Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday said Ottawa will not expel the U.S. ambassador to Canada for amplifying U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest reference to Canada as the “51st state.”
Trump made the comment on his Truth Social account on Monday while sharing a news article about Canada falling into a technical recession, based on the latest GDP data from Statistics Canada.
U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra on Tuesday shared a screenshot of Trump’s post on his official X account.
When asked by reporters at a press conference in Longueuil, Que., if his government can still work with Hoekstra or if it is time for Canada to ask him to leave, Carney replied, “The short answer is no, to the second part of your question.”
“It’s an administration that we have to work with,” he added. “It’s our biggest trading relationship, our biggest security relationship, many other relationships, and we work with that administration. We take the administration as it is.”
A U.S. Embassy spokesperson told Global News in an email that amplifying Trump’s Truth Social posts “is our usual practice.”
Earlier Tuesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters that Trump’s comment was “ridiculous, and it’s never going to happen.”
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“We have to make sure that we don’t allow ridiculous comments like that to distract us from the very real suffering that Canadians are experiencing as a result of Liberal policies here at home, the families who can’t afford food, the one in four Canadians who are living in food insecurity,” he said.
“They don’t want us to be distracted by a foolish comment like that, they want us to focus on reversing the Liberal policies that have made them hungry in the first place.”
Hoekstra has previously dismissed concerns about Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric, which many Canadians have taken as a threat to the country’s sovereignty and reacted to with anger.
The ambassador has repeatedly said he doesn’t understand why Canadians are upset about those comments, urging them to instead focus on ways the two countries work well together and can improve the relationship.
A House of Commons petition urging Ottawa to consider expelling Hoekstra from Canada for actions and statements that “have been inconsistent with the standards of conduct expected of a diplomatic representative to Canada” has garnered 14,600 signatures since its introduction in February.
Hoekstra’s post came as Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc was travelling to Washington on Tuesday to meet with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
Ahead of those talks, LeBlanc penned a letter to his counterparts in the U.S. and Mexico urging a renewal of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on free trade (CUSMA) for another 16 years.
The three countries are undertaking a scheduled review of CUSMA leading up to a July 1 deadline to decide whether to renew or renegotiate the trade pact.
Carney on Tuesday pointed to LeBlanc’s trip to Washington, where he will be joined by Canada’s chief U.S. trade negotiator Janice Charette, as evidence of the ongoing work between Ottawa and the Trump administration on the bilateral trade relationship.
Asked if Trump’s “51st state” remark would impact those trade negotiations, Carney noted Trump is “an exceptionally active user of social media” and that his posting activity has “only gone up in recent months.”
“We’re not going to respond or react to everything,” he said.
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