The Canadian prime minister said the anti-tariff ad featuring Ronald Reagan “insulted” Trump, who has since cut off trade talks with Canada.
Published on November 1, 2025
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that he apologized to Donald Trump for an anti-tariffs announcement that angered the US president and disrupted trade talks between the two countries.
During a press conference in South Korea at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on Saturday, Carney emphasized that he is responsible for negotiating Canada’s relations with its largest trading partner.
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“I apologized to the president. The president was offended,” the prime minister said of the ad produced by the Canadian province of Ontario.
Carney added: “I, as prime minister, am responsible for our relationship with the President of the United States, and the federal government is responsible for the foreign relationship with the American government.”
“And that’s how things happen — we take the good with the bad — and I apologize.”
Relations between the United States and Canada have deteriorated over the past year amid Trump’s global tariff campaign, which has seen him impose heavy duties on his northern neighbour.
The Ontario Trade Declaration, which included a speech by former US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, in which Reagan said tariffs could lead to “vicious trade wars” and unemployment, exacerbated this already tense situation.
The Trump administration suspended trade talks with Canada over the announcement, which Washington claimed misrepresented Reagan’s views and sought to unfairly influence an impending US Supreme Court decision on Trump’s tariff policy.
Last weekend, the US government also announced an additional 10 percent tax on Canadian goods after the commercial was not immediately pulled from airing in the US.
Trump told reporters on Friday that he had no intention of resuming trade negotiations with Canada despite receiving an apology from Carney.
The US President said: “I have a very good relationship, and I love him very much, but what they did was wrong.”
“he [Carney] He was very nice and apologized for what they did with the ad because it was a false ad. And it was exactly the opposite. “Ronald Reagan loved tariffs and they tried to make it look the other way.”
The Ontario Declaration used actual excerpts from Reagan’s speech, but the statements were presented in a different order than how they were originally delivered.
The United States and Canada, which share the longest land border in the world, trade Goods worth $761.8 billion Last year, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.
