TORONTO — President-elect Donald Trump was joking when he suggested Canada become the 51st U.S. state during a dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Canadian minister who attended their recent dinner said Tuesday.
Fox News reported that Trump made the comment in response to Trudeau raising concerns that Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada would damage Canada’s economy.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who attended the Friday dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, said Trump’s comments were in jest.
“The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment,” LeBlanc told reporters in Ottawa.
LeBlanc described it as 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 light-hearted,” he said.
He called the relations warm and cordial and said the fact that “the president is able to joke like that for us” indicates good relations.
On Tuesday, Trump appeared to continue with the joke, posting on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated image of himself standing on mountain with a Canadian flag next to him with the caption “Oh Canada!”
Earlier last week, the Republican president-elect threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico unless they stem the flow of migrants and drugs.
Trudeau requested the meeting in a bid to avoid the tariffs by convincing Trump that the northern border is nothing like the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
Trudeau held a rare meeting with opposition leaders on Tuesday about U.S-Canada relations and later said that opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre shouldn’t amplify the erroneous narratives that Americans are saying about the border.
“Less than one percent of migrants coming into the United States irregularly come from Canada and 0.2 percent of the fentanyl coming into the United States comes from Canada,” Trudeau said in Parliament.
Canadian officials have said there are plans to put more helicopters, drones and law enforcement officers at the border.
At the dinner, Kristen Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, said America’s trade deficit with Canada was also raised. Hillman said the U.S. had a $75 billion trade deficit with Canada last year but noted a third of what Canada sells into the U.S. is energy exports and prices have been high.
“Trade balances are something that he focuses on so it’s important to engage in that conversation but to put it into context,” Hillman told the AP. “We are one-tenth the size of the United States so a balanced trade deal would mean per capita we are buying 10 times more from the U.S. than they are buying from us. If that’s his metric we will certainly engage on that.”
Hillman said Canada sold $170 billion worth of energy products last year to the U.S.
About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, and 85% of U.S. electricity imports as well
Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing for national security.
About 77% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S.
Trudeau’s government successfully employed a “Team Canada” approach during Trump’s first term in office when the free trade deal between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico was renegotiated. But Trudeau’s minority government is in a much weaker position politically now and faces an election within a year.
Poilievre, Canada’s opposition leader, said the tariffs would harm Americans.
“The president-elect was elected on a promise to make America richer. These tariffs would make America poorer,” Poilievre said after meeting with Trudeau.
Poilievre said the U.S. would be wise to do more free trade with its best friend and closest ally.
Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly 3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day.
Trudeau returned home after the dinner at Mar-a-Lago club in Florida without assurances Trump would back away from threatened tariffs on all products from the major American trading partner. Trump called the talks “productive” but signaled no retreat from a pledge that Canada says unfairly lumps it in with Mexico over the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States.
The flows of migrants and seizures of drugs are vastly different. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border during the last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.
Most of the fentanyl reaching the U.S. - where it causes about 70,000 overdose deaths annually - is made by Mexican drug cartels using precursor chemicals smuggled from Asia.
On immigration, the U.S. Border Patrol reported 1.53 million encounters with irregular migrants at the southwest border with Mexico between October 2023 and September 2024. That compares to 23,721 encounters at the Canadian border during that time.
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