Ontario Premier Doug Ford is once again pushing back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric, suggesting Canada’s sovereignty is not for sale and that the province is outperforming its American counterparts in job creation.
“President Trump’s back on his high horse, saying we’re going to be a 51st state. I can tell President Trump that will never, ever happen,” Ford said Thursday at a Toronto news conference.
His comments came after Trump reacted to a Bloomberg report this week that Canada had fallen into a technical recession, posting on social media: “51st State!” The remark was later shared by U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra.
On Thursday, Ford said Canada would remain independent regardless of economic challenges.
“We will always be a proud sovereign country, and I’m going to fight every single day to make sure that happens,” he said.
While two consecutive quarterly contractions meet some definitions of a technical recession, and three of the last four quarters in Canada have recorded negative GDP growth, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has yet to sound the alarm.
At a press conference earlier this week Carney did acknowledge the economy’s “weakness” but fell short of describing current conditions as a recession.
‘A lot of uncertainty’
Ford said on Thursday that many Canadians are living with “uncertainty” amid challenge economic conditions. But he argued that Ontario is better positioned than many jurisdictions to withstand the impact of Trump’s tariffs and trade policies.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty. I’m going to emphasize that it’s a roller coaster. You’re up one time in jobs, and you go down,” he said.
The premier pointed to April employment figures, saying Ontario added 42,400 jobs while the rest of Canada collectively lost 18,000.
Ford also claimed Ontario outperformed the United States on a population-adjusted basis.
“We beat the Americans per capita at 350 million people. They created 115,000 jobs. We beat them by 680 per cent, leading North America, because we’ve been tilling the soil, working with municipalities, working with the federal government to make sure we have an economy that can sustain the hits that were taken from President Trump,” he said.
With files from CTV News Toronto’s Phil Tsekouras
