‘A snowball’s chance in hell’: Trudeau rejects Trump threat to annex Canada

Justin Trudeau has rejected threats from Donald Trump that the US could use “economic force” to annex its closest ally, saying: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.

“Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other’s biggest trading and security partner,” Canada’s prime minister wrote on social media.

Trump’s musings on Tuesday came as he doubled down on threats to impose protectionist tariffs on one of the US’s biggest trading partners.

“Canada and the United States: that would be really something,” he said from Florida, but warned his incoming administration was getting frustrated over what the president-elected called “subsidies” for Canada.

“We’ve been good neighbours, but we can’t do it forever, and it’s a tremendous amount of money,” he said.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, also pushed back, writing on social media that Trump’s comments showed a “complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country”. She said Canada “will never back down in the face of threats”.

The remarks are likely to further fuel political turmoil in Canada after the resignation of its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and the suspension of parliament until late March.

The US president-elect made his comments in a meandering press conference in which he also refused to rule out using military force to retake the Panama Canal and seize Greenland, and promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

He once again mulled a union between Canada and the US, describing their shared border, established more than 230 years ago, as an “artificially drawn line”.

Asked if he would use military force, Trump said: “No, economic force.” He repeated his baseless claim that the US “subsidizes” Canada and said the country spends too much to defend its neighbour.

Trudeau announced on Monday he would step down after nearly 10 years in power as soon as his ruling Liberal party chooses a new leader.

Hours later, Trump revived his running jibe on social media about persuading Canada to seek US statehood.

“Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State. The United States can no longer suffer the massive Trade Deficits and Subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat,” the incoming president wrote.

In a stark contrast to Trump’s trolling, Joe Biden expressed his appreciation for Trudeau in a phone call late on Monday.

“Over the last decade, Prime Minister Trudeau has led with commitment, optimism, and strategic vision. The US-Canada alliance is stronger because of him. The American and Canadian people are safer because of him. And the world is better off because of him,” Biden said in a statement on Tuesday.

But the latest developments are likely to further deepen worries that a suspended parliament, a lame-duck prime minister, a Liberal leadership race and a federal election will all unfold at a time when Canada’s largest trading partner is at its most unpredictable.

Trudeau’s decision to resign has thrown open the doors to a fierce party race before a general election later this year.

Late on Monday, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney announced that he was considering entering the race to replace Trudeau.

Carney, a climate-focused economist who became the first non-Briton to run the Bank of England, said in a statement that he would be “considering this decision closely with my family over the coming days”. A longtime and prominent member of the Liberal party, Carney said he was “encouraged” by the support of Liberal lawmakers and people “who want us to move forward with positive change and a winning economic plan”.

Speculation that Carney, who ran the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, could be seeking high office has grown over the past few months as Trudeau’s popularity plummeted amid record inflation, an acute housing crisis, high food prices and voter fatigue.

It has been more than a decade since the party last ran a federal leadership contest, with Trudeau securing a dominant win in 2013 and rebuilding the party in the years since.

The Liberal caucus will meet on Wednesday to discuss the procedure for selecting Trudeau’s replacement. The party’s constitution has a process for selecting a leader that typically takes months but there are now fewer than 80 days until parliament returns. Party brass are hopeful for a new leader by the end of January.

“It’s unfathomable to me that we can’t choose a leader of the Liberal party in a 30- to 60-day period, whereas we can choose the prime minister of Canada or the leader of the country according to the Elections Act in a 30- to 60-day period,” the immigration minister, Marc Miller, told CBC News.

Still, there are unanswered questions about who may be casting a ballot for the new leader. Trudeau’s 2013 win came after the party allowed people who had not paid for memberships to vote.

The Liberal party is in a tough position, with the opposition Conservatives expected to win a majority government under current polling. The Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre, has dismissed the former central banker as “Carbon Tax Carney”, a reference to a levy on consumer fuel Trudeau brought in. The Conservatives are also weighing using the tagline “Just like Justin” as an attack on the next Liberal leader in the hopes of tying any successor to the unpopularity of the prime minister.

Last week, Trudeau’s close friend and former principal secretary Gerald Butts wrote in a Substack post that allowing “a handful of apparatchiks [to] choose their prime minister” would harm the party.

“Competitions create better competitors. In politics, leadership campaigns make for better general election campaign teams. They train people, test ideas, build resilience,” he wrote.

Butts said the party’s future was at risk if it held a limited race bound by tight rules. “If Liberals arrogate that right to a few hundred people in Ottawa, I hope they’re alert to the risk that they could be selecting the party’s last leader.”

A poll by the Angus Reid Institute on Friday, before Trudeau’s announcement, found Carney was in second place among candidates likely to replace Trudeau as Liberal leader. The former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, whose resignation last month increased calls for Trudeau to go, was top.

If he were to win the leadership race, Carney would be in the unusual situation of becoming prime minister without holding a seat in the House of Commons. Party leaders are not required to be members of parliament when they win, but convention requires they run for a seat as quickly as possible. It took Jagmeet Singh 16 months to become an MP after winning the leadership of the New Democratic party.

With a spring election widely expected, the new Liberal leader will only hold the post of prime minister for a handful of months before the country votes.