Transport minister will ‘not interfere’ with plane certification despite Trump threat

MONTREAL – Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon says he will not interfere with the work of regulators after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to decertify Canadian-built planes unless the government greenlights Gulfstream business jets.

“I do not interfere with this process, obviously,” MacKinnon told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday, before tagging on a qualifier. “I have checked in with this process.”

While emphasizing the arm’s-length nature of regulation, he also sought to defuse the firestorm set off in the aeronautics sector by Trump’s warning last week, saying he’d spoken with manufacturers and stressing the benefits of cross-border collaboration.

“To the extent that any ambiguities or misunderstandings may have existed, I think they’ve been dissipated,” he said.

“We have a system of certification of airplanes that is North American in scope. We have great co-operation with the FAA,” MacKinnon added, referring to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

“That will continue.”

On Thursday, Trump singled out Bombardier Inc. in a threat to ground and tariff Canadian-made aircraft if Ottawa failed to certify Georgia-based Gulfstream’s G700 and G800 luxury planes, marking the latest escalation of trade tensions between the two countries.

“We are hereby decertifying their Bombardier Global Expresses, and all Aircraft made in Canada, until such time as Gulfstream, a Great American Company, is fully certified, as it should have been many years ago,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

White House officials later clarified the president meant new planes, rather than the more than 5,400 Canadian-built aircraft already registered in the U.S.

The G700 and G800 were certified in the U.S. in 2024 and 2025, respectively, according to Gulfstream’s website.

The certification holdup here appears to relate to a de-icing issue in Gulfstream fuel systems, with U.S. regulators granting the two jets only temporary approval on condition the company fix the problem by year’s end.

FAA head Bryan Bedford did not clarify whether he planned to put Trump’s decertification threat into effect.

“Our concern is whether or not sufficient resources are being applied to U.S. products equal to the resources that we’re applying to certify foreign products,” he told reporters in Singapore on Monday. “We just want a level playing field.”

Some experts have speculated that Trump’s threat to Canadian aircraft stems from commercial concerns at Virginia-based General Dynamics, which owns Gulfstream.

Bombardier and Gulfstream are head-to-head rivals, with the Global series battling for market share against Gulfstream’s latest models.

Aircraft constructed in Canada include Bombardier luxury jets, De Havilland Canada Twin Otters and water bombers, A220 single-aisle jets made by French aerospace giant Airbus and helicopters from Texas-based Bell Textron.

Historically, plane groundings by regulators have related strictly to safety, like when the Boeing 737 Max 8 was banned from the skies for 20 months during the first Trump administration.

“Threatening action by a safety regulator for political purposes would set a dangerous precedent in the aerospace industry — the FAA may not even have legal authority to ground a plane at the whim of the president,” said National Bank analyst Cameron Doerksen in a note to investors last week.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 3, 2026.

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