U.S. President-elect Donald Trump jokingly told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that if he didn’t like his proposed tariffs on Canadian imports that the country could become the 51st US state and Trudeau could reign as its governor.
Trudeau attended Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida late Friday to discuss the incoming president’s pledge to impose a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports once he takes office in January.
Fox News reported that according to two sources present at the dinner, the prime minister told Trump that such hefty tariffs on all Canadian imports “would kill the Canadian economy.”
Trump reportedly responded by saying that “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,”
This quip garnered a “nervous” laugh from Trudeau and the others at the table, Fox said its sources reported, which Trump followed with another joke that Trudeau would have to be demoted to governor, if the U.S. were to annex Canada.
After someone at the table allegedly pointed out that Canada would be a very liberal state, Trump suggested splitting it in two, saying the two should join separately as liberal and conservative entities.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who was present at the dinner, said Trump’s remarks are clearly not to be taken seriously.
“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 light-hearted. The president was telling jokes, the president was teasing us, it was, of course, in no way a serious comment,” LeBlanc told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday.
“The fact that there’s a warm, cordial relationship between the two leaders and the president is able to joke like that, we think, is a positive thing,” he said. “It wasn’t a meeting in a boardroom with 10 bureaucrats keeping notes. It was a social evening. And there were moments where it was entertaining and funny, and there were moments where we were able to do, we think, some good work for Canada.”
Trump previously cited Canada’s loose border control as a reason for wanting to implement the tariffs, accusing the Trudeau government of not doing enough to prevent illegal immigrants and illicit drugs from entering the U.S. via Canada.
Trump called the importation of fentanyl a “drug epidemic,” and said that “Prime Minister Trudeau has made a commitment to work with us to end this terrible devastation of U.S. Families.”
Representatives of the Trudeau government were allegedly told that the U.S. tariffs could not be avoided in the short term because the Trump administration was adamant about their effectiveness.
However, they added that if border security is tightened, the tariffs could possibly be lifted in the long term.
At the dinner, the two also discussed NATO, Ukraine, China, the energy sector and the importation of fentanyl into both countries.
