Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.
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Documents released by the Privy Council Office show that as Donald Trump prepared to take office in late 2024, Canada built its early defence against the incoming administration's tariff and border claims around three specific numbers: only 0.6 per cent of U.S. interceptions of illegal crossings in 2023 came from the Canadian border, only 0.2 per cent of fentanyl entering the United States overland was seized at the northern border, and Canada supplied 60 per cent of U.S. crude oil imports and 85 per cent of its electricity imports.
The figures appear in the briefing book prepared for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ahead of the December 11, 2024 First Ministers' Meeting on Canada-U.S. relations — the gathering Trudeau convened with all 13 premiers two weeks after his November 29 dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The records were released by the Privy Council Office in October 2025 under Access to Information request A-2024-00584.
What the Documents Show
The briefing book is organized around four tabs: meeting agenda, participants list, scenario note, and speaking notes for the Prime Minister. The scenario note, speaking notes, and roundtable transcript are extensively redacted under sections 14, 15(1) and 21(1)(a) of the Access to Information Act. What remains visible is largely structural: the meeting ran from 4:00 to 5:00 pm Eastern, opened with remarks from Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford as Chair of the Council of the Federation, followed by a 35-minute discussion on borders and a roundtable beginning with Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey and moving west.
The most substantive material in the release sits in the accompanying "Cards" package — a separate set of background documents shared with PCO officials, including the Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat. The participants list confirms Trudeau, Ministers Chrystia Freeland and Dominic LeBlanc, Clerk John Hannaford, Deputy Clerks Christiane Fox and Nathalie Drouin, and senior officials including Stephen de Boer, Kevin Brosseau, Erin O'Gorman, Tricia Geddes, Veronica Ramrattan and Jeannine Ritchot all attended. All 13 premiers were expected by teleconference.
Unlike the redacted scenario note, the Cards package is substantially intact. It includes a Canada-U.S. storyline and core facts document, a border information sheet, energy and critical minerals dashboards, profiles of North Dakota and Pennsylvania, and biographies of Trump-world contacts — the material federal officials were equipping themselves with to engage the incoming administration.
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The Border Numbers Canada Brought to the Table
The single-page border facts card prepared for Trudeau is one of the most pointed documents in the release. It frames the Canadian border in directly comparative terms with the Mexican border, and it does so with U.S. Customs and Border Protection's own figures.
In 2023, the document states, interceptions of illegal crossings from Canada amounted to 0.6 per cent of total U.S. interceptions. A single bad weekend on the Mexico border that year exceeded the entire annual northbound apprehension figure — more than 16,000 northbound versus under 11,000 southbound for the whole year. On fentanyl, the card states that in 2024, fentanyl seized by U.S. authorities at the Canadian border represented just 0.2 per cent of all fentanyl entering the United States overland, with 99.8 per cent coming from Mexico.
The document also lists the actions Canada had already taken at the time of the meeting. A visa imposed on Mexican travellers caused asylum claims filed by Mexicans to drop from 24,000 in 2023 to under 8,000 in 2024. Tightened visa requirements in June 2024 cut irregular attempts to enter the U.S. from Canada by two-thirds. Along the 300-mile stretch of border between Canada and Vermont, New Hampshire and New York, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounters dropped 70 per cent between June and October 2024. The card also notes that Canada had reduced the number of permanent and temporary residents it would accept over the following three years. Canada has since followed up with significant additional border investment, including Prime Minister Mark Carney's announcement of 1,000 new CBSA officers in 2025.
A Canada Border Services Agency seizure table in the release puts fiscal 2023-24 cannabis seizures at 9.47 million grams and cocaine and crack at 1.11 million grams. The fentanyl seizure figure in that table has been redacted, though running text elsewhere in the package puts CBSA's combined 2023-24 seizures at roughly 10 pounds of fentanyl out of more than 110,000 pounds of illegal drugs intercepted.
The Energy Argument: 60 Per Cent of U.S. Crude, 85 Per Cent of Imported Electricity
The energy section of the Cards package is the most data-heavy part of the release. It frames Canada and the United States as each other's number-one source of foreign energy, connected by 70 pipelines and 35 transmission lines that cross the border.
The specific numbers Canadian officials brought to the meeting: Canada supplied roughly 99 per cent of U.S. natural gas imports in 2023, 60 per cent of U.S. crude oil imports, 27 per cent of refined oil imports and 85 per cent of U.S. electricity imports. Canada provided more of the United States' crude oil imports than Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iraq combined. Nearly a quarter of U.S. oil refinery intake originates in Canada, with the document specifically calling out the Midwest as the region most reliant on Canadian supply.
On critical minerals, the documents quantify a bilateral trade relationship of roughly $150 billion in annual two-way trade. Canada was identified as the most important U.S. supplier of potash (71 per cent of U.S. imports), refined zinc (50 per cent), tellurium (32 per cent), niobium (26 per cent), aluminum (23 per cent), nickel (23 per cent) and uranium (21 per cent). The potash figure is significant because it ties directly to U.S. agricultural inputs — a sector Trump's tariff threats have repeatedly targeted, and one The Canada Report has covered in our reporting on the 12.1 million tonnes of Saskatchewan potash exports at risk from fertilizer tariffs.
The Tariff Cost Estimates Canada Was Prepared to Cite
The trade and tariffs section moves from defensive framing to projected consumer impact in the United States. The document states that approximately 400,000 people and US$2.5 billion in goods and services cross the Canada-U.S. border each day, amounting to nearly US$1 trillion per year. Canadian companies employ almost 900,000 workers in the U.S., and nearly 8 million U.S. jobs are tied to trade with Canada. Canada is the largest export market for 36 states and in the top three for 46.
The release then lays out the specific cost projections Canadian officials were prepared to put in front of premiers and, by extension, the U.S. side. A 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods, the document states, could cause U.S. gasoline prices to rise between 25 and 75 cents per gallon, hitting consumers in the Great Lakes, Midwest and Rocky Mountain states hardest. Steel prices would likely rise by US$100 to US$150 per short ton, given that Canada supplies 60 per cent of U.S. steel and aluminum imports. Mexico and Canada combined supply 32 per cent of fresh fruit and 24 per cent of fresh vegetables sold in the U.S.
The document closes that section with a market signal: in the day following the announcement of Trump's intended 25 per cent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods, General Motors share prices fell by 9 per cent. The integrated nature of the auto industry is illustrated with a now-common talking point — auto parts like a car seat can cross the international border five to six times before ending up in a finished vehicle, with Canadian-assembled vehicles exported to the U.S. containing approximately 50 per cent U.S. content. The tariff regime that followed has since been the subject of extensive bilateral negotiation, including the CUSMA review process scheduled for 2026.
Who Canada Was Briefing Its Officials to Meet
The Cards package includes biographies of five U.S. political and business figures Canadian officials were preparing to engage. The selection itself is revealing: the federal government, in late November 2024, was focused on a specific subset of incoming Trump-world contacts.
The biographies covered Doug Burgum, the 33rd Governor of North Dakota and Trump's nominee for U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Burgum's profile emphasized his business background — co-founder of Great Plains Software, sold to Microsoft in 2001 for what was then a landmark tech acquisition, and a venture capital career that followed. The North Dakota state profile that accompanied the bio noted that 81 Canadian-owned companies employ 4,400 workers in the state, and that North Dakota imports $3 billion in goods from Canada annually, including $275 million in crude petroleum.
Dave McCormick, the newly elected Republican senator from Pennsylvania, was profiled as a Bush-administration veteran turned hedge-fund executive at Bridgewater Associates. His wife Dina Powell McCormick — a Goldman Sachs partner who served as a Senior Advisor to Trump on Entrepreneurship in 2017 and was on the short list to replace Reince Priebus as White House Chief of Staff — was also profiled. Powell McCormick's bio specifically noted her June 2017 advisory role on a bilateral visit to Canada to "improve economic issues with the nation."
The most consequential bio in retrospect was Mike Waltz, then a Florida congressman whom Trump had announced on November 12, 2024 as his incoming National Security Advisor. The briefing characterized him as a combat-decorated Green Beret, former Pentagon policy advisor, and member of the House China Task Force who had sponsored legislation to reduce American reliance on Chinese critical minerals. Waltz's wife, Dr. Julia Nesheiwat — a former Trump homeland security advisor with deep ties to U.S. energy policy and a board role at the Atlantic Council — was profiled separately, with the briefing noting her past role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy. Waltz was sworn in as National Security Advisor on January 20, 2025 and removed from the role on May 1, 2025 following the "Signalgate" disclosure, ultimately being confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in September 2025. The combined Waltz-Nesheiwat profile illustrates which energy-security relationships Canadian officials had identified as worth investing in at the start of the Trump term.
The Request, and What Was Not in the Release
The ATI request that produced this release, A-2024-00584, asked the Privy Council Office for records related to the November 29, 2024 trip Trudeau and LeBlanc made to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump. What was released, however, is the briefing book for a different event — the First Ministers' Meeting held 12 days later, on December 11, 2024, in Ottawa. The two events are clearly related: the Mar-a-Lago dinner set the political context for the FMM, and the same officials were involved in both. But the released package does not include the Mar-a-Lago meeting itself — there are no readouts, no notes, no agendas, no participant lists for the November 29 dinner.
What the release does include of the December 11 meeting is also substantially redacted. The scenario note for the FMM survives only at the level of agenda timing and meeting logistics. The two-page speaking notes prepared for Trudeau's opening remarks, the entire roundtable section in which premiers were to speak in turn beginning with Premier Furey, and the closing remarks are almost entirely blanked under section 21(1)(a) (advice and recommendations) and section 15(1) (international affairs). The substantive case Canada wanted to make on borders, energy, trade and tariffs survives — but only in the cleared "Cards" package designed to be shareable, not in the confidential scenario note or speaking notes prepared for Trudeau himself.
An email chain at the end of the release shows Philippe Melanson, an executive assistant in the Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat, sending the cards package digitally to recipients including Stephen de Boer, Christine Kennedy, Nathalie Béchamp, Joanne Madore and Benoit Ouellet on November 29, 2024 — the same day as the Mar-a-Lago trip. The subject line is "Background information - Can-U.S." and the attachment is named "CANADA-US - REVISED.zip."
What the Records Tell Us
Two things are clear from what survived the redactions. First, by late November 2024, the federal government had already settled on its public-facing case against the incoming Trump administration's tariff and border claims, and that case was built on specific numbers: 0.6 per cent of crossings, 0.2 per cent of fentanyl, 60 per cent of U.S. crude oil, 85 per cent of U.S. imported electricity, 71 per cent of U.S. potash. These are the facts Canada chose to lead with — and the same ones that would be cited repeatedly in the year that followed as the trade war escalated and the Canadian labour market began to feel the impact of tariffs.
Second, Canada's read on which Trump-world contacts mattered in late November 2024 emphasized energy, defence and economic policy figures — Burgum on Interior, Waltz on national security, the McCormicks on finance and policy — rather than the trade-focused officials who would dominate the bilateral relationship through 2025 and into 2026. Three months after Waltz's swearing-in, the National Security Advisor portfolio was effectively vacant for several months following Signalgate, suggesting that some of the relationships Canadian officials prioritized in their briefings did not translate into stable channels.
What the release does not show — and what the original request asked for — is what Trudeau and LeBlanc actually said, were told, or agreed to at Mar-a-Lago on November 29. That conversation, if it was recorded in PCO files at all, has not been released under this request.
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Support Government FilesAll documents and figures referenced are from the Privy Council Office, ATI request A-2024-00584, released October 2025. The 43-page release contains the briefing book for the December 11, 2024 First Ministers' Meeting on Canada-U.S. Relations, an accompanying "Cards" package of background facts, biographies, and an email transmission record.
