President Donald Trump may not like what Canadian leaders have to say about tariffs, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop saying it.
After Ontario Premier Doug Ford ran a short-lived ad campaign using former President Ronald Reagan’s criticism of tariffs and trade wars, Trump halted chats with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, despite the video coming from Ford, who is the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. governor.
In response to the ad, Trump promised to place an additional 10% tariff on Canadian imports.
“I don’t want to meet with [Carney],” Trump said on Monday aboard Air Force One. “No, I’m not going to be meeting with them for a while. I’m very happy with the deal we have right now with Canada. We’re going to let it ride.”
This is where it gets funny.
Ford agreed to pull the ad—but not until after it made its rounds during the first two games of the World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers.
“You know why President Trump is so upset right now? It was because it was effective,” Ford said on Monday. “It was working. It woke up the whole country.”
Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and President Donald Trump, shown in June.
And while Ford’s ads will no longer run, another Canadian premier has entered the chat.
British Columbia’s David Eby has vowed to run his own ads calling out Trump’s destructive tariffs.
“Americans need to hear how tariffs raise prices. We’re making ads to defend British Columbia and Canada’s forestry workers,” Eby wrote on X this past Friday. “Our wood faces higher U.S. tariffs than Russia. Absurd.”
The thing is, Eby isn’t the only one talking about the negative impact of Trump’s lumber tariffs.
Aside from the fact that Trump’s plan seemingly includes plowing down U.S. national forests to pick up the slack of reduced imports, he’s also just hurting the home-building industry.
Even the far-right Heritage Foundation can’t stick by Trump’s side on this. On Heritage’s blog, Anthony B. Kim and Patrick Tyrrell said that Trump’s tariffs were causing “suppressed activity in the U.S. homebuilding industry, fewer construction jobs, and fewer options for homebuyers.”
“What’s not clear, however, is why the government should require U.S. consumers and homebuilders to bear the burden of supporting U.S. growers who can’t compete,” they wrote.
Trump seems to be losing out on favor regardless of where he turns, and these diss tracks coming out of Canada probably won’t garner him much pity. After all, Trump is the same guy who’s posting AI-generated videos of him dumping poo on U.S. citizens.
