WASHINGTON, January 15. /TASS/. Canadians strongly opposed recent statements made by US President-elect Donald Trump suggesting that Canada should become part of the United States as its 51st state in the interests of national security, Canadian Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson said on Wednesday.
Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times, Wilkinson emphasized that Canada is a sovereign state.
"We are a sovereign nation," the Financial Times quoted him as saying. "Our national game is hockey; it’s not football or baseball <…> We have two languages: they are English and French <…> Canadians have no interest in being Americans."
A possible introduction of 25% duties by the new US administration on all goods from Canada would force Ottawa to resort to "tit-for-tat" retaliatory measures, the Canadian minister continued.
The British business daily also quoted Wilkinson as saying that Canada’s responsive tariffs would "focus on products that would create 'the greatest amount of angst in the United States with the least amount of pain in Canada,' potentially steel from Michigan or orange juice from Florida."
The United States, Mexico, and Canada are tied into a trilateral agreement, which stipulates the creation of a free trade zone between those countries. However, on November 25, Trump threatened to impose a 25% tax on imports from Canada and Mexico over the issue of illegal immigrant and drug flows.
On January 7, Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated as US president on January 20, suggested again that Greenland should become part of the United States, citing national security concerns and protection from Chinese and Russian threats.
In 2019, during his first presidential term, he said that the United States could buy the island, an autonomous Danish territory. Both now and back then, the island and the kingdom dismissed the idea as absurd. Trump has also been floating the idea of turning Canada into the United States’ 51st state.