partners, including the European Union.
The U.S. President said Washington and Ottawa are “working on formulas” for a deal on autos – a phrase that appears to refer to the idea of a tariff-rate quota.
Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, last month talked of such an idea, pointing to Mr. Trump’s trade deal with Britain as a model – where the U.S. set a 10-per-cent tariff on British autos for the first 100,000 vehicles shipped to the United States each year. U.S. tariffs rise to 27.5 per cent for each car beyond 100,000 units.
Ford, Pennsylvania governor urge Trump to strike a trade deal in Carney meeting, not bully PM
Mr. Carney pushed back gently on Mr. Trump’s “conflict” language, saying the two countries merely “compete,” as he rattled off statistics about the amount of business Canada does with the U.S.
“There are areas where we compete and it is in those areas where we have to come to an agreement that works,” he said. “But there are more areas where we are stronger together.”
Otherwise, the Prime Minister was careful to avoid conflict and heaped praise on Mr. Trump as “a transformative president” who had achieved economic success and “unprecedented” peace deals with several countries and was “disabling Iran as a force for terror.”
Mr. Trump jokingly revived his talk of annexing Canada. When Mr. Carney, referring to the President’s efforts to broker a peace deal in Gaza, spoke of “in many respects, the most important” peace effort in the world, Mr. Trump interjected.
“The merger of Canada and the United States of America,” the President said, clapping Mr. Carney on the back. “I’m only kidding.”
“That wasn’t where I was going,” Mr. Carney replied, laughing.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Mr. Trump’s comments about collaborating with Canada on his Golden Dome project were noteworthy because Ottawa has never announced to Canadians that it has agreed to join the project. Mr. LeBlanc, asked about Mr. Trump’s comments, said it’s part of the conversation about a security partnership with the United States but shied away from confirming Ottawa had signed on.
“Signing on − you’re using a technical term of contract law. Nobody put the contract in front of us,” he said, adding, “we told the Americans we want to be a security and defence partner and the Golden Dome is absolutely part of that conversation.”
After the 35-minute meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and the press, Mr. Carney’s private time with him included both a working lunch and another short meeting in the Oval Office − which together lasted more than one hour.
Mr. LeBlanc told reporters that Mr. Trump and Mr. Carney had tasked him and other Canadian and U.S. officials to “quickly” reach agreements on steel, aluminum and energy before moving on to other trade issues. Mr. LeBlanc said he would continue talks with Trump administration officials on Tuesday night and possibly beyond.
Mr. Trump repeatedly complimented Mr. Carney. “He’s a great Prime Minister, I mean, he could represent me any time,” the President said. Asked why Mr. Trump could not reach a deal with Mr. Carney if Mr. Carney is a great man, the President replied: “Because I want to be a great man, too.”
Dominic LeBlanc speaks to reporters outside the Canadian Embassy in Washington on Tuesday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Mr. LeBlanc said the meeting Tuesday with Mr. Trump was “more detailed than previous discussions” and ended with orders to him, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to keep negotiating.
“We talked about ways to quickly arrive at a deal that will bring, we hope, a better circumstance to both countries,” Mr. LeBlanc said.
Mr. LeBlanc would not say what the timeline for agreements is but that he was “more optimistic today after those discussions at the White House than I was when we arrived in Washington yesterday.”
The minister was more circumspect on autos, which he did not enumerate amid the first deals he would be working on. Mr. Trump signalled he would want tariffs to remain on Canadian autos even with a new deal in place.
In the House of Commons Tuesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre seized on the Prime Minister’s promise of up to US$1-trillion of investment in the U.S. over the next five years.
“He made a massive trillion-dollar concession before the deal was even signed and without getting anything in return. One trillion dollars of exit investment means closing mines and factories in Canada and opening them in the U.S.,” Mr. Poilievre said.
Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon did not respond directly to the question but argued that Canadian pension plans invest all over the world and the profits come back to Canada.
With a report from Robert Fife in Ottawa