B.C. Premier David Eby likened America to “a really good friend in a bad relationship” while speaking with Fox News about U.S. President Donald Trump’s first meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney earlier this week.
Eby was speaking with Fox Business, a branch of Fox News, on Wednesday, one day after Trump reasserted that he’d like to annex Canada as a 51st state during his meeting with Carney.
Carney told reporters that he made Canada’s stance clear, saying that it was “never going to happen,” and that “Canada is not for sale and will never be for sale.”
Eby says that Trump’s repeated blustering has soured many Canadians’ views of the U.S., but that in some ways it has worked in Canada’s favour.
“I mean, in a sense though, Canadians are grateful for it, because it tells us where the president stands and it gets all of us united to do what we need to do in our country, to stand on our own two feet,” he told Fox News.
“We’ve been, unfortunately, too dependent on what we thought was a very unshakable relationship with the United States,” said the premier. “The president is very clear about where he stands. He doesn’t respect our sovereignty.”
Not all Americans
While Eby says Trump has done some damage to the Canada-U.S. relationship, he still believes the countries have strong ties, especially on an individual level.
“We love Americans. You know, we had Americans up for the Invictus Games, my brother’s married to an American, he’s got American kids – our relationships across the border are so deep, and that’s what’s heartbreaking,” he said.
“It’s like seeing a really good friend in a bad relationship, and we want you to do well. We want Americans to do well and it’s just hard for us to watch this,” he said. “And that’s some of the anger too, and that’s concealing a little bit of disappointment, that such good partners are so far apart right now.”
source: CHEK News photo:Fox Business/YouTube
