U.S. Department of State: Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks to the Press at Fairmont le Manoir Richelieu, Charlevoix, Canada
Transcript of Remarks
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Fairmont le Manoir Richelieu
Charlevoix, Canada
March 14, 2025
QUESTION: If I can follow up. Mr. Secretary, I know that we’re not speaking about Canada becoming the 51st state at this meeting, but I’m asking you now: Do you consider what the President has said about Canada becoming the 51st state – is he serious?
SECRETARY RUBIO: I’ll tell you how that came about. Okay. He’s in a meeting with Trudeau, and Trudeau basically says that if the U.S. imposes tariffs on Canada, Canada couldn’t survive as a nation-state, at which point the President said, well, then you should become a [U.S.] state. And that’s where this began. That said, the President has made an argument for why – he says he loves Canada. He says – he made an argument for why Canada would be better off joining the United States from an economic perspective and the like. He’s made that argument repeatedly, and I think it stands for itself.
Diplomacy is often a business of subtle nuances. What is not said is often as important as what is. The above excerpt from the transcript of Marco Rubio’s press conference at the recent G7 Foreign Ministers meeting says (and does not say) a very great deal.
The context was that Rubio was attending a meeting of the G7 Foreign Ministers in preparation for the upcoming G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. Such preparatory meetings are normal and are part of an intensive process whereby the G7 host nation (Canada this year) convenes various groups of officials from the G7 countries to develop the agenda for the Summit. Rubio was quite right in saying that Trump’s views on Canada were not part of the agenda at the Charlevoix meeting.
But, it is obvious that the U.S. Secretary of State was going to be asked about all this on his first trip to Canada, whether it was on the agenda or not. His answer was likely much thought about and prepared in advance.
If you look at his words very carefully, two things stand out.
First, Rubio himself did not actually endorse or support Trump’s position. He simply said that the President has made his case for Canada to become the 51st State, and that case stands for itself. Contrary to the likes of Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Administration officials, who have been only too happy to pile on Trump’s insulting rhetoric, Rubio does not support or amplify the case. He simply states it and leaves it there.
Rubio very carefully doesn’t mention anything about Trump’s threats to use economic coercion to annex Canada, or even military force to take Greenland from Denmark. This is likely because the State Department which he heads knows only too well that it is a violation of international law to threaten the sovereignty of another state, or its territorial integrity (Denmark/Greenland), or to threaten the use of coercion to achieve these things. But it may also be the case, and this is speculation on my part, that Rubio is interested in creating an off-ramp to allow saner heads to (eventually) prevail and to provide a way for his boss, President Trump, to back away from this preposterous position without losing face. More on that in a minute.
The second way in which Rubio’s brief comment is interesting concerns his statement as to how all of this came about. In Rubio’s telling, it was not until Prime Minster Trudeau offered up the observation over his famous November 29 dinner at Mar-a-Lago that Canada could not survive as a sovereign state, that Trump basically told him that Canada doesn’t deserve to be one if that is the case. We have no way of knowing if Rubio’s telling of the story covers everything, or if this exchange with Trudeau really was the first time Trump had thought of annexing Canada. If Rubio’s telling is correct, however; if Trump had not thought of annexing Canada before Trudeau said we would not survive tariffs, it points more than ever to the need for diplomats (and leaders) to be very careful in what they say and how they say it.
Of course, Canada would survive tariffs. We would not be as prosperous a country as we are now, at least not for a while, but we would survive as a sovereign nation. Trudeau may not have been speaking in terms of the actual survival of the country when he allegedly made the fateful remark, but rather speaking more figuratively of the continuation of the levels of prosperity free trade has brought. But if Trump took him literally; that Canada could not survive, then Trudeau made a cardinal mistake in any dealing with Donald Trump – he showed vulnerability and weakness. Everything we know about Trump, from his own writings and those of people who have had to deal with him, is that he despises weakness and will seek to ruthlessly capitalise on it wherever he finds it.
Trump was already thinking in terms of securing his place in the history books through territorial expansion (Greenland and the Panama Canal) when the fateful dinner took place. He has made no secret of his admiration for the previously little known 11th President, Alexander Polk, who significantly expanded the territory of the U.S. through war, purchase and statecraft. But when, if Rubio’s telling is correct, Trudeau apparently casually offered Trump an excuse to consider the biggest prize of all Trump took it. It would be shocking indeed, if history were to one day reveal that this crisis over Canada becoming the 51st state was largely down to Trudeau having chosen his words carelessly over a dinner with Trump.
This is a mistake which Prime Minister Carney does not appear poised to make. His insistence that he will not meet Trump until the latter shows “respect” (presumably by stopping with the 51st state rhetoric), and Carney’s determination to show that Canada can stand on its own and defend itself, and that it can diversify its economy and defence, are all calculated to undo any misapprehension that might exist in Trump’s mind over whether Canada can survive as a sovereign state in the face of his economic threats. More importantly, it is a calculated show of our determination to do so, whatever it costs us.
Which takes us back to the possible off-ramp that Rubio’s very careful phrasing in Charlevoix may have been intended to open up. If Trump does eventually come to understand that no amount of economic coercion will force us to succumb to his crazy idea, and that the effort to do so will tank the U.S. economy in the meantime, “the Donald” may be looking at some point for a way out of this. But it is unlikely that his ego would permit any backtracking or admission of fault.
Rubio’s phrasing implies that Trump was merely making an offer to help Canada out – if you cannot survive, we will take you in. This is, of course, complete nonsense. Trump is trying to aggressively force an independent nation to surrender its sovereignty. But if, in the context of attempts to get beyond this, the fiction could be invented that Trump’s scheme was merely an argument based on the facts as Trump understood them (Canada cannot survive), and those facts have now changed (Canada has shown that it can and will), it might be possible to construct a face-saving way out.
None of this would overcome the fact that the trust which formed the basis of the relationship has been fundamentally lost and will not be regained for years, if not decades. Nor would it solve the fact that Trump appears determined to use trade policy to strip Canada of its industrial base and turn it into little more than a producer of raw materials for the U.S. These are things that will have to be dealt with and they will fundamentally change the nature of our relations with our southern neighbour for decades.
But a rhetorical compromise based on the ideas that Rubio appeared to lay out in Charlevoix would at least get us beyond the 51st state nonsense and allow more normal diplomacy to begin again.
In order for this to work, both sides will have to find ways to say certain things they know to be untrue, and leave unsaid other things which they know are true. Welcome to diplomacy.
(Of course, if Trump is determined to annex us no matter what, this face-saving idea for an off-ramp will not work no matter how subtle and clever it may be).
