Britt Jones
President Donald Trump has warned Canadian PM Mark Carney that his country would be 'devoured' if it goes ahead with a foreign trade deal.
His comments come after Carney took to the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday (20 January) to slam Trump’s controversial effort to acquire Greenland.
He said: "It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
"On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.
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"Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.
“The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy."
He called for 'middle powers' like Canada to 'stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together'.
Carney recently met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and announced they had reached a trade deal that included electric vehicles, per the BBC.
At the time, Trump called their deal ‘a good thing’ but seems to have made a U-turn on his position.
In a Truth Social post on Saturday (January 24), Trump called the PM ‘governor’ and told him there’s no hope for the nation to make its promising trade deal with China.
“If Governor Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken," he wrote online.
“China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life.”
He then threatened the neighboring country, telling Carney: “If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% Tariff against all Canadian goods and products coming into the U.S.A. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
The Chinese deal would see Canada ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and China would in turn, lower levies on Canadian agricultural products.
Trump's change in position might have something to do with Carney's Davos speech, which appeared to have rattled the POTUS who responded: "Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Elsewhere in his speech, Carney said: “For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order."
He claimed that Canada had 'joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability’ which allowed it to ‘pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.’
Calling the international rules-based order ‘partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,’ and ‘that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically’, he said Canada no longer wants to be part of it.
He added: “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”