Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney says he apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advertisement that has drawn the United States president’s ire and disrupted trade talks between the two countries.
During a news conference in South Korea at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on Saturday, Carney stressed that he is responsible for negotiating Canada’s ties with its largest trading partner.
“I did apologise to the president. The president was offended,” the prime minister said of the advertisement, which was produced by the Canadian province of Ontario.
“I’m the one who’s responsible, in my role as prime minister, for our relationship with the president of the United States, and the federal government is responsible for the foreign relationship with the US government,” Carney added.
“So, things happen – we take the good with the bad – and I apologised.”
The US-Canada relationship has deteriorated over the past year amid Trump’s global tariffs push, which saw him impose steep duties on his country’s northern neighbour.
Ontario’s commercial, which featured a 1980s speech by former US President Ronald Reagan in which Reagan said tariffs can lead to “fierce trade wars” and unemployment, worsened that already tense situation.
The Trump administration suspended trade talks with Canada over the advertisement, which Washington has claimed misrepresented Reagan’s views and sought to unfairly influence a looming US Supreme Court decision on Trump’s tariff policy.
Last weekend, the US government also announced an additional 10 percent levy on Canadian goods after the commercial was not immediately pulled from broadcasts in the US.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that he did not plan to resume trade negotiations with Canada despite getting an apology from Carney.
“I have a very good relationship, I like him a lot – but you know, what they did was wrong,” the US president said.
“He [Carney] was very nice, he apologised for what they did with the commercial because it was a false commercial. It was the exact opposite; Ronald Reagan loved tariffs and they tried to make it look the other way.”
The Ontario commercial used real excerpts of Reagan’s speech, but the statements were presented in a different order than how they were originally delivered.
The US and Canada, which share the world’s longest land border, traded $761.8bn worth of goods last year, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.
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