Dublin will be awash with former heads of state and government officials when the InterAction Council's 39th Annual Plenary Meeting takes place here tomorrow.

The gathering will discuss the global challenges facing the world, from politics to AI.

One of the speakers involved is former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who joined The Anton Savage Show to give his view on his country's current relationship with the US.

He said that despite Trump's tariffs and threats of invasion, he believes things can still be repaired, as both countries need each other for trade.

“There is nothing that the Americans buy from us that they don’t need,” he said.

“And the same thing, we don’t buy anything from them that we don’t need, so we offer to them resources that they need.

“When the President says he’s subsidising Canada – come on.

“We sell him oil, we sell him gas, we sell him electricity, we sell him potash that they don’t have and they are very happy to have it.”

Role on the world stage

Mr Chrétien said there is now an opportunity for Canada to play a pivotal role on the world stage in a way that it has never done before.

“We are the closest in terms of trade relation and population and geography of the United States,” he said.

“The way we will handle that will have a lot of impact on the way that the other nations will want to do their business with the Americans.

“I think that Prime Minister Carney, who has been the governor of the bank in Canada, and after that he was the governor of the bank in Great Britain during Brexit, and after that he went to work with the United Nations, gave him a broad background.”

According to Mr Chrétien, Mr Carney is well known and “very much respected” in international political circles, and will have “a lot of impact”.

Main image: Mark Carney attends a news conference upon the release of the Monetary Policy Report in Ottawa Jan. 19, 2011. Image: imago/Xinhua