Ford says Carney called from Asia and asked him to stop running ad that angered Trump

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he’ll ‘never apologize to Donald Trump’ over the anti-tariff ad that sparked backlash from the U.S.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says Prime Minister Mark Carney asked him several times to pull an anti-tariff ad that angered U.S. President Donald Trump, though he has “a different recollection” from the prime minister of the conversation they had before the ad ran.

“He called me from Asia a couple of times and said, ‘pull the ad’ and I said I wasn’t going to do it until we paused the ad on Monday. And that’s exactly what we did,” Ford said.

The ad featured a clip of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan talking about the economic drawbacks of tariffs. Trump cut off trade talks with Canada in response, and threatened to add an extra 10 per cent tariff on Canadian goods.

Several days after Ford said Carney saw the ad before it ran, the prime minister admitted that he had, telling reporters at a press conference in South Korea over the weekend that he told Ford he didn’t think the province should run the ad. He also said he’d apologized to Trump over the ad.

Asked by reporters at Queen’s Park Monday if Carney had asked him not to run the ad beforehand, Ford said he wasn’t going to get into a “he said-he said” over the matter.

“I’m not going to go back and forth. I had a different recollection of our conversation,” Ford said. “But people don’t need that. They want to move forward to get a deal to protect jobs and protect the economy of Ontario and of Canada.”

Despite Trump’s outrage, Ontario continued to air the ad Oct. 24-26 so that it would be shown to U.S. audiences during the first two games of the World Series. The province stopped running the ad on Oct. 27.

Ford doubled down on his praise for the campaign Monday.

“It was 12.4 billion impressions around the world, and they talked about it on the Senate floor,” he said. “I love the fact that four Republicans jumped over and voted against tariffs on Canada.

“So they (the ads) were very effective, and they ended up rejuvenating the talks with Democrats and Republicans down in the U.S. — that a tariff on Canada is a tax on American people.”

Ford also said that while Carney may have apologized for the ad, he never would.

“I’ll never apologize to Donald Trump, ever. If they put me on a stretching rack I wouldn’t apologize,” Ford said.

The difference in opinion about how to proceed in the trade war has created some awkward moments for Carney, who has asserted that as prime minister, he is the one responsible for the relationship with other world leaders.

For his part, Ford has said he will never apologize for defending Ontario, and has argued that the country needs to bargain from a position of strength rather than caving to Trump’s demands.

Still, the premier said he spoke to Carney as recently as Monday morning via text, and the two continue to have a good relationship.

“He wasn’t angry at all. I fully understand the position he’s in,” Ford said. “He’s trying to talk to the president, but the president was going to give us a terrible deal, like they gave U.K. a terrible deal, gave Japan even a worse deal, in my opinion, and we were going to go down that rabbit hole of getting a terrible deal.

“I always say no deal is better than a bad deal, and that’s what President Trump wants. He wants a terrible deal for Canadians. I take a different approach.”

With files from The Canadian Press