U.S. President Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that Canada will “end up being the 51st state” as he expressed a series of longstanding grievances the United States has with its northern neighbour.
“Canada treats us very badly. They always have. Not anymore. It’s a whole different ball game now that Trump is in town,” he said during a campaign rally in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Wednesday.
Trump brought up Canadian tariffs on milk, car companies moving their factories to the U.S. and renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”
According to the U.S. president, Canada “ripped off” the U.S. through tariffs on “anything past two bottles (of milk).”
“They’ll end up being the 51st state, because that’s the only way it works,” Trump said. “We don’t need them, but they need us.”
The U.S. president then asked why the U.S. should be losing billions of dollars “to support a country that isn’t one of us?”
“They’ll be doing something just like Greenland,” he said, adding that it “just adds to our beautiful plate,” referring to the U.S.
“Our plate’s getting larger all the time.”
Following the announcement of Canada’s latest retaliatory tariffs on American goods in September, B.C. Premier David Eby announced that the province will install new signs at the U.S. border crossings declaring the province “never the 51st state.”
Earlier in the same month, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick targeted Ontario in “51st state” remarks, saying the province would be the “last out of our 51st states.” The comment was a response to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who called on the Trump administration to “start being serious” about trade negotiations.
In June, after Canada slipped into a technical recession, Trump revived his call to the country to become the “51st state” on social media, drawing sharp criticism from officials from across Canada.
With files from CTV News’ Codi Wilson, Todd Coyne
