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Many foreign leaders come to the Oval Office with a plan to flatter Donald Trump. When Canada’s Mark Carney arrived at the White House on Tuesday, it was the US president doing the flattery.
Trump began the meeting with a compliment and a nod of respect for the prime minister who had just won the Canadian election.
“I think Canada chose a very talented person,” the president said in the Oval Office. “I think we have a lot of things in common. We have some tough, tough points to go over, and that will be fine.”
The initial bonhomie set the stage for a high-stakes encounter between Trump and Carney that could well have descended into a public spat along the lines of the infamous encounter with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, given the president’s vocal push to make Canada the 51st US state and rampant trade tensions between the countries.
In the event, Carney politely listened to Trump extol his dreams of Canadian annexation while JD Vance, the vice-president, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, sat quietly on a nearby couch.
“It would really be a wonderful marriage because it’s two places that get along very well. They like each other a lot,” Trump said. But in an apparent concession that this was unlikely to happen without Canada’s consent, he added: “It takes two to tango, right?”
Warming to his theme, he added: “I’ve had many, many things that were not doable, and they ended up being doable.
“If it’s to everybody’s benefit, Canada loves us, and we love Canada . . . over time, we’ll see what happens.”
Carney, the former central banker who rode to electoral victory by casting himself as the defender of Canada’s sovereignty amid a wave of public fury at Trump’s advances, calmly but firmly rejected his neighbour’s offer.
“Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign the last several months, it’s not for sale,” he said.
“[Canada] won’t be for sale — ever — but the opportunity is in the partnership and what we can build together.”
Back home, many of Carney’s compatriots are ready to ditch that partnership altogether — and consider the US president to have stepped over a line in challenging their country’s statehood.
But Carney is no longer campaigning. And the former Bank of England governor who watched the UK cut itself off from its closest trading partners knows that for Canada, the US and its customers remain critical — whatever the person in the White House says.
The initial goodwill became further strained as the president remarked how he “didn’t like” Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, as well as a “person that worked for him” — a thinly veiled reference to former trade and finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who helped negotiate the USMCA trade deal in Trump’s first term.
“She was a terrible person, and she really hurt that deal very badly,” Trump said.
The president also bashed what he claimed was the “unequal” economic relationship between the two countries: “Canada does a lot more business with us than we do with Canada.
“They have a surplus with us, and there’s no reason for us to be subsidising Canada. Canada is a place that will have to be able to take care of itself economically.”
Later, Carney painted his visit to Washington as the beginning of a possible reset in relations that had soured under his predecessor — who Trump referred to as “governor”.
“I feel better about the relations,” he told journalists on the roof of the Canadian Embassy. “[But] we have more a lot of more work to do.”
He admitted that behind closed doors he had told Trump to stop referring to Canada as the 51st state. “I’ve been very clear in private. It was clear again in the Oval Office,” he said.
Still, when asked what he was thinking as he listened to the president describe the border between the two countries as “that artificially drawn line . . . somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler”, he smiled briefly and replied: “I’m glad that you couldn’t tell what was going through my mind.”
