Ontario Premier Doug Ford appears to be falling in line behind Prime Minister Mark Carney as the federal government asserts its authority over high-stakes trade talks with the Trump administration.
Ford and Carney have been at odds over Ontario’s anti-tariff commercial featuring Ronald Reagan’s stance on protectionism, which raised the ire of the U.S. president and led to the suspension of tariff negotiations.
Carney, who apologized to Trump for the commercial, has underlined his expectation that the federal government would be responsible for the negotiations — a signal to Canada’s premiers to avoid actions that would interfere in the discussions.
“It is the sole responsibility of the government of Canada to have those discussions with the United States, and it’s the best way forward,” Carney said on Oct. 26.
On Tuesday, Ford conceded that negotiations “falls on [Carney’s] lap” and offered provincial support.
“He is the prime minister and I’m the premier. When it comes to national issues, making a deal for the U.S. and anyone else, that that falls on his lap,” Ford said.
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“I’m there to support him, suggest ideas along with every other premier in the country. So we’re there to look at Team Canada being united from coast to coast to coast.”
The concession trade talks and tariffs are the domain of the federal government comes just a day after Ford said he had a “different recollection” of a conversation with the prime minister in which Carney said he had asked the premier not to run the commercial.
“I’m not going to go back and forth and (I) have a different record of recollection of our conversation,” Ford said on Monday.
He also admitted Carney called him a “couple of times” from Asia to tell him to pull the ad off the air early, something Ford refused to do until it had aired during the World Series games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays.
Ford launched the commercial in mid-October, saying the ad was “not nasty” and “actually very factual,” earmarking $75 million in taxpayer money to run it on Fox, NBC, ESPN and CBS, among other networks. A week later, Trump took issue with the commercial and ended trade talks with Canada.
Although he has followed Carney’s demands to remove the commercial, the premier said he would “never apologize” to Trump for it and has, on separate occasions, called it the most successful ad in the history of both North America and the world.
The premier has spent the past year taking a central role on the issue of U.S.-Canada relations, garnering the nickname “Captain Canada” before the federal election.
He has visited Washington D.C., on several occasions to push his vision of how trade should work between the two countries and is now a regular guest on U.S. news networks.
Before the most recent commercial, his office earmarked $52 million for a “charm offensive,” which was ultimately dropped after it failed to stop tariffs.
While Ford agreed to pull the commercial in order to “get back to the table,” the government isn’t looking to return American-made alcohol to the LCBO shelves.
“Those are one of the tools we have, so they’ll stay off,” he told reporters. “As long as the negotiations go and once we get settled, we’ll invite them back.”
American-made alcohol has been off the shelves of the LCBO at the beginning of the year after the United States levied tariffs on goods from Canada, including steel, aluminum and autos. It was a move mirrored by many provincial governments.
Since then, several other provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan have returned American products to the shelves of their liquor stores, but Ontario has not.
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