President Donald Trump withdrew his invitation to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to join his “Board of Peace” for Gaza in a Wednesday night Truth Social post.
“Dear Prime Minister Carney,” the president wrote. “Please let this Letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining, what will be, the most prestigious Board of Leaders ever assembled, at any time.”
“Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he added before signing off with his name and title.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Prime Minister Carney’s office for comment.
While Trump did not provide an explanation for his decision to withdraw Canada’s invitation to his “peace” board, which costs members $1 billion each, he bemoaned the country’s lack of gratitude in a rambling speech delivered earlier in the day.
“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way,” Trump told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “They should be grateful also, but they’re not.”
“They should be grateful to us. Canada. Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump continued. “Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.”
Trump’s comments came after Carney addressed Davos on Tuesday, issuing a stark warning about a “rupture in the world order” without mentioning the U.S. president by name, but referencing issues like the “territorial integrity” of other countries that have been brought to the forefront by Trump’s ongoing attempts to claim Greenland for the U.S.
“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality where the large main power in geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints,” Carney said.
“On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries—especially intermediate powers like Canada—are not powerless,” he continued. “They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of various states.”
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must,” Carney said, referencing ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the war between Athens and Sparta in 5 B.C. It is known as the first political work analyzing the effects of war.
“This aphorism... is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”
“Faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t.”
The Canadian leader responded to Trump’s speech on Thursday after returning home from Davos, telling his American counterpart, “Canada doesn’t live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian.”
Carney had previously accepted Trump’s invitation to join the “Board of Peace” on principle, but expressed reservations about how the $1 billion permanent membership fee would be used. A Canadian official clarified to Politico that Canada would not pay for a seat on the board, and had not been asked by Trump to do so.
“Canada wants money to have maximum impact,” Carney told reporters in Doha on Sunday. “We still do not have unimpeded aid flows, humanitarian aid flows at scale to the people in Gaza. … That is a precondition for moving forward on this.”
Carney has found himself having to manage Trump’s emotions since both leaders took office last year as a result of the American president’s efforts to pressure Canada into becoming the 51st state of the U.S.
“I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!” Trump wrote on Truth Social in May.
Trump later lashed out at Canada for declining to be conquered by the U.S. by imposing a 35 percent tariff on imported Canadian goods not covered by the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.
