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As the U.S. finally slaps long-threatened tariffs on Canada, a population unaccustomed to conflict wonders: what does President Donald Trump have against us, anyway?
Theories abound, from the plausible (It’s about the lack of U.S. access to the Canadian dairy market), to the personal (Trump really, really doesn’t like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), to the neo-colonial (the U.S. wants to annex us) to the perverse. (Could it have been that 2019 photographic faux pas, when Trudeau looked like he wanted to smooch the First Lady, Melania?)Trump has given his own reasons — lax border security and fentanyl, but sometimes impeded access to banking or an incorrectly quoted trade imbalance — but those reasons have either been disproven or dismissed. He frequently goads Canada and “Governor Trudeau” from his Truth Social account, claiming Canadians want to become the 51st state and arguing that economically, it might be better for us anyway. There is also another theory offered by a long-time Trump confidant: the U.S. doesn’t have the time or desire to come up with coherent reasons to resent us.“There’s a lot going on here, besides U.S.-Canada,” long-term Trump adviser and former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross tells Global News.“Canada is just one of quite a lot of big issues that the president and the administration are grappling with. I don’t mean to demean its importance, I understand why [tariffs] are so important to Canada, but you really need to put it into perspective from the U.S. point of view.”In a bid to understand the erupting tensions between the two once-close trading partners and neighbours, Global News examined past administration memoirs, policy papers, prior interviews and spoke to administration officials, current and prior, to understand where the fractious relationship started to crack. But no consensus was given as to when the offending affront may have occurred.Some theories appear to have credibility — there’s certainly still ill will harboured towards Canadian dairy, and Trump really does not have anything nice to say about Trudeau. There’s also influential Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who really seems to dislike his northern neighbours.But the overarching theory emerged that this may not be about Canada at all; that worldwide tariffs and verbosely denigrating opponents, or allies, may simply be the way of doing business with the U.S.And that Canada probably isn’t as front-of-mind for Trump as we think it is.If you ask Trudeau, the reason for Trump’s tariffs is because the U.S. president wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that will make it easier to annex us.” Not so, according to Wilbur Ross. And, if anything, Trudeau is antagonizing the situation by saying so, he says.“Accusations like that… might be useful political rhetoric to Trudeau, but that’s certainly not very helpful in terms of making a [deal] with Trump. He’s never said anything like that being one of his objectives, so I don’t think there’s any basis whatsoever for it,” Ross tells Global News from his home in Washington, D.C.Ross was one of a handful of initial cabinet members in Trump’s first administration who kept their position for the entire four-year term. He fell out of favour with the U.S. president in the first term, but maintains a close personal relationship with him and his circle. He says he had dinner with new commerce secretary Howard Lutnick last week.He believes the Canadians have got the wrong idea with tariffs (a common refrain from Trump advisers), and that it hasn’t affected the overall relationship. “We’ve had disputes with Canada before, and it’s never destroyed the relationship, so I don’t think that should be blown out of proportion. But trade disputes are not like a good wine. They don’t get better with age.”Perhaps we may not be as important to Trump as we think we are, then. But what are the “Governor Trudeau” and “51st State” jibes for, if not to bully us into submission?Steve Bannon, the leading MAGA evangelist and former top Trump adviser, told Global News last month that Trump wants control of Canada because he wants control over the hemisphere and over the Arctic — what he calls “the new Great Game of the 21st Century.”And, apparently, he’s doing it because he respects Canada, not that he despises us. “It is something we’ve talked for years — at our first meeting. He holds Canada in very high esteem,” Bannon says.So when Trump talks about the idea of a 51st state, Bannon says, he’s talking about “a partnership,” because he’s “sensitive to the Canadian identity.”“He and I, we talk a lot about military history and a lot about World War Two. There’s never been a better ally to the United States than Canada. You guys punch way above your weight class. You had a brilliant military in World War Two. People forget at D-Day, the Canadians had their own beach. I mean, think about that.”The problem is, Trump doesn’t particularly like our prime minister. Bannon calls Trudeau a “punk, and he’s much too close to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party.]” If you ask Ross, the interpersonal relationships could be playing a role. But not a major one.
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“To the degree that there is any sort of emotional thing, it would be with Trudeau. But everyone knows Trudeau is becoming less of a factor in the overall picture anyway.”Their fractious relationship dates back to the G7 Summit in Quebec in 2018, when Trudeau held a press conference, saying “Canadians will not be pushed around” on U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum.Furious, Trump called Trudeau “very dishonest & weak” on Twitter. The barbs have continued in the intervening years, leading up to the escalating rhetoric around the current trade war. But Trump has also taken possible successors to task, too. He’s described Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as “not a MAGA guy,” has called former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland “totally toxic” and said he doesn’t like her “very much.”Besides, Ross says, trade issues are actually at the heart of this.One of the more solid theories is that Canada’s protected dairy industry has helped trigger this fracas.The U.S. president has long been vocal about his opinion that the Canadian supply management industry is unfair trade protectionism that hurts American farmers. And that could be irking him more than public chastising from Trudeau.“There’s a lot more to this than [Trump hating Canada],” Ross says. “He has a very vivid recollection of the fighting over the dairy products. That was a very big issue during Trump 1.0. There’s a carry-over from that.”During his tenure as commerce secretary, Ross helped renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was replaced with what’s now called the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). Dairy was one of the hardest-fought issues in negotiating CUSMA and was resolved in the final days of the negotiation process.Trump hailed it as “the largest, most significant, modern, and balanced trade agreement in history,” but he has since said renegotiating the deal is top of his agenda.Each of the three key men Trump has appointed to deal with tariffs and trade seem to have the same beef.At his Senate confirmation hearing, Ross’s successor, Howard Lutnick, mentioned Canada’s perceived maltreatment of American dairy farmers on several occasions. “I’m going to work hard to make sure, as an example, for your dairy farmers. They do much, much better in Canada than they’ve ever done before, and that is a key focus of this administration,” said the new commerce secretary to applause.This week, he claimed the Canadians “like to cheat,” in reference to CUSMA.After United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s Senate confirmation, a host of big U.S. dairy firms — including the International Dairy Foods Association and the U.S. Dairy Export Council — sent their public congratulations, complete with grievances with Canada and hopes of support for U.S. dairy farmers and manufacturers. Greer has said a renegotiation of CUSMA will be one of the first things he does.Greer is a little-known figure outside of Washington who served as chief of staff to former USTR Robert Lighthizer, the architect of much of Trump’s first-term tariff policy. He was intimately involved in the renegotiations of CUSMA and also helped implement Trump’s 2018 and 2019 tariffs on Chinese imports.Julian Ovens, who was chief of staff to two of Canada’s international trade ministers in the Trudeau government, recalls Greer as “Lighthizer’s right-hand man” and “someone that they’ll trust to execute the president’s policies.“He knew Canada well. He was part of the CUSMA renegotiation, so it would be equally difficult for him to say that was a terrible deal.”Finally, Peter Navarro, the long-time Trump trade adviser and now the senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, has spoken at length about Canadian dairy.In CNN correspondent Jim Sciutto’s 2020 book, The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World, Navarro accused Canada of being out of step with “Trump world,” maintaining unfair barriers to foreign dairy imports, disparaging Canada’s role in the NATO mission in Afghanistan and facilitating the dumping of Chinese products into U.S. markets.
“Let’s take Canada. I mean, what’s good about Canada?” Navarro asked. “They have some of the highest dairy barriers to entry of any country in the world. What’s good about that?Within Trump’s inner circle, no one seems to have it out for Canada quite like Peter Navarro.In 2018, following the fractious G7 summit in Quebec, Navarro publicly excoriated Trudeau, accusing him of “bad-faith diplomacy” and said there would be a “special place in hell” for the Canadian prime minister. Days later, he walked back the comments, saying his language was “inappropriate.”More recently, Navarro was supposedly primed to kick Canada out of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group, as reported by the Financial Times. He later claimed the story was not true.Navarro declined an interview with Global News. But others who have worked with Navarro in the past have much to say about him.Hunter Morgen, who worked closely with Navarro in Trump’s first term as a special assistant to the president and senior adviser for policy and strategy, says “there is a reason Peter is one of only three original advisers that served from the genesis of the 2016 campaign in Trump Tower through the entirety of the first term.”“The press likes to dog Peter (wrongfully), but no one will outwork him (except maybe president Trump). (He) has a passion for deep economic issues that would make even the most erudite economist’s eyes glaze over.”Morgen would not answer specific questions on what Navarro’s feelings towards Canada were, including whether there were long-held grievances at play. However, he said the president and his economic team are “tired of seeing us ripped off.”“When it comes to trade, the administration has said there are no allies in the traditional sense, it is a zero-sum game. Their interest is protecting and promoting domestic manufacturers as well as American workers.”Navarro aired his thoughts on open borders and the U.S.’s trade partners in an article entitled “The Case for Fair Trade” in the conservative policy playbook Project 2025. In it, he waxed lyrical about trade deficits between several countries, but most of his attention was spent discussing how the USTRA could be levied on countries such as India, Taiwan and Vietnam – not Canada.But Canada is certainly caught in his crosshairs now. On Wednesday, Navarro rerouted an interview on CNN about trade and manufacturing to air more of his grievances with Canada – this time, on fentanyl. “I would say to Mr. Trudeau that he has allowed Mexican drug cartels to embed themselves across Canada, bring up their little pill presses, and manufacture these fake prescription drugs, which then find their way. So, I think, Mr. Trudeau, it would be really useful if he just toned stuff down.”Because it’s a drug war, not a trade war, Trump asserts.If you ask Trump — or Lutnick, or Navarro, for that matter — Canada’s inaction on on fentanyl is the root of the grievance. But then he references his gripes with trade in almost the same breath.On Monday, the day tariffs went into effect, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Canada doesn’t allow American Banks to do business in Canada, but their banks flood the American Market. Oh, that seems fair to me, doesn’t it?” Canadian officials have repeatedly said less than one per cent of fentanyl entering the U.S. comes from Canada. But the Trump administration disagrees.In an appearance on CNN on the eve of the tariff deadline, Lutnick said the Mexicans and the Canadians have “done a nice job” on the border, with illegal crossings “at their lowest level ever,” but fentanyl deaths were down less than 15 per cent and that drop “wasn’t enough”. Trudeau, on the other hand, says fentanyl seizures from Canada have decreased by 97 per cent between December 2024 and January 2025.According to Ross, Washington insiders don’t believe Trudeau.“There’s a lot of opinion in Washington that there’s a fair amount of sleight of hand in (Trudeau’s) announcements, and I don’t think they were received as being a really good effort to deal with the problems,” Ross says. When asked whether this was a trade war or a drug war, Ross insists it’s “not so black and white.”So, who do we appeal to for help, then? Lutnick? Greer? Navarro?Ross says the final say is with Trump and Trump alone.“At the end of the day, Trump is his own trade minister, and nobody should lose track of that. He takes a lot of input, he likes to have conflicting input because that makes sure he will hear a lot of different sides of the equation. But at the end of the day, he feels he knows enough about trade and has a strong enough command of the details that he’s really his own trade minister.”While Lutnick mulls the potential for a tariff rate renegotiation, Ross says Canada should not suffer under any illusions that it’s getting out of tariffs altogether. For now, this is how the world will do business with the U.S., he says. “Trump has become more sensitive to trade from everywhere than he was in 2016. Back then, the real use of tariffs was simply a trade factor. Now that he’s proven that he has the authority to use it more broadly, he’s beginning to do so. I think that’s part of the reason why that’s being more broadly [used] on Canada.”Trump has signalled that more tariffs will come in early April, potentially for all U.S. trading partners.“Canada is looking at this in isolation, but it’s not really happening in isolation. What’s happening in connection with Canada is part of the president’s overall emphasis on using higher tariffs for a whole variety of end purposes in all kinds of geographies,” Ross says.So, should we stop navel-gazing and trying to figure out how we can appease Trump? Yes and no, Ross says.Canada should be focusing on increasing its defence spending and working on ways to “work with Trump, not against him.”“I think the way to deal with Trump is try to figure out how to get along, not just to throw recrimination. Nobody is going to force him to back down. That is an ill-fated concept if that’s the strategy the Canadian government uses.”The relationship has also been through the ringer before. After all, in his memoir, Lighthizer described the CUSMA negotiations as pushing U.S.- Canada relations to their worst point since the War of 1812.So is there coming back from this?Maybe. But with a cost.“Tariffs worldwide relative to the U.S. are going to be the new way of life. Certainly as long as Trump is in office. There’s very little point in anybody harbouring the illusions that there’s something they can do to just get rid of the tariffs. That’s not realistic,” Ross says.
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