TORONTO, Dec 4, (AP): US President-elect Donald Trump was joking when he suggested Canada become the 51st US state during a dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Canadian minister who attended their recent dinner said Tuesday. Fox News reported that Trump made the comment in response to Trudeau raising concerns that Trump's threatened tariffs on Canada would damage Canada's economy.

Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who attended the Friday dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, said Trump's comments were in jest. "The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment,” LeBlanc told reporters in Ottawa. LeBlanc described it as a three-hour social evening at the president’s residence in Florida on a long weekend of American Thanksgiving.

"The conversation was going to be light-hearted,” he said. He called the relations warm and cordial and said the fact that "the president is able to joke like that for us” indicates good relations. On Tuesday, Trump appeared to continue with the joke, posting on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated image of himself standing on a mountain with a Canadian flag next to him with the caption "Oh Canada!" Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to Trudeau and a close friend, said Trump has done this before.

"Trump used the ”51st State" line with Trudeau a lot during his first term," Butts wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "When someone is trying to get you to freak out, don't. #protip” Earlier last week, the Republican president-elect threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the US from Canada and Mexico unless they stem the flow of migrants and drugs.

Trudeau requested the meeting in a bid to avoid the tariffs by convincing Trump that the northern border is nothing like the US  southern border with Mexico. Trudeau held a rare meeting with opposition leaders on Tuesday about U.S-Canada relations and later said that opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre shouldn’t amplify the erroneous narratives that Americans are saying about the border.