Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday repeatedly told President Donald Trump that the True North will remain strong, free, and most importantly, not for sale.
“As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale,” Carney told Trump in the Oval Office as reporters looked on.
“That’s true,” Trump responded, though he later added, to “never say never.”
Carney, who cut his teeth as a central banker, is fresh off his party’s strong federal election win in a contest that Trump upended by musing about making Canada the 51st state of the United States. During the public portion of their meeting, Carney repeatedly sought to explain his positions through the lens of real estate, Trump’s first business, and properties that would never be for sale.
“We’re sitting in one right now,” he said. “You know, Buckingham Palace, that you visited as well. And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign the last several months, it’s not for sale and won’t be for sale ever. But the opportunity is the partnership and what we can build together.”
Canada is also among a wide range of nations, including long-time US allies, currently subject to Trump’s tariffs. Both Trump and Carney said the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Trump’s first-term rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, would need to be reopened again. In the meantime, Trump did not sound ready to cut a bilateral deal with Canada.
When a reporter asked the president if there was anything Carney could say in the meeting to get Trump to immediately lift tariffs on Canadian goods, he responded, “No.”
Trump compared the US to “a super luxury store,” arguing that trade partners are gaining far more from the US market than they offer in return.
Top White House and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have suggested that the first major trade deal could come as soon as this week. Trump indicated he will only give his sign-off when he’s confident in what the US will receive in return.
“Everyone says, ‘When, when, when are you going to sign deals?’ We don’t have to sign deals. We could sign 25 deals right now, Howard, if we wanted,” Trump said on Tuesday, motioning to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market, we don’t care about their market.”
Trump said at “some point over the next two weeks” he will sit down with Bessent, Lutnick, and others on his trade team to discuss whether to accept the offers made thus far.
Shares on Wall Street, which briefly went higher after Trump promised a major announcement only to clarify that it was not necessarily trade-related, sank even lower after the press were ushered out of the room so Trump’s meeting with Carney could continue.
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