Canadian prime minister apologizes for an ad that quoted Reagan accurately.

The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said on Saturday that he had personally apologized to the President of the United States for an Ontario provincial advertisement that quoted Ronald Reagan on the subject of tariffs. The advertisement had used a 1987 radio address in which Reagan, in his own voice, explained that tariffs raise prices, hurt consumers, and tend to provoke trade wars. PBS fact-checkers, on the air, called the ad fairly representative of Reagan’s actual position.

The President had nevertheless responded to the ad by adding a 10% tariff to Canadian imports and terminating trade negotiations with Ottawa. The Prime Minister of Canada, who was not the head of the Ontario provincial government and who did not produce the ad, then apologized.

This is a small story and a useful one. It records, on the public ledger, the precise moment a sitting head of state of a G7 country apologized to the United States for accurately quoting the historical record of an American Republican president the United States lionizes.

The apology was offered, accepted, and televised. The trade talks did not resume. The 10% tariff stayed on. The cost of the apology, in tariff dollars, was zero. The cost in dignity is harder to put a number on.

In a serious country, the head of state does not require a foreign prime minister to apologize for citing a previous head of state of his own party. In a serious country, the previous head of state’s words belong to the public, not to the President’s mood.

We are not in that country anymore.

Calmly documenting the decline.