Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he apologized to President Donald Trump for an Ontario government ad that used Ronald Reagan’s words to criticize Trump’s trade policy.
“I did apologize,” Carney told reporters on Saturday after attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Gyeongju, South Korea.
Trump “was offended” by the ad, he added, saying that the TV ad, which was not sponsored by the Canadian government, was “not something I would have done” and that he told Ontario Premier Doug Ford that he did not want him to use it.
The ad, which used clips of Reagan in order to criticize Trump’s trade policy, so angered Trump that last week he announced a halt to trade talks with Canada, one of America’s biggest trading partners.
He also accused Canada’s government — which did not sponsor the ad — of what he called “egregious behavior” that was intended to “interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts” on tariffs.
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments next month in a case challenging many of Trump’s tariffs.
The president said Friday that Carney had apologized, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that he had a “very good relationship” with the leader, “but what he did was wrong.”
“He was very nice — he apologized for what they did with the commercial because it was a very false commercial,” Trump said.
The ad, which Ford ran on TV during the World Series, used genuine but rearranged lines from a speech Reagan gave in 1987 while president.
The ad starts with Reagan saying, “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs, and sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time.”
“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” he continues in the ad. “Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”
Reagan was a staunch free trade advocate. The purpose of the speech was to explain why — despite his strong dislike of tariffs — he had imposed retaliatory import duties on certain Japanese products.
