US President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened Canadian PM Mark Carney with 100 per cent tariffs to dissuade him from signing a trade deal with China.
Addressing him as 'Governor Carney', Trump warned in a Truth Social post that "China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it".
He also claimed that the 100 per cent tariff threat was to prevent Canada from becoming a "Drop Off Point" for the entry of Chinese goods into the US.
This comes a week after reports of trade deal negotiations between Canada and China, which the former had once called its "biggest security threat", as well as uncertainty over ties with the US.
The deal would see Canada ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which it had imposed simultaneously with the US in 2024. In exchange, China would lower the retaliatory tariffs on key Canadian agricultural products.
Trump's tariff threat makes a marked shift from his earlier approval of the deal, when he stated that it was what Carney “should be doing and it’s a good thing for him to sign a trade deal".
This shift comes amid worsening tensions with the US over Trump's plans to acquire Greenland, which threaten the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and has led to an escalating war of words with Carney.
“Canada lives because of the United States," Trump had said while in Davos, Switzerland, for the 2026 edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Carney hit back, praising his country's self-reliance, the fact that America's dominant role in the world was fading, and that it was time for a "new global order" to take shape.
Notably, Canada—like Greenland—has been part of Trump's ambitions, with the US president often suggesting in his second term in office that Canada ought to be the 51st US state.
The altered map of the United States that Trump posted recently—with Canada, Venezuela, Greenland and Cuba as a part of its territory—was the latest step in this direction.
As for their own trade ties, Washington and Ottawa have yet to reach a deal to reduce the tariffs that the US had imposed on key sectors of the Canadian economy.