President Emmanuel Macron arrived in the French territory of St Pierre and Miquelon for talks with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney on Sunday, weeks after President Donald Trump posted an image showing the islands covered by the US flag.
Macron’s visit to the archipelago off Canada’s Atlantic coast is the first there by a French president since 2014 and comes as Canada seeks closer ties with the European Union amid an increasingly acrimonious trade war with the United States.
St Pierre and Miquelon is France’s only remaining territory in North America, and French officials said Macron’s trip would underscore French sovereignty and highlight close ties with Canada.
“There’s no doubt [it is French],” Macron said after landing in the territory of 5,800 inhabitants late on Saturday.
“We are not going to affirm it every day because people have strange ideas or say strange things,” he told reporters responding to a question on Trump’s map.
Diplomats said the visit by Macron, who was en route to the annual United Nations General Assembly of world leaders, had a symbolic weight following Trump’s social media post.
The image Trump shared showed the US flag draped over the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and was labelled “United States of America”. It included St Pierre and Miquelon and French Caribbean territories.
France did not respond publicly to the post at the time.
For France, St Pierre and Miquelon is strategically important due to its location on the doorstep of the US and the Arctic, a French presidency official told reporters in a briefing ahead of the visit.
The territory also occupies a key place in France’s co-operation with Canada, including over energy, one of the issues in focus for the meeting on Sunday between Macron and Carney.
Macron, whose government is facing increased pressure at home over rising fuel prices, said he would like Canada to broaden its exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe rather than primarily Asia.
The two leaders will also discuss Canada’s ties with the EU after the bloc opened the door to Ottawa becoming its first associate member, diplomats said.
Any move towards deeper integration is likely to face hurdles. More than a decade after the EU and Canada agreed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, and nine years after its provisional application began, several EU member states have yet to ratify the accord, including France. – Reuters