Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly wrapped up the G7 meeting in La Malbaie, Que., on Friday with a stern message for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio: hands off our country.
“What I said to the secretary is Canada’s sovereignty is not up to debate, period,” she said at the closing press conference of the G7 foreign ministers meeting.
“There’s no argument, there’s no conversation about it, there’s no need to talk about it,” she said. “You’re here, you respect us, you respect our sovereignty, you’re in our country, you respect our people. Period.”
After the summit, Rubio told reporters that U.S. President Donald Trump’s position is that Canada would be better off joining the United States “for economic purposes.”
“There’s a disagreement between the president’s position and the position of the Canadian government,” Rubio said. “I don’t think that’s a mystery coming in, and it wasn’t a topic of conversation because that’s not what this summit was about.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, speaking to reporters in Quebec in her final news conference of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting, said she told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to respect Canada and its sovereignty.
Joly made her remarks a day after U.S. President Donald Trump repeated his call for Canada to join the United States, saying his country does not need anything Canada has to sell.
“Canada only works as a state,” Trump said at the White House. “We don’t need anything they have. As a state it would be one of the great states … if you look at a map they drew an artificial line right through it … a straight artificial line … makes no sense.”
Despite the conflict between the two countries over sovereignty, Joly said the G7 ministers decided at the outset of the summit that they were not going to let the issues they did not agree on prevent them from working together in areas where they agree.
Rubio agreed with that sentiment in his press conference saying that often in foreign policy “you have disagreements with people you like” or find yourself “unaligned on an issue with a nation that you work with very closely on a bunch of other things.”
Joly said her counterparts in the G7 arrived in Canada for the summit with the impression that Trump’s talk of Canada becoming the 51st state was something to be “taken in a humorous way,” but she quickly set them straight.
“I said to them this is not a joke. Canadians are anxious. Canadians are proud people and you are here in a sovereign country and so therefore we don’t expect this to be even discussed, or clearly not laughed at,” she said.
Joly said Canada was created “because we didn’t want to be part of the United States,” but also because we wanted to be closer to each other than we are to the Americans.
The future of Canadian trade
Looking forward, Joly said that in order to soften the blow of tariffs being imposed on Canada, the provinces need to “get rid of internal commercial barriers” to boost the flow of interprovincial trade.
“There are lots of opportunities in Canada to be able to work amongst each other, to be able to be closer from one province to another,” she said.
Joly also said that Canada will seek to build stronger trading relationships with countries other than the U.S.
“Canada wants to foster new partnerships in the world, we want to be closer to Europe, we want to be closer to Britain,” she said. “We need to diversify our economy.”
On the issue of Ukraine, Joly said the G7 is united in supporting a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal for the country, which has been endorsed by Kyiv and is now awaiting a response from Russia.
In comments Friday morning, Joly said the international community is closely watching Moscow’s reaction.
“Ultimately, the ball is now in Russia’s court when it comes to Ukraine,” she said.
Later on Friday, Trump said there is a “very good chance” the war between Russia and Ukraine can end after productive discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday.
“We had very good and productive discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia yesterday, and there is a very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
Trump said he had requested that Putin spare the lives of “completely surrounded” Ukrainian troops in Kursk, Russia.