Trump hints at revisiting US-Canada border demarcation: Report

WASHINGTON, DC : Amid the ongoing tariff war between the two countries, US President Donald Trump, during his conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, raised the point that he did not believe in the border demarcation treaty between them and wants to revise the boundary, the New York Times reported.

The report, which cited four people with firsthand knowledge of their content, on the condition of anonymity, also noted that Trump, in an early February call, challenged the border treaty between the two countries and told Trudeau he didn’t like their shared water agreements.

Recently, Justin Trudeau made an extraordinary statement that was largely lost in the fray of the moment, as per NYT.

“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa.

“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.

The conversation between Washington and Ottawa on February 3 not only included discussions on staving off tariffs on Canadian exports but Trump also laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.

Notably, the border treaty that Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States, as reported by NYT.

Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest in in the past.

The report further cited Trump’s response to the media on January 7, wherein, he had said that he is planning to use “economic force” against Canada.

The persistent social media references to Canada as the “51st state” and Trudeau as its “Governor” had begun to grate both inside the Canadian government and more broadly, as reported by NYT.

Following the talks between the two leaders, Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick in a conversation with Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc, issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call that Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were ‘easy to abandon.

He also wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the ‘Five Eyes’ that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand, according to NYT.

He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario, the report further added.

It also noted that he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defence Command.
A sigh of relief, however, has been that the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has refrained from delivering threats, and recently dismissed the idea that the United States was looking at scrapping military cooperation.

However, Canada’s politicians across the spectrum, and Canadian society at large, are frayed and deeply concerned. Officials do not see the Trump administration’s threats as empty; they see a new normal when it comes to the United States, the report added. (ANI)