Mexico’s president has said Canadians “could only wish they had the cultural riches” of her country as tensions mount between the two nations, caught in a feud over tariffs and trade exacerbated by Donald Trump.

The US president-elect threatened in a social media post last week to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”

Since then, both Mexico and Canada have worked to gain assurances from Trump that the tariffs, which would prove catastrophic to their economies, would be walked back.

But in an effort to gain an upper hand, both leaders have worked to cast the other as ill-prepared to meet the challenges, amid warnings from experts that Trump “loves to divide and conquer”.

Even before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and a handful of provincial premiers had mused openly about cutting Mexico out of future trade talks, instead pivoting towards a Canada-US trade pact – a move that Mexico’s lead negotiator called a “betrayal”.

But federal ministers and diplomats have continued to frame Canada’s handling of the border and fentanyl by contrasting its actions against those of Mexico.

In late November, Canada’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, likened the 23,000 interceptions by US officials at the northern border in 2023 to a “significant weekend at the Mexico border”, where 1,530,523 “encounters” were recorded last year.

Trudeau and Trump met at the president-elect’s Florida resort on Friday, discussing trade and migration. The dinner between the two was a diplomatic win for Trudeau, who became the first G7 leader to meet with Trump.

Two days after the meeting, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself standing atop a mountain range, a Canadian flag by his side with the caption “Oh Canada!”

Canada’s ambassador to the the United States, Kirsten Hillman, told reporters the meeting was productive despite receiving no assurances from Trump that he would walk back the tariffs.

“The message that our border is so vastly different than the Mexican border was really understood,” Hillman said of the meeting between the two leaders.

In a Monday press conference, the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said Mexico “must be respected, especially by its trading partners”.

Sheinbaum, who held her own phone call with Trump last week to discuss drugs and migration, is under immense pressure to convince the president-elect her country is capable of handling migration at the border and the smuggling of precursors used to make fentanyl.

Late on Tuesday, she told reporters Canada has “a very serious problem with fentanyl consumption”, more than Mexico, citing recent drug-decriminalization measures that proved controversial.

“We are not going to fall for a provocation of which country is better,” she said, adding that her country was increasingly being used as a political foil.

“Mexico should not be used as part of [Canadian] electoral campaigns,” she said.

Sheinbaum then dug deeper, adding that Canada “could only wish they had the cultural riches Mexico has”, pointing out her country has civilizations dating back thousands of years.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, said in response she believes that “many conversations, when it comes to diplomacy, are always better when they remain private”.

This article was amended on 5 December 2024 to correct that Justin Trudeau met with Donald Trump on Friday, not on Sunday as an earlier version said.