If President-elect Donald Trump has his way, “everything the American consumers buy from Canada is suddenly going to get a lot more expensive,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned during an interview with CNN on Thursday afternoon.
Trudeau shared a list of imports facing the 25 percent tariffs Trump has threatened to slap on Canadian imports: oil and gas, electricity, steel, aluminum, lumber and concrete.
The prime minister joined Jake Tapper in studio Thursday for his first one-on-one interview since he announced plans to resign from high office by March at the latest.
Trudeau was in Washington to attend the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, who served as an honorary pallbearer for Trudeau’s father almost 25 years ago.
Tapper also quizzed the prime minister on Canada’s experience with devastating wildfires and asked the impact of Trump’s rhetoric on Trudeau’s decision to call it quits earlier this week. (Trudeau denied any influence at all.)
Trudeau dismissed the president-elect’s musings about annexing Canada and taking control of America’s northern neighbor by economic force.
“Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” he said. “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”
Trudeau, who did not interact with Trump during Carter’s funeral, credited the incoming president as a “skilled negotiator” hoping to distract attention from his tariff threat.
The prime minister’s relative silence with reporters stretches back to December.
Following the shock resignation that month of Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Trudeau canceled a traditional round of year-end interviews.
When he announced his resignation on a frigid day in Ottawa, he fielded only a handful of questions.
Canadian journalists might grumble about the prime minister picking an American interviewer as his first interrogator of 2025. But the prime minister enjoys airtime stateside. He found time last year for the Freakonomics podcast and Vox’s “Today, Explained.”
In 2022, Trudeau joined the Pod Save America crew.
CNN aired the Trudeau interview while the prime minister’s fierce rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, held a press conference in Ottawa. Poilievre is the odds-on favorite to succeed Trudeau no matter who leads the Liberals into an election expected this spring.