US President Donald Trump called Canada "difficult and unreasonable" and threatened to rename a lake after trade talks collapsed. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Earlier, Trump had claimed a deal with Canada was imminent, which would avoid the new taxes. But, in a development that surely galled the Art of the Deal author, there was no agreement. Instead, Trump and his team demonstrated the art of collapsing the deal, as trade talks fell apart due to what Canada said were unreasonable, last-minute demands from the US side.
On Saturday, US tariffs came into force, applied to various Canadian exports including hockey sticks and tongue depressors. But if Trump expected Canada to bow to his demands – the president was seeking more favorable terms on things like steel and aluminum – he was disappointed.
Instead, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister who has emerged as a rare world leader willing to stand up to Trump, said Canada had been "attacked", and announced retaliatory tariffs on about $20bn worth of US goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment.
All this means US consumers are seeing surging prices on all kinds of products – including toilet paper. My colleague Lauren Aratani reports that "the US accounts for more than 20% of global tissue consumption despite having only 4% of the world's population". And this outsize usage has grown more expensive. "Though American toilet paper and tissues are often made domestically, they heavily rely on lumber-rich Canada for raw materials," she writes.
It's fair to say that Canada's retaliation upset Trump, who famously loves to win. On Tuesday, he claimed the US "is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don't expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer" – we'll see how that goes – and has dubbed Canadian negotiators "clowns".
Earlier this week, Trump compared Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, unfavorably to his deceased brother Rob, the scandal-plagued former mayor of Toronto, whose time in office saw him admit to smoking crack cocaine and being "hammered" in public.
And while Trump was flailing about, JD Vance was doing his best Scrappy Do, "lemme at 'em" impression, lobbing insults at Canada from the safety of a Republican rally in Maine. Vance claimed that Canada and China are "the two worst countries when it comes to trade policy anywhere in the world".
He added: "We have to remember, Canada is a state. Sorry. Freudian slip. That was actually an accident." The satisfied look on his face didn't make it seem like one.
Vance went on to add that Canada "quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America". It was an interesting take, given the only country that has mused about invading Canada is the US – as recently as last year Trump was threatening to annex the nation.
So in a nutshell: Donald Trump has led the US into an unsavory spat against the world's most popular country, a scrap that could result in Americans – less than three months out from crucial midterm elections in which Republicans face an uphill battle – struggle to pay for a roll of toilet paper.