Donald Trump listens to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a meeting at Winfield House, London, December 3, 2019.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
The Canadian government is brushing off a suggestion from Donald Trump that Canada should join the U.S. as its “51st state” if it hopes to avoid his trade protectionism, characterizing the comment as a joke made during a lighthearted dinner conversation.
The remark, first reported by Fox News, came at Friday’s Mar-a-Lago meeting between Mr. Trump and Justin Trudeau, when the Prime Minister said the President-elect’s promised 25-per-cent tariffs would decimate Canada’s economy.
“If Canada can’t survive without ripping off the U.S. to the tune of US$100-billion a year, then maybe Canada should become the 51st state,” the conservative cable network quoted Mr. Trump as replying, citing two unnamed sources who were at the table.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who also attended the dinner, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was kidding, and that the Canadian delegation took it as such.
“In a three-hour social evening at the president’s residence in Florida, on a long weekend of American Thanksgiving, the conversation was going to be lighthearted,” Mr. LeBlanc told reporters as he headed into a cabinet meeting in Ottawa. “The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment.”
Another government source agreed that Mr. Trump’s quip was facetious. But the source said that it wasn’t the only time during the evening the President-elect brought up his country’s trade deficit with Canada – a potentially significant signal to Ottawa ahead of Mr. Trump’s promised renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2026.
The Globe and Mail agreed not to identify the source in order to learn details of confidential discussions.
Later on Tuesday, on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump posted an apparently AI-generated image of himself with a large Canadian flag, gazing over a mountain vista. “Oh Canada!” he captioned the picture. But the panorama appeared to be centred on the Matterhorn, the peak on the border between Switzerland and Italy.
The President-elect threatened last week to impose 25-per-cent tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican goods if the two countries do not crack down on migrants and fentanyl crossing into the U.S. Mr. Trudeau used the dinner to promise Mr. Trump that Canada would ramp up border security.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, border patrol officers stopped people 23,721 times along the Canadian border last year, compared to more than 1.5 million on the Mexican border. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl coming from Canada, less than 0.2 per cent of the total 21,900 pounds intercepted across the U.S.
Fox News reported that Mr. Trudeau and others laughed “nervously” at the 51st-state joke, and that Mr. Trump told Mr. Trudeau that, even though Canada joining the union would cause Mr. Trudeau to lose his title of prime minister, he could still continue on as governor. When someone pointed out that Canada would be a very liberal state, Mr. Trump suggested splitting it in two, admitting more liberal and more conservative parts of Canada as separate states, Fox reported.
The tone was in line with Mr. Trump’s history of sometimes acerbic banter with Mr. Trudeau. Some of the underlying trade discussion fit with how the President-elect has long viewed his relationship with Canada.
Mr. Trump is famously focused on the U.S. trade deficit, which he sees as a scorecard of economic success. Most economists do not view it as a problem. They contend that economic growth is the metric that matters.
According to U.S. figures, the country’s trade deficit with Canada in 2022, the last year for which it has published numbers, was US$53.5-billion on US$908.9-billion of overall trade. That deficit is largely related to crude oil, for which the U.S. turned to Canada for more than half its imports.
“Any U.S. trade deficit is a result of a huge U.S. appetite for Canadian oil and gas, and iron and cooper. The Americans want our resources, and they want a lot,” said Lawrence Herman, a Toronto trade lawyer.
He said Mr. Trump’s remark, even if flippant, did seem to indicate how he conceptualizes the USMCA zone. “Many of the senior levels of U.S. leadership don’t buy into the notion of North America as an economic unit. They instead see the United States as the centre and the other countries as political appendages.”
During his previous presidential term, Mr. Trump regularly portrayed Canada as having “taken advantage” of the U.S. on trade. Among other things, he repeatedly complained of Canada’s protectionist supply-management system for dairy and eggs, which uses tariffs of up to 300 per cent to keep out foreign products.
“We cannot continue to lose that kind of money with one country. We lose a lot with Canada,” he said in 2018.
During a telephone call in the spring of 2018, Mr. Trudeau questioned Mr. Trump’s rationale for imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada: the then-president had deemed Canada, and most other U.S. allies, to be national security threats. Canada, Mr. Trudeau told Mr. Trump, was in fact a stalwart U.S. ally.
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The Globe and Mail reported at the time that Mr. Trump replied, “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” This was an apparent reference to the capture of Washington during the War of 1812.
In a memoir on the previous Trump administration, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, described his former boss as having something of a joking-not-joking rapport with both Mr. Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron.
“Trump didn’t really like either Trudeau or Macron, but he tolerated them, mockingly crossing swords with them in meetings, kidding on the straight,” Mr. Bolton wrote in his book The Room Where It Happened.
Mr. LeBlanc, for his part, declined to say what exactly Mr. Trump had told the Canadian delegation over the course of the evening. But he characterized the Friday night joking as a sign of bonhomie.
“We had a discussion on trade issues, on border security, that was very productive. But the fact that there’s a warm, cordial relationship between the two leaders, and the president is able to joke like that for us,” he said, indicates a good relationship.