U.S. President Donald Trump is once again taking shots at Canada as he claimed that the country was being “very nasty to us on trade.”
At a briefing in Asheville, N.C., on Friday, the president’s first stop of his second term, Trump said he had asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau what would happen if the U.S. “didn’t subsidize Canada.”
The president made those comments immediately after being asked about the U.S. trading with the United Kingdom.
He alleged that during a conversation with the prime minister, Trudeau replied Canada would be a “failed nation” without the U.S.
Trudeau visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in November, shortly after Trump initially threatened a 25 per cent tariff on all goods from Canada entering the U.S.
The day of his inauguration, Trump suggested that those tariffs may be deployed as early as Feb. 1.
In North Carolina, Trump repeated that the U.S. does not need Canada’s “cars or lumber or food products because we make the same products on the other side of the border.”
He also said Canadians would have “much better” health coverage if the country joined the U.S.
“I think the people of Canada would like it,” the president said.
U.S. President Donald Trump continued with his threats to impose tariffs on Canada while speaking to reporters in North Carolina on Friday.
Trudeau said on Tuesday that Canada is prepared to slap dollar-for-dollar matching tariffs on American products if the U.S. enacts its promised tariff scheme — a program that could result in levies on hundreds of billions of dollars of American imports.
“We don’t think he wants that,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa of the countermeasures.
CBC News has contacted the Prime Minister’s office for comment on whether Trump’s telling of the exchange is accurate.
But this would not be the first time that the president has shared a misleading account of conversations he had with the prime minister.
During a recent interview with MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, Trudeau noted that Trump left out the prime minister’s answers when publicly recounting their conversation at Mar-a-Lago.
Trudeau said that in response to Trump floating the idea of making Canada the “51st state,” he suggested that “maybe there could be a trade for Vermont or California for certain parts.”
That reply “made Trump decide it was not that funny anymore, and we moved on to a different conversation,” Trudeau told host Jen Psaki.
