(Al Jazeera Media Network) An advertisement released in the United States by Canada’s biggest province featuring former US President Ronald Reagan has set off new tensions between Washington and Ottawa, which already had icy relations over President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.
In a post on Truth Social on Thursday night, Trump claimed that the advertisement – which shows Reagan, a fellow Republican, speaking negatively about tariffs as an economic policy – was “fake”. He cited comments by the Ronald Reagan Foundation that described the clip of the former president used in the commercial as doctored.
Trump also said the advertisement was aimed at influencing US courts.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote.
Why is the advertisement creating tensions between the US and Canada? Here’s what we know:
On October 14, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, said his province would spend 75 million Canadian dollars (US$54 million) to run anti-tariff advertisements on mainstream channels in the US.
Ford has been a critic of Trump’s tariff policy, and Ontario, known for its steel industry, has been severely hit by the US levies. Ontario is home to more than a third of Canada’s population and the country’s biggest city, Toronto.
On October 16, Ford posted the ad on his X account and said Canada will “never stop making the case against American tariffs.”
The minute-long advert features remarks by Reagan from a national address in April 1987 about free and fair trade. In that speech, Reagan spoke of tariffs he had recently imposed on Japan, at the time a major economic rival, before arguing that such duties were at best a short-term fix.
“When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works, but only for a short time,” Reagan is heard saying in the ad. His remarks play over visuals including the New York Stock Exchange, farm fields and cranes featuring US and Canadian flags.
“Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer,” Reagan says.
“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. … Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”
According to Canadian media reports, Ford calls himself a fan of Reagan, and his office said the anti-tariff ad will appear on US platforms such as Bloomberg and Fox News by the end of October. His office added that the advertisement seeks to target Republican voters in the US who will understand the impact of tariffs when they hear the former president’s voice.
In a post on the social media platform X late on Thursday, however, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, which advances Reagan’s legacy and principles, said the advert by Ontario was edited.
“The ad misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address, and the Government of Ontario did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks,” the institute said in the post, which included a link to Reagan’s original address.
The institute did not explain how exactly the speech was misrepresented but added that it was reviewing legal options to deal with the matter.
Al Jazeera reviewed the text of the original speech as it appears on the website of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. It includes all the statements Reagan is heard saying in his radio address.
But the comments in the advertisement don’t appear in the same sequence as Reagan’s speech. Instead, Ford’s team appears to have patched together different sections of Reagan’s speech to make their argument stronger and make it flow better.
For instance, in the advertisement, Reagan is heard saying about tariffs: “And sometimes, for a short while, it works, but only for a short time. Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”
In the actual address, Reagan made the comment about trade barriers hurting Americans in the long run in the introductory part of his speech. He talked about how tariffs help only for a “short time” much later in the speech. The comment about retaliatory steps taken by other countries comes in a different segment of the speech.
And the sentence about markets shrinking and millions losing their jobs comes in yet another part of the address.
Although Reagan’s original comments appear to have been spliced together by the Ontario premier’s team, the advertisement appears sincere to the thrust of Reagan’s message – that tariffs, if wielded as an economic weapon, must be used only sparingly and for a short time, or they can hurt Americans.
Some Canadian officials have taken to social media to defend the advertisement’s message.
“The Ontario ad does not misrepresent President Reagan’s anti-tariff radio address in any respect whatsoever. It is a direct replay of his radio address, formatted for a one minute ad,” Jason Kenney, a former Conservative cabinet minister for the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said in a social media post.
“They know perfectly well that the Ontario ad captures precisely President Reagan’s opposition to tariffs, and support for free trade,” he added, taking aim at the Reagan Foundation.
“But it is obvious that the Foundation now has gormless leadership which is easily intimidated by a call from the White House, yet another sign of the hugely corrosive influence of Trump on the American conservative movement.”
Trump said the advertisement is Canada’s way of trying “to interfere with the decision of the US Supreme Court, and other courts”.
After entering office in January, Trump imposed tariffs on imports from many countries around the world, saying he sought to punish countries with whom the US runs trade deficits, raise US government revenues and rebuild US manufacturing.
His administration initially imposed a 25 percent tariff on most Canadian goods, exempting only products covered by a free trade agreement that exists between Canada, the US and Mexico from Trump’s first term.
Canada is among the top US trading partners, and more than 77 percent of Canada’s exports go to the US. According to the Office of the US Trade Representative, US goods and services trade with Canada totalled US$909.1 billion in 2024.
But US tariffs have particularly affected Canada’s steel and aluminium sector.
