The Decibel - U.S. trade talks stalled after Ford ad, Carney heads to Asia

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump ended trade talks with Canada and threatened to hike tariffs on Canadian imports by another 10 per cent because of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s anti-tariff ad. Now, Trump says he doesn’t plan to meet with Carney “for a long time”, as both leaders head to Asia for trade summits and turn their attention to repairing trade relations with China.The Globe’s chief political writer, Campbell Clark, joins the show. He’ll explain why Ford’s ad struck such a nerve, the fallout from halted U.S.-Canada trade negotiations, and the stakes for Canada as both Carney and Trump prepare to meet with President Xi Jinping.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly announced he was ending trade talks with Canada. He said it was because of an advertisement running in the U.S., produced by the Ontario government. When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. The 62nd TV spot has been running since October 15th. It uses footage from nearly 40 years ago, a former U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, speaking against American protectionism. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens.

Market shrink and collapse, businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs. After the president criticized the ad, Ford pulled it off the air, but only after it ran during the World Series, which a lot of Americans watched. Trump has since said he would boost punitive tariffs on Canadian imports by another 10%. Whether it's provincial or Canada itself, they all know exactly what the ad was. The prime minister knew, everybody knew, the prime minister knew what the end was. At the same time, Carney is turning his attention towards working things out with another superpower, China.

Today, the Globe's chief political writer, Campbell Clark, is here. He'll walk us through why the ad struck such a nerve, how the breakdown of talks will impact Team Canada, and what Carney and Trump are both up to in Asia in the meantime. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Campbell. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. And today we're talking about the trade war and Trump, and with any anything on this file, things can change fast.

So just want to say that we're talking Tuesday at 12.30 p.m. Eastern. So Campbell, this is not the first time Trump has called off negotiations with Canada. But how big of a deal is it this time around? Well, it's a big deal, at least right now, because it means that everything stopped. There are still tariffs on Canadian goods. There's a larger review of the USMCA or Kuzma, whichever one you want to call it, trade, agreement that keeps most of our goods tariff-free that's coming up supposedly in early 2026. And that's a high-stakes thing as well. So, yeah, it's a big deal as long as it

lasts. Yeah, USMCA-R-Kuzma is our agreement between Canada, U.S. and Mexico, which protects a lot of the, our products are actually protected because of that deal. But Trump has also threatened to up tariffs on Canadian goods by 10%. Do we know when this might happen? No, we don't know when it might happen yet. We have not seen the executive order, which is sort of the technical order or the official order that puts those tariffs in place. And in fact, if you've heard Donald Trump or his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, over the last couple of days, they've kind of dodged the question when they've been asked. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Let's talk about why this is actually happening right now. Trump says this is happening

because of this anti-tariff ad released by the Ontario government and Doug Ford, Ontario Premier, or Doug Ford. For those who haven't seen this ad, could you just describe it? It's not a very, you know, complex ad. It is Ronald Reagan giving a speech in the 1980s. It was one of his radio addresses. And he's talking about, you know, how tariffs are a bad thing for the economy in the United States and the economy in the world. And it's supposed to be a reminder to Americans of the sort of long-term damage and the fact that a Republican icon believed that there was long-term damage to the tariffs. Some of the imagery as well as, like, you see a lot of Canadian and American flags,

a lot of families, workers, kind of giving a sense to an American audience that this is kind of a real bond here. Like, that's kind of what I got from watching this ad. And by the way, you know, that is the way Ronald Reagan thought of that free trade agreement back in the 1980s. There's a real bond of nations, you know, a neighbor's making a building together, you know. So that part is certainly true. Yeah.

So Trump called this ad, quote, a fraud and said it was. was misleading. Was it? No, not really. I mean, there was a section because this was an address that Ronald Reagan gave at a time of trade disputes with Japan. As perhaps you've heard, last week I placed new duties on some Japanese products in response to Japan's inability to enforce their trade agreement with us on electronic devices called semiconductors. You know, he was talking about trade actions with Japan, but was saying in the end, we do not want to have tariffs between our countries, right? And, you know, it's kind of funny that in this day and age,

Canadians are trying to convince Americans, Republicans, that Ronald Reagan was against tariffs. He was a free trade warrior. That's, you know, what he's known for. He was known for that in Canada. He was known for that in the United States. But Ronald Reagan was an anti-tariff president. There's no doubt about that.

Right. So we kind of think that Trump ended talks with Canada because of this ad. But why was he so upset about this ad? So, first of all, I do think that Donald Trump was, you know, getting piqued with Doug Ford. and we'd heard that before, right? Like, there had been a point in time back in the spring when Doug Ford threatened to cut off electricity in the United States

and Donald Trump threatened a doubling of steel tariffs and then Ford backed off. And, you know, the U.S. ambassador has been suggesting that, you know, Donald Trump was pretty unhappy with Doug Ford. So this is not entirely new. And if there's one thing that, you know, American politicians don't like, it's somebody running ads on TV against them. And Republicans do still see Ronald Reagan,

as one of their few modern icons. And it is probably something that annoys Republicans or, you know, it does play at his Republican base. Something that's interesting is that this ad has been running since October 15th. And last week, Trump basically said it was fair game. And I even see foreign countries now that we are doing very well with taking ads. Don't go with tariffs and taking ads.

I saw an ad last night from Canada. If I was Canada, I'd take that same man also. But now Trump's ending trade talks over this ad. So what do you make of this shift? Well, you know, I think it was probably different once it was running and people were seeing it. And it is quite possible that as it sort of got under the skin of Republicans, it got more under the skin of Donald Trump. It's also pretty likely that he was looking for a way of cutting things off or demanding new concessions from the Canadian government, which was asking for. a few more details and guarantees before finally closing down this sort of smaller sectoral

agreement on steel, aluminum, and energy. And, you know, again, this is the Donald Trump modus operandi. He's been using something like this to get Canada to make concessions before a deal is even done. You know, the digital services tax that Canada was about to apply in the United States, you know, he insisted that Canada stopped that before the United States go back to the negotiating table. So it's a way for him to demand concessions without giving anything in return. Interesting.

Let's talk about Ontario Premier Doug Ford. What has he said about the president's response to this ad? Well, you know, it's interesting because Doug Ford has politically, in a way, far more than even than Mark Carney, used Donald Trump as the foil for his politics. And standing up to Donald Trump was the sort of key issue. if we can call it that, in the Ontario provincial election in the spring. You know, his reaction to Donald Trump has been, well, we've got to fight.

And they need the manufacturing might of Ontario. We know that. So I wouldn't ever negotiate through weakness. I'd negotiate through strength. That's what President Trump respects. He's seen the whole world roll over. I'll tell you, I'm not going to roll over. I think he bragged about the number of impressions or the number of people that had seen this ad.

Billion times, I think. I think, who's the number? A billion impressions, I think. I have no way of knowing if that's the truth, to be honest. But, you know, it had an impact. And I think he seems pretty proud of that. Whether or not he's getting any heat for having sort of triggered another set of tariffs, maybe. He seems to not believe.

Doug Ford says that he doesn't believe that there will actually be another 10% tariffs on Canadian goods because of it. Ford says his concerns are for Ontario's auto sector, which is being impact by this U.S. trade war. Let's talk about a so-called eminent deal. I've been hearing this for month after month after month. And if there was, there was no mention about auto. How does this ad help Ontario if trade talks are now off because of it? So that's, you know, the catch-22 of dealing with Donald Trump, right? He's going to hurt you.

And maybe he'll hurt you less if you fight back or maybe he'll hurt you more. And that is the negotiating situation that Donald Trump is always trying to set up, right? I'm going to cut off talks if you dare. say a word against me. I'm going to cut off toxic. You don't remove some of your retaliation. I'm going to, you know, so this is, you know, one of the tactics that Donald Trump uses, and he is the powerful president of the United States and has a kind of leverage that nobody else in the world has. But, you know, Doug Ford is right that the auto sector is in trouble. It is one sector that is where Canadian and U.S. industry are deeply intertwined.

And, you know, you could argue that Donald Trump's tariffs on Canadian automotive products are hurting U.S. industry as well. And I think that's one of the things that the Ford government is trying to get across in the United States. And also, like, I think Doug Ford politically feels like he has to do something to say and to look like he's trying to fight for those jobs

because they're leaving now, right? We've seen Stalantis and General Motors cancel shifts and closed plants in Canada. And that kind of move, you know, a few more of those will be sort of an existential threat to the auto industry in Canada and in Ontario. And he probably didn't know that an ad like this would cause Donald Trump to cut things off, but he probably felt he couldn't afford to do nothing. And he couldn't afford to be seen to be doing nothing.

And interestingly, also, other premiers have kind of come out in support of this ad, like Premier Wop Canoe from Manitoba, Premier David Eby from BC. They see it as like a good tactic, I guess. Yeah, David Eby even said yesterday that, you know, he would use all. all of the tools at his disposal, including advertising, to fight softwood lumber tariffs from the United States. It's worth pointing out, though, that the overall trade negotiations aren't being managed by the premiers. And it's Mark Carney that has to try to thread this needle at the end. And he has the one that has to have the sort of direct relationship. So it's a bit trickier for

the Prime Minister of Canada than it is for the premiers who, you know, they will get demands to fight for their industries and their economic interests, their provinces. So it's not always easy to sort of balance the interests of one industry in one province against the other. How has Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to the breakdown in negotiations? Does he blame Ford? So no, he hasn't blamed Ford. He was been pretty lucky. In fact, he kind of hasn't blamed anybody, right? He sort of stood stoically and said, you know, we were making progress and we'll stand ready to continue the talks when the Americans are ready to continue the talks. If you're the Prime Minister of Canada, you're going to have to balance the sort of different competing

political pressures that you face. One is Canadians really do want to see somebody stand up and fight Donald Trump because they don't like the giving into the bully thing. And, you know, a lot of Canadians, some Canadians complain that Mark Carney promised to be elbows up and he hasn't been. But the other pressure, of course, is if you can get a deal with the United States that alleviates the trade pressures on Canadian companies and help save Canadian jobs, well, that's something Canadians want as well. And, you know, he is under pressure to save Canadian jobs to avoid a recession, to avoid the fallout that one way or the other

will be damaging to Canadians and probably to his political interests. So he's got two very difficult competing political interests to deal with there. We'll be right back. So Campbell, these new trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada are happening as both Carney and Trump are on parallel Asia trade trips. And this trip marks the first time in years that we'll see a Canadian Prime Minister meet with President Xi. What's significance of that? And do we know what could come out of it? So the meeting between Mr. Carney and Mr. Shee, which is supposed to happen later this week, is supposed to symbolize a reset in relations.

between Canada and China, which have been fairly well frozen since 2018 when the Canadian government arrested Ming Wang Zhao, who was a Huawei executive, the daughter of the founder of Huawei. China retaliated by arresting two Canadians, the two Michaels, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spaver, and there was a series of trade barriers sprung up, and things have been very frosty ever since. So there hasn't been an official meeting between a Canadian Prime Minister and President Xi since that time, although there have been sort of pull-asides at summits. But it is a big deal because, of course, if Canada is facing difficult trade relations with its biggest trading partner of the United States, and as Mark Carney has said quite

extensively, he's looking to diversify trade. And, you know, the second biggest economy in the world is China's. Trade with China is already pretty large for Canada, but it's pretty unstable. It's pretty unpredictable, as we've seen with canola, right? as we've seen with Canadian meat. And sometimes that's because Canada has its own tariffs against China, like the ones on electric vehicles. So the tariffs you're talking about here, the tariff that Canada has on Chinese EVs, 100%. And then China has retaliated with 100% tariffs on Canada's canola.

Yes. But sometimes it's just because of politics, because of difficulties in relationships. So I think the thing that Mark Carney will be trying to speak to the president about is, we want a stable trading relationship with China. We want to be able to establish some sort of rules of the role and expectations so that Canada's trade is not used as a weapon against Canada every time there's a disagreement between the two countries. So Trump is also set to iron out a potential trade framework between their two countries. Do we have a sense of how that could impact Canada? Yeah, I think so that's the big deal in the world, right? That's the

one that is very important to global trade all around, really, and to people who are concerned about the growth of the global economy. And it does have an impact on Canada, right? Canada needs to have a diversification of its trade, but, you know, China needs that less if the United States trade is open. An example of that, just a small example of that is that Canada has difficulty because of the trade barriers on its canola. Well, the United States has had the same issue with soybeans, one that's really hurt

American farmers. The Chinese are buying soybeans from Brazil. Well, both of those things are canola and soybeans are sort of crops that substitute one for another to a certain extent where, you know, they're used for cooking oil for feed. And, you know, once China settles its trade disputes with the United States, well, maybe it has more alternatives to Canadian canola. Now, that's not necessarily the biggest deal in the world, but the point is that, you know, the more the big agreement between China and the United States is worked out, the less both of those countries need to work out their other trading arrangements. You know, Canada doesn't have a huge amount of leverage with China, but China does want and has tried to appear to other countries to be.

kind of a more stable alternative or an alternative to U.S. trade, right? Because countries around the world, not just Canada, are facing tariffs from the United States. They're facing disruptions in their trade relations with the United States. And China's trying to sell itself as a trading alternative. Interestingly, like, we know that, you know, China is also not a very reliable trading partner. We had a whole episode about Canola showing that this is not the case when it comes to China and Canadian relations. Yeah. Well, we're in the world of big superpowers that are able to.

to use their trading power as a weapon. You know, the phrase that foreign policy experts use is weaponized interdependence. So if you count on your trade with a foreign country, they can use that against you. And in Canada's case, you know, that's definitely true with the United States and it's somewhat true with China.

And, you know, the argument, I think, that you'll see Mark Carney, or at least we will, I don't know if we'll ever see it because we probably won't see those private talks between Mark Carney and Xi Jinping, but Mark Carney's goal, there has to be stable trade with China. We need some form of stability in the Chinese relationship.

It's not that there isn't a big Chinese market for Canadian goods and that there cannot be trade between the two, but the Canadian interest is seeing that stabilized because our U.S. trade is now extremely unpredictable. So it does seem like Carney is stuck between these two superpowers. How does he navigate this? There's a couple of things that are difficult, right? One is that the United States want to keep China out of some of their markets.

And there's a distrust about countries that deal with China. For example, there's a concern that Canadian trade with China could increase sort of backdoor shipments of products from China through Canada to the United States. And that gets the Americans putting up trade barriers. Another is, if we open our car markets to Chinese companies, that makes them sort of less valuable in our trade talks over the auto sector between Canada and the United States. If we have more and more integration and more and more economic trade with China, we still have to be concerned about them using it capriciously and weaponizing it against us when there's

a political arrangement. And that leads to the sort of last thing, which is Mark Carney's political consideration here at home where, you know, Canadians don't trust the government of China as a reliable partner. They don't think that China has a good human rights. record, they are concerned about China making threats or trying to push its own sort of rules of the world on Canada. So that's a very tricky thing for Mark Carney to negotiate, you know, leaving one superpower that we've known to work with a superpower that we're wary of. That

doesn't make things very, very easy. Yeah. This is a very big trip for Carney. And it comes after months of him speaking about the importance of diversifying our trade efforts and highlighting Asia as part of this. What will be signs to you, Campbell, that this trip is a success? Well, for one thing, it's hard to imagine that there will really be any of the fruits of that success that are immediately visible, like the real fruits of that success. You know, we, years ago there used to be these team Canada trips, the Jean-Cretchen used to go on and they'd signed a bunch of deals, but all those deals were completed before the prime minister ever got there, right? And there will be some of that this time, but this is for Mark Carney, kind of the

Asian version of the European trips he did earlier in his premiership, and he did a lot of European trips, where he has gone not just to sort of diversify trade, but to seek investment. You know, he met with the CEO of a Malaysian gas company, Petronus, which invested in LNG, Canada. He's looking for investments from major Asian companies. When he's in Korea for the APEC summit later this week, he's going to go visit the Hanwa shipyards where they build submarines. and Canada is looking at buying submarines either from Germany or from South Korea.

And one of the aspects of the negotiations is, are you going to arrange to invest in Canada as part of this deal to build things or buy things from Canada when we buy submarines from you? And possibly, you know, can we have a closer security alliance where we have exchanges in security relations? So these things are, you know, these could be very sizable things for the Canadian government, nothing like replacing U.S. trade, but if you're trying to attract investment and trade, those are some of the places to start. I think that the main point of this Asian swing is opening up investment from Asian countries into Canada and sort of creating

sort of partnerships because those countries need to diversify their trade and investment relationships as well. Just lastly here, Campbell, and coming back to the Canada-US trade relationship, how long do we think, I mean, obviously we don't know for sure, but how long do we think this latest pause on negotiations could last? My opinion is it's not going to last very long, but there will be things like this with Donald Trump until Donald Trump is no longer president. He's shown that every single time, but pretty much every country in the world, if we do sign

a deal. There will be something else that he wants to read and negotiate soon afterwards. It happens every time. And he has the power to sort of disavow his own trade agreements now, which he did with the USMCA. So I think this pause will probably not last more than weeks, but the next pause will be coming soon after. So expect a lot of stops and starts as we go ahead into the future. On whatever agreement we're negotiating at the time. Campbell, great to having the show. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's it for today.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, Chief Political Writer. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.