Trump ends trade talks with Canada over ‘fake’ Ronald Reagan ad. What’s really behind his feud with America’s closest ally?

President Trump announced on social media late Thursday night that he was ending all trade negotiations with Canada because of a video ad paid for by the province of Ontario that quoted his Republican presidential predecessor Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs.

“tariffs ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Trump wrote. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.

The president went on to claim that the ad was “fake” and that it had been created “to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” which is considering a legal challenge to many of his tariffs.

It’s official: Ontario’s new advertising campaign in the U.S. has launched. 

Using every tool we have, we’ll never stop making the case against American tariffs on Canada. The way to prosperity is by working together.

Watch our new ad. pic.twitter.com/SgIVC1cqMJ

— Doug Ford (@fordnation) October 16, 2025

On Friday afternoon, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the province “will pause its U.S. advertising campaign effective Monday so that trade talks can resume,” having already achieved its goal of reaching “U.S. audiences at the highest levels.” Ford added that the spot would continue to air “during the first two World Series games” over the weekend.

Trump’s sudden decision to cancel trade talks with America’s second-biggest trading partner has further destabilized an alliance that he has been aggressively — and, to some, confusingly — trying to transform since returning to office in January.

For the past 150 years, U.S. presidents have largely maintained close, cordial relations with America’s “nicer” neighbor to the north. Trump, in contrast, spent the first weeks of his second term threatening to turn Canada into “the 51st state” and publicly referring to the country’s then prime minister, outgoing Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, as “Governor” Trudeau.

In February, Trump imposed sweeping 25% tariffs on goods from both Canada and Mexico; he later increased his blanket tax on Canadian exports to 35% while imposing individual tariffs on steel, auto parts and other major industries. The three countries had been preparing for a review of their shared free trade agreement, which was scheduled to be completed by next summer.

Trump’s big issue with Mexico — that it doesn’t do enough to stem the flow of immigrants — has long been central to his political identity. But his animus toward Canada has seemed more … mysterious.

“I can’t quite figure it out,” Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist and former Trump adviser, told the New York Times in March. “Whether it’s some kind of strategic leverage, I don’t know.”

This week’s dispute over the Reagan ad only deepens that mystery. Here’s what we know so far about Trump’s feud with Canada.

The Reagan ad isn’t ‘fake’

On Friday, Trump insisted in a second social media post that “CANADA CHEATED AND GOT CAUGHT!!!,” adding that they “fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like Tariffs, when actually he LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY.”

To support his allegation of “cheating,” Trump cited a Thursday post from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute claiming that “the Government of Ontario, Canada, created an ad campaign using selective audio and video” of Reagan to “misrepresent” his words — and that Ontario did so without “seek[ing] nor receiv[ing] permission to use and edit the remarks.”

The Reagan Foundation did not elaborate on how the ad allegedly misrepresented Reagan’s remarks.

The ad in question is a $53.5 million buy that began airing in the U.S. last week during a Toronto Blue Jays playoff game and was scheduled to continue airing over the next two weeks while the Jays play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.

But while Ontario’s ad does shuffle the order of several sound bites from a weekly radio address Reagan delivered in April 1987, it does not “misrepresent” his position on tariffs.

“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,” Reagan is heard to say in the ad. “And sometimes for a short while it works — but only for a short time.”

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars,” Reagan continues. “Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse. Businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”

The ad concludes with Reagan saying that “America’s jobs and growth are at stake.”

The original context for Reagan’s radio address was a package of high tariffs on Japanese semiconductors imposed by his administration ahead of an upcoming meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone to discuss trade practices that Reagan considered unfair.

In his remarks, Reagan sought to explain these specific tariffs to listeners — but he did so by calling them a “special case” and continuing to reject broader “protectionist” policies as inimical to his “basic, long-term commitment to free trade and economic growth.”

“Imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take,” Reagan said. “Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.”

‘It’s not fair for us to be supporting Canada’

Many observers have speculated that Trump’s animosity toward Canada is primarily “personal,” as Moore told the Times.

Some have mentioned his troubled business dealings there, including a Toronto hotel and condominium complex that went into receivership in 2016 and a Vancouver hotel that failed the following year — both of which were magnets for protesters. (“Trump’s name and brand have no more place on Vancouver’s skyline than his ignorant ideas have in the modern world,” the city’s mayor wrote at the time.)

Others have noted his fractious relationship with the progressive Trudeau, 53, who was famously photographed greeting first lady Melania Trump with a European cheek kiss at a 2019 Group of 7 gathering in France. A few months later, Trump called his Canadian counterpart “two-faced” for appearing to mock him at a meeting of NATO leaders. The previous year, Trump accused Trudeau of being “very dishonest and weak.”

(After more than nine years as prime minister, Trudeau suspended Parliament in early January. He officially resigned after his Liberal Party chose Mark Carney as its new leader — and thus Canada’s new prime minister — on March 9. Carney then called a federal election for April 28, which the Liberal Party won.)

But whatever the two leaders think of one another, personally or politically, the simpler explanation for Trump’s recent belligerence is that the president sees Canada less as the closest ally of the United States and more as yet another freeloader country bent on ripping off America — and he’s determined to leverage Washington’s vast economic power over Ottawa to renegotiate any existing deals on more favorable “America First” terms.

“It’s not fair for us to be supporting Canada,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting late in February. “If we don’t support them, they don’t subsist as a nation.”

This is not a new theme for Trump. During his first term, he railed against the steep tariffs Canada imposes on U.S. dairy imports to protect its own domestic farmers, calling them a “disgrace.” In 2018, he slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and 10% tariffs on Canadian aluminum — a move that resulted in at least 75,000 job losses across the U.S. manufacturing sector by mid-2019, according to economists.

Likewise, Trump has long complained that the modest U.S. trade deficit with Canada (about $63 billion in goods and services) amounts to a “subsidy,” even though experts say it mostly exists because the U.S. imports a lot of inexpensive Canadian oil, which helps lower Americans’ gas prices. And Trump has never approved of Canada spending less than 2% of its GDP on defense — a gripe he also has with other NATO member nations in Europe.

Now, emboldened by his own reelection, the president seems to believe that escalating the economic pressure — by imposing tariffs; by stacking those tariffs with additional duties on steel and aluminum; by picking a trade fight over Canadian lumber; by withdrawing from trade talks altogether — will force a deeply dependent Ottawa to accede to whatever he demands at the negotiating table.

On Friday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, declined to discuss the ad that triggered Trump’s exit from talks. But he told reporters that the “frustration has built up over time” and faulted Canada for a “lack of flexibility” in negotiations.

“The Trump Administration has repeatedly sought to address Canada’s longstanding, unfair trade barriers,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, added in a statement. “These good-faith efforts with Canadian officials have not led to any constructive progress.”

Canada fights back

Canadian sentiment toward the U.S. has “soured drastically over the past several months because of the Trump administration’s moves,” according to the New York Times.

Already, Trump’s “51st state” trolling had led some Canadians to boycott American goods and cancel their U.S. vacations. Trudeau’s Liberal Party, which had been suffering in the polls, enjoyed a sharp uptick in support after Trump took office in January. Meanwhile, the Canadian government has imposed retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars of American exports — with some provinces going so far as to pull certain U.S. products from their shelves.

Since taking office as prime minister, Carney has said that Canada’s old relationship with America is over. Earlier this week, he announced that he wanted to double Canada’s exports to countries other than the U.S. over the next decade. In response to Trump’s announcement, Carney said Friday that U.S. and Canadian officials had been conducting “detailed, constructive” talks over steel, aluminum and energy tariffs and that “we stand ready to pick up on those discussions when the Americans are ready.”

But, Carney added that “we can’t control the trade policy of the United States.”

Ford — Ontario’s brash Conservative Party premier — said in a social media post on Friday that his province had purchased the ad because “Reagan knew that we are stronger together.”

“Let’s take Ronald Reagan’s words, and let’s blast it to the American people,” Ford said when he launched the ad on Oct. 14. “He was just the best president America has ever seen, in my opinion.”

In his post Friday announcing that the ad would soon be paused, Ford explained that the decision to do so had been made in consultation with Carney.

“Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses,” Ford wrote. “We’ve achieved our goal.”