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How Trump’s ‘51st State’ Canada Talk Came to Be Seen as Deadly Serious
Written by Matina Stevis-Gridneff

President Trump, in an early February call, challenged the border treaty between the two countries and told Justin Trudeau he didn’t like their shared water agreements. After President Trump imposed tariffs on Canada on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an extraordinary statement that was largely lost in the fray of the moment.

“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa.

“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.

This is the story of how Mr. Trudeau went from thinking Mr. Trump was joking when he referred to him as “governor” and Canada as “the 51st state” in early December to publicly stating that Canada’s closest ally and neighbor was implementing a strategy of crushing the country in order to take it over.

The February Calls

Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke twice on Feb. 3, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as part of discussions to stave off tariffs on Canadian exports.

But those early February calls were not just about tariffs.

The details of the conversations between the two leaders, and subsequent discussions among top U.S. and Canadian officials, have not been previously fully reported, and were shared with The New York Times on condition of anonymity by four people with firsthand knowledge of their content. They did not want to be publicly identified discussing a sensitive topic.

On those calls, President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.

He also brought up something much more fundamental.

He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States. Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.

Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

During the second Feb. 3 call, Mr. Trudeau secured a one-month postponement of those tariffs.

This week, the U.S. tariffs came into effect without a fresh reprieve on Tuesday. Canada, in return, imposed its own tariffs on U.S. exports, plunging the two nations into a trade war. (On Thursday, Mr. Trump granted Canada a temporary reprieve from those tariffs.)

Glimpses of the rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau, and of Mr. Trump’s aggressive plans for Canada, have been becoming apparent over the past few months.

The Toronto Star, a Canadian newspaper, has reported that Mr. Trump mentioned the 1908 border treaty in the early February call and other details from the conversation. And the Financial Times has reported that there are discussions in the White House about removing Canada from a crucial intelligence alliance among five nations, attributing those to a senior Trump adviser.

Doubling Down

But it wasn’t just the president talking about the border and waters with Mr. Trudeau that disturbed the Canadian side.

The persistent social media references to Canada as the 51st state and Mr. Trudeau as its governor had begun to grate both inside the Canadian government and more broadly.

While Mr. Trump’s remarks could all be bluster or a negotiating tactic to pressure Canada into concessions on trade or border security, the Canadian side no longer believes that to be so.

And the realization that the Trump administration was taking a closer and more aggressive look at the relationship, one that tracked with those threats of annexation, sank in during subsequent calls between top Trump officials and Canadian counterparts.

One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.

Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.

Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said.

He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario. And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

A spokesperson for Mr. Lutnick did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Mr. LeBlanc declined to comment.

In subsequent communications between senior Canadian officials and Trump advisers, this list of topics has come up again and again, making it hard for the Canadian government to dismiss them.

The only soothing of nerves has come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the four people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Rubio has refrained from delivering threats, and recently dismissed the idea that the United States was looking at scrapping military cooperation.

But Canada’s politicians across the spectrum, and Canadian society at large, are frayed and deeply concerned. Officials do not see the Trump administration’s threats as empty; they see a new normal when it comes to the United States.

On Thursday, at a news conference, a reporter asked Mr. Trudeau: “Your foreign affairs minister yesterday characterized all this as a psychodrama. How would you characterize it?”

“Thursday,” Mr. Trudeau quipped ruefully.

Written by Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The (New York) Times, leading coverage of the country.