President Donald Trump ended trade talks with Canada after seeing an ad that used a speech by former President Ronald Reagan to attack his tariff policy.
The White House insists the ad was just the latest in a string of problems between the two countries, and that negotiations were going south well before that — a view that Canada doesn’t share.
In fact, Canadian officials believed they were on the brink of progress with the U.S., with Prime Minister Mark Carney telling reporters this week that the country was in “intensive” negotiations with the U.S. and that he expected to see Trump at the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea. Instead, Trump told reporters on the flight to Asia that he doesn’t have “any intention” of meeting with Carney during his trip, scrapped trade talks altogether and threatened to slap an additional 10 percent levy on Canadian exports.
The blow up is the latest in a relationship that keeps splintering and being patched back together — a cycle that underscores the challenge for Carney in navigating Trump’s mix of transactional instincts and personal grudges. But it poses perils for the U.S. as well, with Canada a key conduit for the energy, metals and manufacturing inputs central to Trump’s push to reinvigorate American manufacturing.
“Despite a positive meeting in the Oval Office earlier this month, it’s clear that there are significant differences about both the urgency and substance of a deal,” said Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. “Since then relations have only soured. A lot of work remains.”
White House aides contend the president’s frustration shouldn’t surprise the Canadians, who they accuse of slow-walking trade talks and failing to make concessions. The White House has taken particular umbrage at exemptions from steel and aluminum tariffs that the Canadians are trying to secure, especially considering Trump’s view that he granted too many exceptions during his first term.
“Their tariffs preceded the reciprocal tariffs by months, and in that time period we’ve been able to secure major trade deals with the EU, with Japan,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to share the administration’s thinking. “And here we still are just talking for the sake of talking … It’s kind of like either put up or shut up.”
“I guess you can say the ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the official added.
A Canadian parliamentarian with experience in North American relations, granted anonymity to discuss the U.S.-Canada dynamic, pushed back on the White House’s characterization, calling it “disingenuous.”
“The U.S. wants a supine adversary in negotiations and that won’t happen. There is too much at stake and a handshake agreement as with the U.K. and Japan simply isn’t going to work,” the person said. “We have run ads before and put out positions publicly too. We have a good negotiating team — always do — and that leads us to be called nasty.”
Another former Trump administration official said that underneath Trump’s frustration is a “weird fixation” with Canada — and an old notion he simply can’t forget.
“He doesn’t like Canada. In general, he has this characteristic — as a lot of older, successful people do: He gets something in his head, and he will just never get it out,” said the official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about their first-hand insights. In this case: “The idea that Canada is terrible on trade — which is just not true.”
The ad that sent Trump off on a Truth Social tirade Thursday night used excerpts from a 1987 radio address by Reagan to make the case against U.S. tariffs. Reagan, in the address, justified tariffs on Japanese electronics as a way of “just trying to deal with a particular problem, not begin a trade war.”
Trump pointed to the Reagan Foundation’s assertion that the ad “misrepresents” the former president’s radio address in a Truth Social post.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) disagreed, saying in a Tuesday statement that “no cross-eyed reading of Reagan” would paper over “the economic harms of trade wars.”
“Tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive,” he said ahead of a vote to end the president’s emergency tariff authority in Canada and other countries.
It’s not clear what specifically provoked Trump to single out the commercial, given just two days earlier he told reporters that he’d seen the ad and that, “if I was Canada, I’d take that same ad also.”
The C$75 million ad, which ran on American TV stations through Monday, was paid for by the province of Ontario, not the federal government of Canada — but that distinction hasn’t helped Ottawa much.
Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, has repeatedly tested Washington’s patience on trade, using nationalist stunts to bolster his political standing at home. Earlier this year, Ford ordered American alcohol pulled off the shelves of Ontario’s government-regulated liquor stores until a trade deal was reached. He later threatened a surcharge on U.S. electricity exports, a move he backpedaled on after it infuriated Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Ford dismissed the backlash this week, saying that the ad had “achieved our goal” and that people are “talking about it in the U.S. and they weren’t talking about it before I put the ad on.” Still, there’s little evidence the ad has shaped Americans’ public opinion — beyond the one who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In fact, Ford is now calling on the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, to apologize following an expletive-laden confrontation over the tariff ad with Ontario envoy David Paterson at a Monday gala.
Carney, taking a measured tone, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that he hasn’t spoken with Trump since the dust-up but stands ready to re-engage with the president when he is ready. Asked whether he was upset with Ford for running the ad, Carney said that “unexpected twists and turns” can come up in “any complicated, high-stakes negotiation.”
“It doesn’t pay to be upset,” Carney said. “Emotions don’t carry you very far.”
He also reiterated that “considerable progress” had been made on reaching sectoral tariff deals on steel, aluminum and energy, to the point that the two sides were exchanging term sheets.
“We’ve made significant progress,” Carney said. “We stand by the progress that we had made.”
British Columbia Premier David Eby, meanwhile, intends to push forward with plans for its anti-tariff ads in the U.S., though its spot will focus on the threat to the province from softwood lumber tariffs from the U.S.
It also has echoes of the challenging negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during Trump’s first term, when the U.S. slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum because negotiations were taking longer than expected. Administration officials maintain Canada is being equally intransigent this time around.
“I’ve been involved in some of these negotiations,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett recently told reporters, “and the Canadians have been very difficult to negotiate with.”
