U.S. President Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that Canada will “end up being the 51st state” as he listed a series of longstanding grievances the United States has with its northern neighbour. “Canada treats us very badly. They always have. Not anymore. It’s a whole different ball game now that Trump is in town,” he said during a campaign rally in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Wednesday. Trump brought up Canadian tariffs on milk, car companies moving their factories to the U.S. and renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” According to the U.S. president, Canada “ripped off” the U.S. through tariffs on “anything past two bottles (of milk).” “They’ll end up being the 51st state, because that’s the only way it works,” Trump said. “We don’t need them, but they need us.” The U.S. president then asked why the U.S. should be losing billions of dollars “to support a country that isn’t one of us?” “They’ll be doing something just like Greenland,” he said, adding that it “just adds to our beautiful plate,” referring to the U.S. “Our plate’s getting larger all the time.” Foreign meddling Trump made the comments on the same day Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, suggested the actions of several Canadian politicians could amount to “political interference” in close races ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November. Hoekstra pointed to comments made by Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, who said in August that Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are designed to target specific U.S. states. “It appears that some of this, from our perspective, in the way we view our elections, could be inferred to be election interference,” the ambassador said in an interview on “The Really Big Show” podcast. One of those close races is in Michigan, where Democrats have tied Trump’s tariff policies to the higher cost of living facing Americans. Meanwhile, Trump has commented on the elections of several countries throughout his second term in office. Last weekend, he said it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to end the war with Russia and blaming him for high diesel prices in the United States. The president also advocated for Flavio Bolsonaro in Brazil’s elections earlier this month, and endorsed former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban ahead of his election loss in April. ‘Never the 51st state’ Following the announcement of Canada’s latest retaliatory tariffs on American goods in September, B.C. Premier David Eby announced that the province will install new signs at the U.S. border crossings declaring the province “never the 51st state.” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick targeted Ontario in “51st state” remarks last month, saying the province would be the “last out of our 51st states.” The comment was a response to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who called on the Trump administration to “start being serious” about trade negotiations. In June, when Canada slipped into what some economists said met the definition of a technical recession, Trump revived his call to the country to become the “51st state” on social media. The move drew sharp criticism from officials from across Canada. Soon after, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the president was “back on his high horse” and that Canada’s sovereignty is not for sale. “I can tell President Trump that will never, ever happen.” With files from CTV News’ Codi Wilson, Todd Coyne
