TORONTO (AP) — 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.
The minister said there is no transcript.
“It wasn’t a meeting in a boardroom with 10 bureaucrats keeping notes,” he said. “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 good work for 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.
Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, told The Associated Press that Trudeau was successful in getting Trump and key Cabinet nominees to understand that there is no comparison between the Canada-U.S. border and Mexico-U.S. border when it comes to drugs and migrants.
Hillman, who sat at an adjacent table to Trudeau and Trump, said Canada is ready to make new investments in border security and there are plans for more helicopters, drones and law enforcement officers.
At the dinner, Hillman 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
Trudeau held a rare meeting with opposition leaders on Tuesday to discuss the tariff threat.
“The president-elect was elected on a promise to make America richer. These tariffs would make America poorer,” opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said after the meeting.
“They would raise energy prices when he promised that he would cut them in half. They would kill American jobs and drive up the American cost of living. And those are the arguments that I intend to make to anyone in a position of authority who will listen to them between now and January 20th.”
Poilievre said the right thing to do for the U.S. would be 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.
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.
During Trump’s first term, his move to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, and reports that he was considering a 25% tariff on the auto sector were considered an existential threat in Canada.
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.
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.
