Trudeau says Canada won’t be 51st country, even though Trump is a ‘successful negotiator’

Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested that President-elect Trump’s proposal to make Canada America’s “51st state” diverted attention from the tariff threat.

“I know as a successful negotiator he likes to keep people a little off balance. The 51st state, that’s not going to happen,” Trudeau said on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki” on Sunday. “It’s just the beginning. Canadians are incredibly proud to be Canadian. But people are talking about it now, as opposed to talking about the impact of 25% tariffs [has] to steel and aluminum coming into the United States, to energy, whether it’s oil and gas or electricity.”

“No American wants to pay 25 percent more for electricity or oil and gas coming from Canada,” Trudeau said in an interview with Psaki, President Biden’s former White House press secretary. “That’s something that I think people need to pay a little more attention to. And maybe the idea of ​​a 51st state is a little bit of a distraction from a very real issue that is going to raise the cost of living for Americans and hurt a trade relationship that works extremely well.”

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of 25 percent on all Canadian imports. The president-elect also said that if Canada were to merge with the US, taxes would be reduced and there would be no tariffs.

The president-elect also took a shot at Trudeau, calling him the “governor” of Canada. Last Monday, Trudeau announced that he would resign as Canada’s prime minister after his Liberal Party elects a new leader on March 9.

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“Since my first conversations with him back in 2016, he has told me how much he admires Canada, how much he appreciates and loves us, so he has some doses of flattery in the fact that he thinks we are great the way we are. Trudeau said of Trump on Sunday. “He’s right, we’re great. We’re also very, very proud to be Canadian. If you talk to any Canadian, you ask them to define what it means to be Canadian, they’ll talk about all kinds of things, but one of the things we’ll point out is, ‘and we are not Americans’.”

On Trudeau’s trip to Mar-a-Lago in November, the Canadian prime minister said the topic of the US annexing Canada had indeed come up, but Trudeau said that after he joked that Canada might annex Vermont or California as some kind of trade, Trump “immediately decided it wasn’t so funny anymore, and we moved on to another conversation.”

“It’s no accident that he’s doing this, but my focus has to be not on something that he’s talking about that will never happen, but more on something that could happen, that if he decides to go forward with tariffs that increase the cost of almost everything for the American people, on top of that, we’re going to have a strong response to that,” Trudeau said.

“We stand ready to respond with tariffs as needed,” Trudeau said.

Canadian officials say that if Trump follows through on his threat of punitive tariffs, Canada would consider retaliating with tariffs on US orange juice, toilets and some steel products.

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Trudeau recalled that Trump had previously imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports during his first term, and Canada responded by imposing tariffs on bourbon, Harley Davidson motorcycles, orange juice, playing cards and other such items that Trudeau argued would Canadians could easily find a replacement.

“It ended up causing a lot of losses for American companies that have Canada as their number one export partner. We’re the number one export partner for about 35 different US states, and anything that thickens the border between us ends up costing American citizens and American jobs. That’s not what what President Trump was elected to do,” Trudeau said. “I know he was elected to try to make life easier for all Americans, to support American workers. Those are the things that are going to hurt them.”

Trump said last week that the U.S. doesn’t need oil — or anything else — from Canada, but nearly a quarter of the oil the U.S. consumes every day comes from Canada. The energy-rich western province of Alberta exports 4.3 million barrels of oil a day to the US, according to the Associated Press. Data from the United States Energy Information Administration shows that the US consumes 20 million barrels per day and produces about 13.2 million barrels per day.

Canada, a founding member of NATO and home to more than 40 million people, is also a major export destination for 36 US states. Almost 2.7 billion dollars worth of goods and services cross the border every day.

Trump said he would reconsider his threat of tariffs if Canada made improvements in managing security at the Canada-U.S. border, which he and his advisers see as a potential entry point for illegal immigrants.

Trudeau said less than 1% of illegal immigrants and fentanyl cross into the US from Canada.

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However, after his meeting with Trump at Mar-a-LagoTrudeau announced an increase in spending on border security, expressing a willingness to address Trump’s concerns in the hope that he will reconsider his threat of tariffs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.