Was Trudeau’s Friendly Warm Social Dinner with Trump a Breakthrough?

Patrick Gossage • December 4, 2024

Let’s get real. Indeed, most agree that Trudeau’s taking up Trump’s invite to a Friday dinner invite to Mar a Lago made during his Monday phone call with the incoming President was a coup. It made Poilievre’s day-after nasty criticisms seem foolish. This is certain: there is no world leader that does not envy Justin and his gang spending over three hours at dinner with the incoming president and a few appointed heavies. Only weeks before his inauguration.

A table setting to be envious of indeed. Trudeau was seated next Trump, surrounded by new Trump appointees important to the US- Canada relationship including Howard Lutnick, Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump's pick to lead the Interior Department, Mike Waltz and his wife, Trump';s choice to be his national security adviser.


Also, Senator David McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell, a former deputy national security adviser under Trump, as well as Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, responsible for border security, and Katie Telford, Trudeau's chief of staff. All smiling! Let’s hope they all knew which fork to use for the salad course. And his mother’s meat loaf was on the menu – a must order for our people!


Our US Ambassador Kirsten Hillman, at an adjacent table, said the atmosphere was “warm," that Trump and Trudeau "get along well" and the dinner was also a chance to socialize. She said Trump used his iPad to play music and she said Trump told Trudeau he is a big fan of Canadian singer Celine Dion. There were no briefing papers and no agenda – not a real working dinner. Clearly Trump enjoyed being the generous host in the crowded main dining room of his Florida palace. Personal relationships are so important - clearly this event worked for Canada. LeBlanc said Trump accompanied his Canadian guests to the door with a warm “keep in touch – we’ll talk soon.”


Trudeau had the floor early on to make his pitch. And knowing the rules for Canadian diplomacy vis-a-vis the most powerful man in the world, you can be sure he emphasized that he was on the same page when it came to the border and fentanyl – two focuses of Trump signaled in his Nov. 25 social media post. There he threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico until they clamped down on drugs, particularly fentanyl, and migrants crossing the border. Trudeau called Trump the evening it landed and assuredly made his case that the southern and northern borders are entirely different. It was on that call Trump invited his to his Florida mansion for dinner the following Friday as long as it was kept secret.


Notably Trump sought out Trudeau’s views on world leaders who had changed since he was last President. Trudeau is now the senior member of the Group of Seven western leaders. Part of the better relations between the two men can be traced to an earlier personal call from Trudeau to Trump the day after the attempted assassination on July 13, 2024. In addition, Trudeau still has some star power and would be recognizable to Trump’s Florida crowd.


Dominic Leblanc’s read out in several interviews paints an incredibly positive picture of the launch of very strategic high-level lobbying of Trump and his people to find an exemption to the punishing tariff threat. He made a good impression on Lutnick, the incoming Commerce Secretary. He was able to recount the major BC takedown of a huge fentanyl lab. He was very interested in the Chinese source of many chemicals used in its manufacture. Leblanc found Burgum from North Dakota picked to run the interior department who is well briefed on Canada and shared concerns.


The lighthearted nature of the dinner was on display one point when Trump joked that if Canada can't handle the economic

effects of a punishing 25 per cent tariff on its goods, it should become the 51st state of the U.S.!


The Canadians left the Americans with detailed promises to buy more helicopters and drones to provide better surveillance of the large swaths of the undefended border. LeBlanc has invitations to phone the two he talked to most. These kinds of contacts made in a friendly social circumstance are gold. The next day the PM-in-waiting Piere Poilievre was behind a podium branded Fix the Broken Border. He was anything but a Team player for Canada calling the PM “a weak prime minister who’s lost control of our borders, lost control of immigration, lost control of crime and drugs, and lost control of our economy.”


Let’s hope Trudeau is a smart and strong PM, taking the right approach to protect us against Trump’s threats. The Mar a Lago dinner was a great occasion to set out on the right foot.


Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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