A few days after saying he would not get involved in Canada’s election, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a message to Canadians on election day, wishing them luck while repeating comments that Canada should be a part of the United States.
Trump then repeated his previous comments that Canada would benefit from merging with the United States under his presidency.
“Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America,” he said.
Trump has loomed large in Canada’s election campaign, with parties making pitches on who is better placed to handle the U.S. president and build an economy that is less dependent on its southern neighbour amid the imposition of tariffs. The Liberal campaign’s central theme has been to cast Trump’s comments as a real threat to Canada’s sovereignty.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney has repeatedly said that Trump “wants to break us so America can own us.”
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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has also pushed back against Trump, but has said the Liberal government’s policies and “weakness” over the last decade has led to the situation where Trump looms over Canada. Poilievre’s key theme has been that “change” is necessary to tackle Canada’s underlying issues such as a weakened economy, housing shortages, and a cost-of-living crisis.
In his message on April 28, Trump repeated some of the concepts he has been using since first mentioning Canada as the 51st U.S. state in late November 2024.
He called the border between Canada and the United States “artificially drawn” and that the U.S. has been “subsidizing” Canada with “hundreds of billion of dollars a year.” Trump added in capital letters that if Canada joined the United States there would be “all positives with no negatives” and that it was “meant to be!”
The post by the U.S. president came a few days after he was asked by reporters about the Canadian election while he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on April 23.
The conservation with Carney that Trump alluded to, which took place on March 28, made its way back into the news last week. Carney had said immediately after the call that Trump had respected Canada’s sovereignty during the conversation, which would have marked a change in tone for the U.S. president after repeated 51st state comments directed at Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau.
“The president has certain things in his mind that he reverts back to all the time, but [he] treated me as the prime minister, not as something else,” Carney said. “I’m not even going to say the word he used to use about my predecessor,” he added, in reference to Trump calling Trudeau “governor” of the so-called 51st state.
On April 23, Trump explained the origin of his comments about Canada joining the United States, recalling his meeting with Trudeau in late November at his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
“If they didn’t have us, and if we didn’t spend that money, as Trudeau told me, they would cease to exist,” Trump said. “He said that to me, they would cease to exist, which is true.”
This account of the meeting is similar to that of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also previously said that Trudeau had warned Trump Canada would “cease to exist” with the imposition of broad tariffs. Trudeau had gone to see Trump in Florida after he had threatened to impose a broad 25 percent tariff over border security and drug trafficking concerns.
“At which point the president responded, very logically, and that is, ‘well, if you can’t exist without cheating in trade, then you should become a state.’ That was his observation there,” Rubio told American journalist Catherine Herridge.
Since Trump’s initial reference to Canada as a 51st state, his administration has imposed three sets of tariffs on Canada, with some having carve-outs for goods covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada free trade deal.
Carney and Poilievre have both said, if elected, they will immediately begin negotiations with Trump to forge a new free trade deal.
Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.
