President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that Canada should become the 51st state drew a rebuke from the leader of the U.S. neighbor’s MAGA-lite opposition leader Tuesday.
Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, asserted his is a “great and independent country” in a post on X. Inverting one of Trump’s favorite slogans, he said a government under his leadership would put “Canada First.”
Poilievre is arguably the chief importer—sans tariffs—of MAGA-style politics to Canada.
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He has earned plaudits from Trumpworld figures and the online global right for saying he will dismantle “wokeism” if elected prime minister and for taking a combative, sloganeering approach to campaigning.
On Tuesday, Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk—who will be tasked with leading a federal spending review when the president-elect takes office—praised a video of Poilievre arguing for a cap on government spending as “perfectly articulated.”
Poilievre also recently sat down for an extended interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a longtime cause célèbre of the global right for his attacks on so-called “political correctness,” during which he and Peterson suggested that racism had been “imported” to Canada—as opposed to existing there in the first place—and “wokeism” had caused an increase in hate crimes.
Canada’s national law enforcement service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said in a report last year that hate crimes began rising in 2016 alongside the rise of anti-immigrant “populist politics” and again during the COVID pandemic when people of Asian background were targeted.
In his tweet, Poilievre blamed the “weak and pathetic” government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for creating an opening for Trump’s opining about a Canadian takeover, claiming Trudeau has failed to make “obvious points” about Canada’s historic defense and economic partnerships with the United States.
Trudeau and several of his cabinet ministers have, in fact, visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida multiple times since the election, where they have reportedly reminded Trump of these things.
But Trump has since mocked Trudeau with the title “Governor” in several social media posts and, at a press conference Tuesday, mused about using “economic force” to rope Canada into the union.
The needling from Trump has come as Trudeau was forced to announce on Monday he will step down once his Liberal Party elects a successor.
His party has trailed Poilievre by double digits in opinion polls for over a year, suggesting the Conservative leader is the most likely person to be elected prime minister in Canada’s next federal election, which must be held by late October.
Trudeau—whose standing with the public has collapsed over his government’s handling of housing and affordability crises exacerbated by the global inflation epidemic—was blasted by his own Deputy Prime Minister last month. Chrystia Freeland resigned from his cabinet and accused him of being ill-prepared to deal with Trump’s brand of protectionist politics.
Internal pressure from within his caucus led him to bow out with an acknowledgment that he “can’t be the best option” to lead the country with his party in turmoil.
But Trudeau made clear Tuesday that, while he’s around, he will also vociferously oppose Trump’s musings about Canada.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” he tweeted Tuesday.
