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Some are calling U.S. President Donald Trump’s termination of trade talks with Canada just another bump in the rollercoaster that’s been the president’s second term.
Late last night, Trump said he would be terminating all trade negotiations with Canada because of a television advertisement pushing back on tariffs.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump posted on social media Thursday.
The advertisement features audio and video of former President Ronald Reagan speaking about tariffs in 1987.
Kelly Malone, Washington correspondent for the Canadian Press, joined the Evan Bray Show to share her response to this ad and reaction from Capitol Hill.
Read more:
- Trump terminates trade talks with Canada because of tariff ads
- What did Reagan actually say about tariffs? Read the transcript of his 1987 address
- Carney: ‘We stand ready’ for Trump to resume trade talks
Listen to the full interview here:
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Bray: So, here we go again. This is not the first time Donald Trump has said, ‘trade talks are off,’ but it seems to be happening again, this time over an ad.
Kelly Malone: It was not what I was expecting to see late last night, because he actually mentioned that he saw the ad earlier this week. It aired during the Blue Jays game. And he made a comment to reporters at the White House that he’d seen the ad, and if he were Canada, he would have taken out the same ad too and followed it up by saying, ‘But I don’t think people are going to believe it.’
So he had seen the ad, had not seemed upset by the ad, and it kind of just passed by.
And then yesterday, the Ronald Reagan Foundation put out a social media post claiming that the Government of Ontario had misrepresented it, and that obviously got into Trump’s ear, or Trump’s team, and he seems to have just kind of exploded.
Listen to President Reagan's unedited remarks here: https://t.co/1gQUcbR4eZ pic.twitter.com/iqmjSuypp0
— Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute (@RonaldReagan) October 24, 2025
I’ve watched the whole five-minute speech, and you can find it on YouTube. Although (the advertisement) wasn’t the entire speech, it was just a clip, it doesn’t feel like it was used in any way that misrepresented what the former president was saying.
Malone: Doug Ford’s office told me last night that it is an unedited excerpt, and they said it’s part of the public domain. That means that you can use it without permission.
So it’s unclear what the Ronald Reagan Foundation was truly upset about, but they maybe got some pushback from Trump and his administration, put out this social media post and then that gave Trump reason to just get really angry at Canada on Truth Social last night.
But yes, it appears in my watching of it, and then my watching of the Ronald Reagan speech in 1987, that it does seem like it’s just an excerpt. I don’t want to guarantee that 100 per cent. I have not seen the raw components of the commercial myself to confirm it, but it seems that it is just an excerpt. It’s not manipulated in any capacity.
This is another example where we’ve got our country attempting to negotiate a deal, and part of our country, one province, taking maybe a bit of a different approach against the United States. Is there an understanding that this is actually the province of Ontario that brought this forward, not the country?
Malone: Does it not bring you deja vu to like steel and aluminum, where Doug Ford threatened to turn off electricity to three states, and so Trump was like, ‘We’re going to put tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50 per cent,’ so Doug Ford backed off. And guess what? We still have 50 per cent steel and aluminum tariffs.
At that time, I remember going on a couple of American TV stations to talk about it, and people were asking me, ‘How will Ford negotiate with the Trump administration?’ And I kept having to say, ‘Ford doesn’t negotiate with the Trump administration. He’s the premier. He’s not the Prime Minister.’ So I do think in some circles there is a misunderstanding of who represents Canada in these talks.
I also think that this is a great distraction for Trump, as he mentioned, from the fact that the Supreme Court is going to have a huge hearing at the start of November on whether or not a lot of his tariffs are even legal. And so he said in his post that this was Canada trying to push back on that Supreme Court decision. I’m not 100 per cent sure how an advertisement would influence the Supreme Court, but it shows that his big concern right now is that his large tariff regime will actually be found to be illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Do you have any sense of how far along the road the talks were between Canada and the United States? Because I’m hearing hints that maybe we were closer than ever to actually inking a deal.
Malone: Well, Canada-U.S. trade minister Dominic LeBlanc, when asked about a report that it would be some sort of deal around energy and aluminum would be fine at the APAC, he kind of tempered those expectations. Trump and Carney are both flying to Malaysia today, and then to South Korea for this big leaders’ summit in that region.
But LeBlanc said when he was asked whether or not a deal would materialize while both leaders were at that summit, he said that he was surprised by those reports. But he said the talks were making more progress and hitting finer parts than before. I had heard rumblings about good progress. I’d heard rumblings about specific volumes and things like that, being talked about, which was a bit more in detail than they previously had.
So I think Canadian officials were feeling pretty good about how everything had gone since Carney visited the White House just earlier this month, and this can only have caught them off guard.
I’m not getting too worked up about this because we saw this play out in June over the Digital Services Tax, where Trump called off trade talks. I’m expecting this is just more of As the World Turns?
I think that you would be correct to assume that. I expect Canadian officials to be reaching out to their American counterparts to see what’s going on.
But I think with how we exist in the roller coaster that is the second Trump administration, we have to think of this as another dip before we start heading back up that track again.
