Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaves a hotel in West Palm Beach enroute to meet President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 29, 2024.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaves a hotel in West Palm Beach enroute to meet President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 29, 2024.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is having dinner Friday evening with Donald Trump at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to a person familiar with the visit.
The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced trip. The sudden visit to Florida comes days after Trump threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods, along with an additional 10 percent on Chinese merchandise. The president-elect has said the tariffs would be aimed at halting an “invasion” of drugs and migrants into the United States.
Trump’s transition team did not reply to a request for comment.
The threatened tariffs would affect large swaths of U.S. trade and are expected to raise prices on a host of goods for consumers. Some of the largest U.S. imports of Canadian goods include oil and gas, machinery and parts. Canada had been anticipating trade policies that would damage the country’s interests, sending top government officials to meetings across the United States ahead of the November election meant to stave off a turn to protectionism.
Earlier on Friday, Trudeau told reporters that the tariffs would hurt consumers.
“One of the things that’s really important to understand is that Donald Trump, when he makes statements like that, he plans on carrying them out. There’s no question about it,” Trudeau said to reporters in Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada.
“Our responsibility is to point out that, in this way, he would be, actually, not just be harming Canadians, who work so well with the United States; he would actually be raising prices for American citizens as well and hurting American industry and businesses,” he added.
Trump criticized the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) during his first presidential campaign, replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which took effect in 2020. Trump publicly hailed the new accord on several occasions, boasting that it represented an enormous improvement over the original trade pact. Under the USMCA, goods moving among the three North American nations cross borders on a duty-free basis.
Trudeau at times had a strained relationship with Trump during his first term in the White House, particularly when it came to matters related to trade. Trump’s insults toward the Canadian leader sometimes got personal, but the two countries maintained strong ties.
Trump also spoke to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum over the phone on Wednesday following the tariff threat, but the two have described dramatically different versions of what took place.
Trump claimed Sheinbaum had agreed to “stop Migration through Mexico,” and the Mexican president responded by saying that “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders but to build bridges.”
On Thursday, Sheinbaum said she and Trump agreed in a phone call that their countries will have a “good relationship,” and she dismissed his threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexico’s exports if it didn’t stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl to the United States.
“There will not be a potential tariff war,” Sheinbaum told reporters in her daily news conference.
The tariff threats come at a time when migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded far fewer migrants illegally crossing the border from Mexico in fiscal 2024 than the previous two years. On the border with Canada, numbers are much lower but have gone up.
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Mary Beth Sheridan, Amanda Coletta and Niha Masih contributed to this report.
