Trudeau, Trump discuss trade, border at crucial Mar-a-Lago meeting

By Josh Wingrove and Brian Platt

 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with President-elect Donald Trump on Friday as the two leaders discussed trade, the border and fentanyl, subjects of the incoming US leader’s tariff threat on its neighbor.

Trudeau and Trump spoke on a wide range of issues over dinner at Mar-a-Lago that lasted roughly three hours, two officials familiar with the meeting said. They included defense, NATO, Ukraine and China, the people said, declining to be identified as the information isn’t public. 

 

The two leaders also discussed several pipeline projects, including the Keystone XL line the Biden administration killed, and icebreakers, the people said. Trudeau landed in West Palm Beach, Florida, earlier Friday evening.

 

The meeting was attended by top Trump officials, including his incoming National Security Adviser Mike Waltz; Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary; Doug Burgum, his pick for interior secretary; and David McCormick and Dina Powell, respectively the newly elected senator for Pennsylvania and a senior Trump aide from his first term, the people said.

 

Trump earlier this week vowed to hit Canada and Mexico as well as China with additional tariffs, casting the levies as necessary to secure US borders, a top concern of voters in November’s presidential election. The president-elect said he would impose additional 10% tariffs on goods from China and 25% tariffs on all products from Mexico and Canada if they failed to act.

 

The two leaders were also joined at dinner by Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc — whose portfolio includes border security — as well as Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, a person familiar with the matter said earlier.

 

Representatives for both sides did not immediately respond to a request for a public comment outside of regular business hours.

 

Trump’s first specific vow to curb global trade flows since his election has roiled markets. His threats, which he made on his Truth Social network, sent the Canadian dollar falling. That evening, Trudeau contacted the president-elect in a phone call to discuss border security and trade, according to a government official with knowledge of the matter.

 

The prime minister pointed out that the number of migrants who cross the country’s border into the US is minuscule compared to those who make their way from Mexico, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Canadian officials in recent days have also been quick to insist that they are working closely with the US to combat the flow of fentanyl — a deadly synthetic opioid that has sparked a public health crisis in the US.  

 

The volume of fentanyl seized at the Mexican border since the beginning of 2022 is about 1,000 times greater than what has been captured at the Canadian border, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. Still, Trudeau is under pressure at home to step up border security and defense spending to assuage Trump’s concerns. Ontario’s Doug Ford, the leader of Canada’s most populous province, said after a meeting of the premiers and prime minister that he has been pushing Trudeau for months to show that Canada will work to address US economic and security worries.

 

Trudeau was the first Group of Seven leader to have a face-to-face meeting with Trump since the US election. 

 

“The symbolism of Trudeau going down to Palm Beach on bended knee to say ‘Please don’t’ is very, very powerful,” said Fen Hampson, professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.

 

“The stakes are enormously high and Trudeau has to deliver on this,” Hampson said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be seen by Canadians as a failed mission, because we all know why he’s going down there and it’s not to baste the turkey for Trump.”   Canada and the US have one of the world’s largest bilateral trading relationships, worth more than $900 billion a year, and it’s the largest external supplier of crude oil to the US, pumping millions of barrels a day to refineries in the Midwest and elsewhere. Economists see Mexico and Canada taking the biggest economic hit if Trump follows through on his pledge for broad tariffs against US imports.

 

Trump has made tariffs a centerpiece of his economic agenda, vowing to use them across the board against both US allies and adversaries to extract concessions and force businesses to reshore manufacturing jobs. Mainstream economists have warned that the levies threaten to raise prices for consumers, would fail to raise the revenue he is predicting and are poised to reduce or redirect trade flows.

 

Tariffs on Mexico and Canada also threaten to reignite a trade feud from Trump’s first term in office, when he forced the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

 

The rebranded trade pact, dubbed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, allows for duty-free trade across a wide range of sectors, while changing the regulations for a variety of industries including auto manufacturing.