The Canadian “bad cop” who is at the forefront of the trade war with the US

And how angry is he, on a scale of 1 to 100? “110,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

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It was classic Ford: belligerent, blunt, and, according to its critics, also a little reckless.

A day later, on Tuesday, Ford adopted a more conciliatory tone after Trump mocked him on social media, calling him “the less charismatic, less intelligent and generally unimpressive brother of the late, great Rob Ford,” the former Toronto mayor whose tenure was overshadowed by a drug-use scandal. Trump also threatened to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”.

“Things got a little heated, and yesterday it got a little personal between me and the president,” Ford told CNN, adding that he wanted to “reach an agreement.”

Getting on Trump’s nerves

Ford, one of Canada’s oldest provincial governors, has once again brought his volatile political style to bear on the US-Canada trade war.

With a combination of bragging and bragging, he seems to get on the nerves of Trump and his close aides as few do. His lack of visibility makes Prime Minister Mark Carney’s negotiating position difficult, but at the same time he also provides Carney with a useful contrast: a sort of “bad cop”, which allows Carney to play the “good cop” role with a more measured approach.

“You can’t imagine Mark Carney telling Donald Trump to ‘kiss my ass,'” said Daniel Bland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. “It’s unfathomable. But Ford can say that, and I think a lot of people in Canada like that, while others worry that he might be going too far.”

Although Ford retracted the insults he hurled at Trump, he showed that, like the president, he too is ready to stretch a political confrontation to the limit of what is acceptable.

“I don’t think the US government is used to direct criticism or Doug Ford-type attacks,” said Eric Miller, president of the Rideau Potomac Strategy Group consulting firm and a former senior Canadian government official.

A senior White House official said Tuesday that the president posted the comments about Ford on Truth Social because he was upset that the Ontario politician had “scolded” him in television interviews.

without an official role in the negotiations

Canada’s provincial governors have no formal role in trade negotiations, but they do have influence, and Ford has a lot to lose. Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and the heart of its manufacturing industry. It is among the provinces hit hardest by the American tariffs, at a rate of 50% on steel and 25% on vehicles. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake.

Ford has often played a destabilizing role during the tumultuous 19 months since Trump returned to the White House.

Shortly after Trump’s election victory in 2024, Ford proposed that the US and Canada negotiate a trade agreement without Mexico, due to concerns that Chinese companies were using Mexico as a back door to the US market. The proposal created a political rift between Canada and Mexico, which Carney later worked to repair.

Last year, after Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, Ford announced a 25% export tax on the electricity that Ontario supplies to 1.5 million homes in New York, Michigan and Minnesota. He withdrew after a dizzying day in which Trump threatened to double tariffs on metals from Canada.

Last fall, the Ford government paid for a commercial to air during the World Series on American television networks, in which a radio speech by Ronald Reagan was played in which he criticized tariffs and claimed that in the long run they “hurt every American worker and consumer.” Trump canceled trade talks with Canada. Ford later suspended the advertising campaign, and Carney apologized to Trump.

Ford supported bans imposed by Canadian provinces on the sale of American alcohol in government liquor stores, after Trump imposed tariffs on Canada. The bans, adopted in eight of the country’s ten states, have been a source of friction with the Trump administration.

Ford maintained an uncharacteristic public silence after the Canadian government presented the general outlines of a trade agreement with the United States to provincial leaders last week. But behind the scenes, he said, he did not stop having phone conversations with auto industry executives and parts manufacturers.

Ford came to the conclusion that it was a “terrible” agreement, according to him, and told the Prime Minister as much, when Carney decided to withdraw from the agreement. Ford said that he was told that he would not lift the provincial ban on the sale of American alcohol, one of the demands raised by the US representatives in the negotiations.

“I can’t go to Dopsko and look a steel worker in the eye, knowing that if we get this deal, in a few years he won’t have a job,” Ford said, referring to the ArcelorMittal Dopsko plant in Hamilton, Ontario.

Ford denied that Carney asked him to moderate his remarks, and the Prime Minister’s Office did not dispute this.

“We all know that Prime Minister Ford is a very colorful guy,” Industry Secretary Melanie Jolly said on Tuesday.

Won the elections three times

Ford came to power in Ontario in 2018. At the beginning of 2025, he called ahead to the elections and won a majority government for the third time in a row, after harnessing to his advantage the anger in Ontario over Trump’s tariffs and his threats to make Canada the 51st country of the USA. During the election campaign, he often wears a dark blue hat that reads “Canada is not for sale.”

As Premier of Ontario, Ford sought to cultivate an image of a people’s man connected to the public. He even freely gives out his phone number. Last March, at the beginning of the trade dispute, he asked people to stop texting him in the middle of the night because the phone’s vibration kept him awake. According to him, he intended to reply to the more than 4,000 messages he received, which continued to arrive in the hundreds.

Since the elections, his support rates have decreased, and recently they were hurt by a controversy surrounding his government’s decision to purchase a private jet at a cost of 20 million dollars, which he has since given up. A survey by the Angus Reid Institute from June found that the rate of support for him was 21%, the lowest among the heads of provincial governments in Canada and the lowest since he took office.

“When Ford takes on the mantle of ‘Captain Canada,’ his approval ratings tend to rise again, because sometimes he is the politician who is willing to say out loud what everyone else is thinking but not saying, or to say things that the top officials of the federal government can’t say,” said Shachi Correll, president of the Angus Reed Institute, a public opinion research foundation.

In some ways, Ford is an unlikely figure to lead the opposition to Trump in Canada. During last year’s district election campaign, he was caught on an open mic telling firefighters he was happy when Trump won the 2024 election.

But that was before “the guy pulled a knife,” Ford said, as he demonstrated a stabbing motion with his hand toward his stomach.

This article was translated by Globes exclusively from The Wall Street Journal. Link to the original article in English