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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office confirmed he will meet with President Donald Trump on Friday when both leaders are at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to attend the final draw of next year’s FIFA World Cup that the United States, Canada and Mexico will host.
It could lead to their first discussion about the Canada-U.S. relationship since Trump abruptly ended trade talks in October in response to an anti-tariff ad that featured former president Ronald Reagan paid for by Canada’s most populous province of Ontario.
“The stakes are high for both Canada and the United States,” said Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Ottawa-based Business Council of Canada, whose members include the CEOs of major Canadian companies.
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With 25% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) related to trade, of which 75% is with the U.S., “it’s better to be talking, it’s better to be finding a way forward” on the tariffs issue, Hyder said.
He told Fox News Digital that Canada should not be “waiting for the president to call us to bring down his tariffs.”
“Why would he do that? All my information from Washington has consistently been that the president is just fine with where Canada is positioned at right now. As far as he’s concerned, we got a pretty good deal,” said Hyder, who noted that under the USMCA, about 85% of Canadian exports to the U.S. are tariff-free.
Still, Canada faces global tariffs on steel, aluminum and copper products at 50%; tariffs at 25% on Canadian-made passenger vehicles based on the value of all non-U.S. content; a 10% tariff on such non-USMCA-compliant energy resources as crude oil and natural gas; and 35% tariffs on non-USMCA goods.
In September, Canada dropped most of its counter-tariffs against the U.S., except for those on steel, aluminum and non-USMCA-compliant automobiles.
Carney and Trump have not had a formal sit-down since the president terminated cross-border trade negotiations on Oct. 23.
A month later, the prime minister was asked at a news conference following the conclusion of the G-20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg, that the president did not attend. When he last spoke to Trump, Carney replied, “Who cares? I mean it’s a detail. I’ll speak to him again when it matters.”
“I look forward to speaking to the president soon, but I don’t have a burning issue to speak with the president about right now,” he added. “When America wants to come back and have the discussions on the trade side, we will have those discussions.”
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Back home in Canada, Conservative parliamentarians pounced on the prime minister’s response, with their leader, Pierre Poilievre, reminding him during Question Period in the House of Commons that in the general election campaign that Carney’s Liberal Party won in April, he promised an “elbows-up” approach to Trump’s tariffs against Canada, and “after, it was ‘who cares?’”
The prime minister acknowledged that he had made “a poor choice of words about a serious issue.”
Perrin Beatty, who was the secretary of state for external affairs in the government of former Progressive Conservative (PC) Prime Minister Kim Campbell in 1993 and who recently served as president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, told Fox News Digital that Carney’s “who cares?” comment was more of an expression of “frustration with the reporter” and exasperation with “minute-by-minute questions on ‘when did you last talk with Trump?’ as opposed to an attack on the president.”
“It wasn’t Mark Carney who discontinued the talks,” said Beatty. “The talks have been broken off by the president – and you can’t negotiate with yourself.”
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However, as Hyder highlighted, it’s “the little things that work with President Trump,” such as when the prime minister gave him a set of United Nations-branded golf balls at a reception that the president hosted for world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September.
Trump invited Carney to visit the White House the following month, “which illustrates how important these interactions are and that it is the personal relationships that matter above all else,” according to Hyder, who served as chief of staff to Joe Clark, leader of Canada’s former Progressive Conservative party and the country’s 16th prime minister from 1979 to 1980.
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