Trump's Annexation Fixation Is No Joke, Trudeau Warns

TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says President Donald Trump is not joking about Canada becoming the 51st state.

On a hot mic at a closed-door summit of business and labor leaders Friday, Trudeau called Trump's desire to absorb Canada "a real thing.”

In remarks caught on tape by The Toronto Star, Trudeau suggested the president is keenly aware of Canada’s vast mineral resources. “I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” Trudeau said.

Asked about those remarks later Friday, Transport and Internal Trade Minister Anita Anand sternly reinforced that a border separates the U.S. and Canada. "There will be no messing with the 49th parallel," she said.

The president's penchant for 51st state quips traces back to his dinner with Trudeau late last year at Mar-a-Lago. At the time, then-Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc sounded certain the ribbing was all in good fun.

“The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us,” LeBlanc said.

But Trump has since repeatedly raised the prospect of statehood for his northern neighbor, insisting Canadians would be better off as Americans.

"The Canadian citizens, if that happened, would get a very big tax cut — a tremendous tax cut — because they are very highly taxed,” he said in January in North Carolina. “They’d have much better health coverage. I think the people of Canada would like it.”

Last month, Trudeau fired back on X: "There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States."

Was Trump simply trolling Canadians? Was he keeping the northern neighbors off-balance?

Trudeau recently told MSNBC's Jen Psaki that Trump's 51st-state rhetoric was connected to his threat of punishing tariffs — a simmering trade dispute that nearly exploded into an all-out trade war before a last-minute deal to delay tariffs for 30 days.

Back then, Trudeau viewed the annexation fixation as "distracting a little bit from a very real question that will increase the cost of living for Americans and harm a trading relationship that works extremely well.”

It's true that a massive super-country would edge past Russia for the largest in the world by land area — and further integrate heavily interconnected supply chains.

Steve Bannon, a former senior aide to Trump, recently offered his own explanation for the president's thinking. In an interview with Canada's Global News, Bannon spoke of increased integration as almost an inevitability.

“Let me be brutally frank," he said. "Geo-strategically, you don’t really have an option [but to join the U.S.] if you want your sovereignty because from the north, from the Arctic, it’s going to get encroached in a great power competition that you don’t have the ability to win.”

On Feb. 3, Trump and Trudeau spoke twice about tariffs. In between those phone calls, the president dropped his strongest language yet on absorbing the Great White North.

"Some people say that would be a long shot," he said. "If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100 percent certain that they’d become a state. But a lot of people don’t like to play the game. Because they don’t have a threshold of pain."

Evidently, Canada's outgoing prime minister is no longer laughing, if he ever was.

With about a month to go before Trudeau is out of a job, the prime minister convened the corporate confab Friday at a venue near downtown Toronto to capitalize on what he described as a rare opportunity to tackle intractable national quagmires.

Sleeves rolled up, riffing without notes or a teleprompter, Trudeau opened the summit with a call to action for the approximately 200 people in the room.

Trump's tariff threat has united the country, Trudeau said, adding that Canada's response requires tactics and strategy.

The tariffs require a tactical response, he told the room, including substantive action to thwart any fentanyl that crosses the border. But the prime minister lit up as he described a broader strategic play — an all-Canadian effort to prepare for what could be a fundamental reshaping of Canada-U.S. relations.

"We are in a moment that we have to meet for Canadians to see not just how we get through this particular challenge over the next 30 days or few months, but how we get through and thrive and go stronger over the next four years — and into what may be a more challenging long term political situation with the United States."

"There's a window open," Trudeau said, to eradicate stubborn internal barriers that Canada's political and business class has complained about for decades. He pointed to trucking sector tire regulations that differ across the country and teaching certificates not universally recognized in every jurisdiction.

Those rules, he said, "just don't make sense."