Trump jokes about annexing Canada, prompting nervous laughter

OTTAWA — President-elect Donald Trump cracked an old joke about annexing Canada, and Ottawa is still trying to figure out if it was meant to be funny.

Canada as the 51st state is occasionally a topic of conversation on both sides of the border. Homer Simpson once dubbed his northern neighbor “America junior.”

When Trump dined with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last Friday at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect reportedly tried his own hand at manifest destiny humor.

Trudeau, who traveled to Florida with a small delegation days after Trump threatened across-the-board tariffs on imports from Canada, used his face-time with the incoming president to warn that the measure would punish the Canadian economy.

Fox News sources claimed that’s when Trump floated the idea of statehood for Canada, “which caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously.”

Sure, a massive super-country would edge past Russia for the largest in the world by land area — and further integrate heavily interconnected supply chains.

But Canadian nationalists have long warned against Canada becoming the 51st state, including during a tense national debate over continental free trade that dominated the 1988 election. As the Canada-U.S. free trade deal expanded to include Mexico, Canada maintained its sovereignty.

Still, journalist Matthew Yglesias — an American, naturally — likes the sound of erasing borders.

“Annexation is clearly a good idea that would make both Americans and Canadians better off but nobody talks about it except in the context of occasional nationalist bluster,” Yglesias posted on X.

Canadian Cabinet ministers were hounded Tuesday by reporters looking for a reaction to the joke — including Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who was at the Mar-a-Lago dinner.

“In a three-hour social evening at the president’s residence in Florida on a long weekend of American Thanksgiving, the conversation was going to be lighthearted,” LeBlanc said. “The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us.”

LeBlanc’s message: Chill out, everybody.

“It wasn’t a meeting in a boardroom with 10 bureaucrats keeping notes,” he said. “It was a social evening, and there were moments where it was entertaining and funny, and there were moments where we were able to do, we think, some good work for Canada.”

Gerald Butts, a former Trudeau senior adviser who played a major role on the Canada-U.S. file during Trump’s first years in office, counseled his LinkedIn followers to calm down.

“Trump used this ‘51st State’ line with Trudeau a lot during his first term. He’s doing it to rattle Canadian cages,” Butts wrote. “When someone is trying to get you to freak out, don’t.”

That message seemed to resonate on Parliament Hill. Asked about Trump’s quip, Arif Virani, the justice minister, pivoted to the endurance of the Trump-Trudeau relationship.

“I think it’s really important that when President-elect Trump sees Prime Minister Trudeau, he sees someone who’s been there, and there’s continuity in terms of leaders on the world stage,” Virani said. “Resurrecting the relationship that they already have is very important in demonstrating that we take issues that relate to our two nations seriously, particularly economic interests.”

A reporter tried once more: “Was it just a joke, though?”

“Merci. Thank you,” came Virani’s final reply.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, a leading voice on a year-long “Team Canada” engagement strategy, immediately served up talking points on the cross-border relationship.

“Our American friends will see Canada as the strategic supplier of choice, whether it’s about semiconductors, whether it’s about critical minerals, whether it’s about energy,” he said.

Champagne reminded reporters that Trudeau was the first G7 leader to meet Trump after the president-elect’s resounding victory last month — a tête-à-tête that “sends a big signal to the world that Canada is the strategic partner.”

The Canadians might be forgiven for their humorlessness. After all, Trump still had Canada on his mind several days after the dinner.

On Tuesday, he posted a cryptic image on Truth Social.

“Oh Canada!” Trump wrote atop what appeared to be an AI-generated image in which he stood beside a Canadian flag, overlooking a mountain range.

The mountain in the background bore a striking resemblance to the Matterhorn, a notable peak in the Swiss Alps — some 3,800 miles east of Ottawa’s Parliament Hill — but point taken.