Canada’s Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, a friend of Vice President JD Vance from Yale Law School, said he takes back his open invitation for Vance to Canada and the situation in the country is not right because of the continuous provocations of the Trump administration.
Jivani won from his seat in the election while his party leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat. Jivani said to Politico that his friendship with JD Vance made him a soft target for the Liberals during the campaign. “They created commercials about me and JD being friends. They doctored pictures of us and dropped them in mailboxes in my riding,” Jivani said. “The misrepresentation of who I am, what I believe in, the misrepresentation of my commitment to this country, that stuff, was very, very frustrating.”
Jivani flew to the US for a dinner with Vance in Arlington, Virginia. He was also in Washington for the inauguration day. But then things changes with Donald Trump’s constant rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state of the US.
Jivani said he hadn’t talked with Vance for a while but he’s hopeful that they would soon engage beyond politics.
“He’s busy, I’m busy. It’s just the nature of the work that we do. Certainly, the way they’ve talked about Canada has been a problem for me personally. I’m a proud Canadian. I’m focused on my community, and we’ll see what happens next.”
“We were friends before politics, we will be friends after politics,” he said. “This is a guy that I played fantasy football with for the last 15 years. He’s now the vice president and that’s a unique situation.”
“It’s just the nature of having a friend in a situation like this. I kind of just acknowledge that we’re in different places, we have different priorities. He does his thing, I do my thing. And when this is all over, I’m sure we’ll talk again.”