Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canadians “weren’t impressed” when the U.K. decided to offer U.S. President Donald Trump an unprecedented second state visit while he was threatening Canada’s sovereignty.
“To be frank, they weren’t impressed by that gesture, quite simply, given the circumstance,” Carney told British news channel Sky News in an interview posted online Wednesday.
“It was at a time when we were being quite clear, some of us were being quite clear, about the issues around sovereignty.”
Carney said that when he was campaigning for the party leadership he was “being clear” that Canada is not for sale, and the invitation that U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer presented to Trump while in the Oval Office “cut across some of those messages.”
Asked if Carney thought it was appropriate to invite Trump for a second state visit, Carney said that was a choice for the United Kingdom and Buckingham Palace to make.
“I leave the diplomacy to the U.K. government,” he said.
Sky News pressed Carney for an answer, saying he must have an opinion on the decision, to which Carney replied, “I have an opinion on many things, some of which I keep to myself.”
At his first news conference after the April 28 election, Carney announced that King Charles will travel to Canada later this month to deliver the speech from the throne on May 27.
“This historic honour matches the weight of our times,” Carney said then, adding that Queen Camilla would join the visit.
Gov. Gen. Mary Simon issued a statement confirming the royal visit on May 26 and 27.
Every new session of Parliament is opened by a throne speech, a document that lays out the government’s expected direction and goals, and how it plans to achieve them.
Much attention has focused in recent weeks on Charles’s role as head of state of Canada, particularly in the face of repeated taunts from Trump about it becoming the 51st state.
Carney explained that he asked the King if he would visit Canada when he met with him after being sworn in as prime minister in March and that it is not accidental that the King is visiting at a time when Canada’s sovereignty as a country is being challenged by the U.S.
“All issues around Canadian sovereignty [that] have been accentuated by the president, what he said, they exist in normal times as well,” he told Sky News. “So no, not it is not coincidental but it is also a reaffirming moment, will be a reaffirming.”
Starmer handed Trump the invitation for a second state visit during a visit to Washington in February, saying the president’s last state visit in 2019 had been a “tremendous success.”
After reading the invitation in front of reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said it would be an “honour” to visit the “fantastic” country.
