Friday morning in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in front of a room packed with Liberal MPs and started reading out numbers. Gigawatts. Billions of dollars. Dam comparisons.
Then his hands started moving.
By the time he reached the end of the sentence, the room was gone. MPs laughing, reporters at the back laughing, and Carney never once said the name of the man he was imitating. He didn’t have to.
The occasion was the Liberal caucus retreat, held days before Parliament returned for the fall sitting. Carney had just flown back from Strasbourg, France, and he spent much of the address on the state of the relationship with Washington.
He told his caucus that Canada made the “right decision” to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States last month.
“It wasn’t tough to draw the red lines. We could not accept what they had offered, and we would not give what they had asked,” he said, per Global News. He called Trump’s latest tariffs a “miscalculation,” adding that “Canadians will always take care of each other.”
Then he got to the energy file, and the tone changed.
In August, Ottawa announced a package alongside Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and the Innu Nation of Labrador that the federal government calls the largest clean energy investment in North American history.
Carney has a line he repeats about it: 14 gigawatts, “the functional equivalent of 18 Hoover dams,” enough to light, heat and cool every home in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver combined, and 23,000 jobs.
To sell the sheer size of those figures to his own MPs, the prime minister reached for a visual aid, and it wasn’t a slide. He pulled his hands apart and squeezed them back together in front of his chest … over and over.
Slow and deliberate, the accordion motion Trump performs at every rally, every podium and behind the Resolute Desk, was being mimicked.
He did it once. Then he did it again, deadpan, without breaking stride, while the laughter kept building behind him. Needless to say, a clip of this particular moment has since gone viral on social media.
“PM Carney has a sense of humour,” one commenter wrote on X, adding laughing emojis.
Another jokingly suggested Carney had missed his opportunity. “That’s all he did? You can make standup about him that would last 24 hours.”
“The only thing getting hurt here is Trump’s ego,” one person posted.
Elsewhere, someone else floated a career change for the prime minister: “They need to get Mark Carney on SNL.”
One Threads user predicted the fallout in advance, writing that Trump was “gonna rant so hard” on Truth Social.
The joke landed in the middle of a genuinely bad year between the two countries. Trade talks collapsed in August, with Carney accusing the U.S. of making last-minute demands that undercut Canadian sovereignty.
Washington imposed 50% tariffs on billions in Canadian goods. Canada retaliated with duties on $20 billion worth of American steel, dairy, appliances and farm equipment.
Trump then signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” inside the U.S., a move he cannot force Canada to honor.
Days before the caucus speech, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the EU’s first “associate member.” Trump called the idea “laughable,” labeled Canada a “terrible trade partner” and warned the arrangement could amount to a “hostile act.”
Trump has found himself the punchline in rooms like this before, including at July’s NATO summit in Ankara, where world leaders were caught on camera grinning as he walked past. What made this one different is who was doing the impression.
As of publication, Trump had not responded.
