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In a wide-ranging interview this week on the Fox program The Ingraham Angle, U.S. President Donald Trump told its host, Laura Ingraham, what he thought about Canada and some of its politicians. It wasn’t good.
“Here’s my problem with Canada,” he said at one point. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their lumber … We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything.”
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When Ingraham interjected that it seemed he was being tougher on Canada than on some of America’s biggest adversaries, he replied: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.”
When she then asked about the danger of perhaps pushing Canada closer to China, Trump responded: “I deal with every country, indirectly or directly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
He continued sarcastically: “Good old Justin — I call him Governor Trudeau — his people were nasty, and they weren’t telling the truth. They never told the truth. You know they’d say, ‘Well, we don’t charge.’ Well they do. They charge tremendous.”
He added: “And if you look at dairy products, what they’ve done to our farmers. I’d go up to Iowa, I’d go up to different places, Nebraska, and they would always complain about Canada, how they get ripped off. Do you know that Canada has a 250 per cent tariff? Two hundred and fifty, nobody knows that. They charge us numbers that are crazy.”
Trump then brought up what he called “a very big deficit with Canada,” and he and Ingraham sparred over whether it was $60 billion (her take) or “much more” (his) before she muttered: “I don’t think so.”
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Ingraham then suggested: “The Liberal party is going to win now in the next election, most likely, and they were down and out. Isn’t that going to be make them more hostile to us and possibly opening more for China? It’s closer to Canada and that would really put us in a bind.”
Trump said he didn’t care, and then talked about Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, though not by name.
“The Conservative that’s running is, stupidly, no friend of mine,” he said. “I don’t know him but he said negative things, so when he says negative things I couldn’t care less. I think it’s easier to deal actually with a Liberal, and maybe they’re going to win but I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”
Ingraham then asked him to define his end game with Canada.
“My end game is I don’t want to have a big deficit,” Trump said. “I don’t want to see the United States of America … pay 60 or 200 billion dollars to a country that if they were a state, think of this, would be our biggest, most beautiful — it would be great, this state.”
He added that “Canada pays very little for defence; they think we’re going to defend them … Do you know in NATO they pay less than anybody else?”
He rounded out remarks on Canada by noting that “they give us nothing and they are the worst people to negotiate with, of everybody.”
On the topic of free trade, he added: “USMCA’s good but they cheat. You know, an agreement’s good but they cheat. And Mexico cheats also.”
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