US President Donald Trump has suspended all trade talks with Canada after an advertisement featuring former President Ronald Reagan criticised tariffs, saying they “hurt every American.”
The ad, released by Ontario last week, used excerpts from Reagan’s 1987 radio address on foreign trade. Trump denounced the advert as “fake,” while the Ronald Reagan Foundation said the video misrepresented the late president’s remarks. In response, Ontario announced it would stop running the ad to allow trade negotiations to resume.
The minute-long commercial only includes selected parts of Reagan’s five-minute address but changes the order of his comments. Although the advert does not alter Reagan’s words, it rearranges them to imply a different context. In the original speech, titled Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade, Reagan began by discussing an upcoming visit by Japan’s prime minister and the recent trade tensions that had led him to impose tariffs on some Japanese goods.
Later in the address, Reagan expressed his opposition to tariffs, praised the benefits of free trade, and warned that protectionist policies had worsened the Great Depression. In the Ontario ad, these lines appear at the start, even though they originally occurred over a minute apart in the 1987 broadcast.
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