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Trudeau’s Defiance of Trump Set the Stage for Carney

He saw through American designs and called out the president when few other nations dared to

Justin Trudeau’s last months as prime minister coincided with one of the most dangerous moments in Canada–United States relations in history. In November 2024, Canada found itself confronting an existential threat from Donald Trump’s re-election as US president.

The shock began on November 25, 2024. Trump posted to his social media platform, Truth Social, that soon after taking office in January, he would impose a 25 percent tariff on most US imports from Canada and Mexico. That would be a violation of international trade law and the Canada–US–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). Trump’s stated justification for his unprovoked attack was alleged failures by Canada and Mexico to stop illegal migrants and fentanyl from flowing into the US. That Canada was not a significant source of either was soon revealed, but the reason hardly mattered. Overnight, Canada faced a tariff regime that could trigger mass layoffs, disrupt supply chains, and push the country into recession.

And then Trump escalated. He began referring to Canada as “the fifty-first state” and to Trudeau as its “governor.” Asked by White House reporters if he would use military force to annex Canada, Trump said, “No, economic force.” American commentators dismissed the bluster, but Canadians heard something darker. As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, “Though [Trump] does not (yet) use the language of military conquest, what other form could annexation of a neighboring country that doesn’t want to be annexed take? Trump speaks the language of power and domination, the Putinist language directed at Ukraine before the war: your land should be ours and will be soon.”

America’s covetous regard for Canada is not new. It dates at least to 1690, when a contingent of New England soldiers laid siege to Quebec City, capital of New France, and was chased away by Governor General Louis de Buade de Frontenac. In 1775, a war party of American rebel colonists under the command of generals Robert Montgomery and Benedict Arnold occupied Montreal and Trois-Rivières but was repulsed at Quebec City by British forces commanded by Guy Carleton, Quebec’s British governor. The US attacked a final time in the War of 1812, a conflict that ended in a stalemate.

American protectionism also goes far back, to the advent of the US republic, when timber merchants in present-day Maine petitioned President George Washington to impose tariffs on timber imports from pre-Confederation New Brunswick. Thus began one of the world’s longest-running trade disputes. For decades before Trump first became president, the US, at the behest of its powerful forest products lobby, violated international trade law and its own free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in placing high tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber.

Yet from those inauspicious beginnings evolved one of the world’s most successful binational relationships. For most of their modern co-existence, Canada and the US have been bound by ties of friendship, commerce, and military collaboration. With Trump’s belligerence, the prevailing sentiment among Canadians was one of betrayal by a close friend.

Trump’s annexation threats quickly revived the fortunes of Canada’s Liberals, however. Their phoenix-like rise from being twenty points behind the Conservatives in the polls began in Parliament after Trump’s first threat in November 2024. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre hammered away at Trudeau for destroying the Canadian economy and handing the country over to drug lords and criminals—his refrain of the previous two years.

But Trudeau ignored Poilievre and instead detailed how his government was handling the unprecedented threat to the Canadian economy. Trudeau described Ottawa’s elaborate plan to stop the US inflow of illicit drugs and illegal migrants from Canada that Trump had cited as justification for his tariffs on Canadian imports. Trudeau’s government had already created a Canada–US task force on border protection. He had met virtually with all thirteen premiers and contacted Trump by phone to explore every possibility of calling off the threatened tariffs. With........

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