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U.S. President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Xi Jinping this week, heralding the Chinese president as a “great leader” while looking to expand or extend a deal both countries reached last year to stave off some tariffs and carve out something of a trade truce.
Trump has previously said he’s made “fantastic trade deals” with Beijing and, recently, even mused about inviting Chinese auto manufacturers to set up factories in the U.S.
“If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be OK with that,” he said on the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. Trump also reportedly got that extension with China late on Wednesday.
And yet, Trump and many in his administration have repeatedly scolded Prime Minister Mark Carney for reaching a vastly smaller trade deal — agreeing in January to let in 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles with a tariff rate of 6.1 per cent (down from 100 per cent), while China lowered tariffs on Canadian products including canola, peas, lobsters and crabs.
“They’ll look back at this decision and surely regret it,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said of the EVs at the time.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took a more bellicose approach, accusing Canada of turning its back on the U.S.
“We are a $30 trillion economy, we are the consumer of the world. Carney has a problem with us, he gets on a plane and goes to China? Does he think the Chinese economy is going to buy his stuff?” he said to Bloomberg.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick blasted Canada’s trade strategy on Friday, saying Prime Minister Mark Carney ‘has a problem with us’ and mocking Carney’s recent trade visit to China. The journalist who asked Lutnick about Canadian trade, Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith, weighed in on Power & Politics.
Jia Wang, senior fellow with the China Institute at the University of Alberta, says this highlights the way the U.S. demands one thing of its trading partners, while doing another itself.
“The hypocrisy in the way the U.S. treats its trading partners is palpable,” she said.
Canada’s trade with China did pick up steam in 2025 as businesses sought to diversify in the face of U.S. tariffs. At the same time, American importers purchased fewer products made in China.
But Canada would have to increase its China trade by more than 380 per cent to catch up to the amount of imports the U.S. still brings in every year.
The U.S. imported more than $434 billion worth of Chinese goods in 2025. By contrast, Canada imported just $90 billion from China.
And yet Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican and Trump loyalist, highlighted what he saw as Canada’s risk in increasing trade with China, in a lengthy essay posted on X.
“Choosing Communist China as a trading partner over the U.S. isn’t just a bad idea — it’s a trap,” he wrote in early September.
As many commenters pointed out, Florida buys more goods from China than from Canada. In fact, it is one of four U.S. states that list China as their top source of imports. (California, South Carolina, Tennessee are the others.)
But Wang says that sort of nuance is lost in Trump’s zero-sum world where everything is about power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping was welcomed with a rare planeside greeting from U.S. President Donald Trump upon his arrival in Washington Wednesday. Jinping’s state visit comes when tensions between the two geopolitical rivals are high over trade, artificial intelligence, Trump’s war with Iran and China’s designs on Taiwan.
Trump “is more than happy to receive Chinese investment, to do more with China economically, to further strengthen the relationship with Xi, while being very critical and very harsh on Canada,” she said.
Mark Manger, a professor with the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto agrees there is an element of hypocrisy in an American policy that tries to strike deals with China while discouraging countries like Canada from doing the same thing.
“But we also have to take everything the U.S. president says with a grain of salt. What great deals is he striking with China? I don’t see anything there,” he said in an interview.
Manger says China remains the world’s biggest exporter, and is closing in on the American lead on artificial intelligence.
And more to the point, he says, China knows it can outlast Trump.
“The Chinese are playing a longer game,” said Manger.
And both Manger and Wang say Canada needs to play the long game as well.
“We have to deal with both economies. We can’t wish them away,” said Wang.
And, she says, dealing with both economies will require leadership, strategic thinking and deft decision making as smaller countries like Canada navigate the two biggest economies in the world.
