Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney says people shouldn’t read too much into the fact that he sang during a fundraiser dinner at U.S. President Donald Trump’s private club on Saturday.

“It doesn't really signal anything,” Mulroney told CTV’s Power Play Tuesday, referring to his rendition of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at the Mar-a-Lago social club fundraiser, where he had been seated with the Trumps, who are his neighbours in Palm Beach, Fla.

“As I said when I sang the song, this was for a charity for cancer,” he added. “I wasn't singing for Donald Trump, I was singing because of the huge demand from the audience.”

The demands included a request from Canadian songwriter David Foster, who had called Mulroney to the stage during the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute fundraiser and said: "I would never presume to say that I could go to the president of the United States and ask him to sing, so I won't.”

Mulroney said the more important thing to focus on is what Trump told him about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada, at a time when the countries are renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement Mulroney signed in 1992.

“He was very positive on both scores,” Mulroney said.

Mulroney added that he expects NAFTA negotiations to be “rough” but that he believes “we'll come out of this with a trilateral agreement even though I understand that the preference of the Americans going forward is now for bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations.”

On Tuesday, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters that any negotiations on NAFTA “would be three-way negotiations,” adding that Canada “values its partnership with Mexico.”

Much of the negotiation for NAFTA’s predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, was conducted between Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, whom he had joined in singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at a summit in Quebec City in 1985.

With files from The Canadian Press