U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters he won’t be meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney “for a while” after cutting off trade talks with Canada over an anti-tariff advertisement run by the Ontario government that he called “egregious.”
On Saturday, Trump declared that he would add a 10 per cent tariff on top of existing levies on Canada because an ad featuring former U.S. president Ronald Reagan speaking about the risks of using tariffs was still running.
Trump on Monday was asked when those additional tariffs will kick in.
“I don’t know when it’s going to kick in,” he told reporters on board Air Force One. “We’ll see.”
Trump and Carney are both in Kuala Lumpur to attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. Trump was asked on board Air Force One if he would meet with Carney.
“I don’t want to meet with him. No, I’m not going to be meeting with them for a while. No, I’m very happy with the deal we have right now with Canada. We’re going to let it ride,” Trump said.
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The ad was run by the Ontario government on American television networks in the past week and features images of Americans from all walks of life going about their days over swelling music, with clips from Reagan’s 1987 radio address playing.
That speech saw Reagan speak about “free and fair trade,” and about how he viewed the risks of tariffs and protectionism against the tariffs the U.S. was imposing at the time on Japanese goods.
While Regan’s original radio address was over five minutes long, it was edited to one minute and referred only to Regan’s views on tariffs.
Trump called the ad “fake.” On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he would be pulling the ad starting Monday.
However, Trump said it was “very late.”
“They’ve (Canada) apologized, and they said we’re going to take the ad out. Well, they did it, but they did it very late,” Trump said.
Trump has claimed that the ad was aimed at influencing the U.S. Supreme Court as it gears up to hear a challenge to Trump’s tariffs, but Ford said the aim of the campaign was to “initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses.”
Carney told reporters on Monday that Canada and the United States were close to a deal when Trump abruptly cut off trade talks on Thursday.
Carney said there were “very detailed, very specific, very comprehensive” negotiations about steel, aluminum and energy trade before everything changed late last week.
Trump claimed Reagan “loved tariffs” but applied them “selectively,” which he said was “probably” a mistake, according to the White House pool reporting of his comments on Air Force One.
“I was the biggest fan of Ronald Reagan, but on finance, on trade — it wasn’t his strong suit, but he liked tariffs,” Trump said Monday.
— with files from Global’s Sean Previl and The Canadian Press
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