This week’s election result surprised most Canadians, but now we need to prepare for a Trump administration.
The kind of “bromance” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau developed with U.S. President Barack Obama is unlikely to be repeated. Nevertheless, Mr. Trudeau needs to personally lead Canadian efforts to exercise, as he once put it, “effective influence” in Donald Trump’s Washington in order to advance Canadian objectives.
Premiers and legislators have to help. Our political leadership needs to reach out to Mr. Trump’s transition team and to Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress and in the States. Business and labour leaders need to step up with their counterparts to underline the shared value of our “strong integrated economies.”
Our message is simple: An integrated North American (including Mexican) approach to economic development, especially around energy, serves our mutual interests. Canadian outreach means identifying and calling our American friends to action.
Mr. Trump’s campaign agenda was mostly delivered in broad strokes. Now, we need to register our positions to help shape his administration’s policy direction. Rather than trying to boil the ocean, our efforts should focus on three areas:
- Security: Mr. Trump expects North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to pull their weight.
- Trade: Mr. Trump wants a revision of the North American free-trade agreement because of American job losses.
- Energy: Mr. Trump calls for more drilling of fossil fuels, fewer regulations and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
On trade, we need to remind Mr. Trump’s team that Canadian trade and investment is behind an estimated nine million American jobs. Nearly 80 per cent of what Canada sells to the United States goes into American-made goods and services.
Mr. Trump wants an ambitious infrastructure building program. We need to figure out how to integrate our governments’ infrastructure programs into this effort and so improve our mutual competitiveness.
The message on burden-sharing is not new, although Mr. Trump delivers it in his characteristic blunt fashion. We need to look anew at the defense review, especially the pace and scope of our fighter-jet replacement and fleet renewal. Reaching the NATO spending target is important. U.S. national security leadership will confirm that co-operation between our military, security and intelligence services is excellent. We are also contributing to the campaign against the Islamic State, putting boots on the ground in Latvia and reinvigorating Canadian peace operations.
On energy, Mr. Trump promises approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. We need to persuade his team to look at energy as a continental resource that, if we manage it well, will fuel the manufacturing renaissance he wants to create.
While Mr. Trump may not be immediately receptive, there are allies in Congress who support continuing collaboration on clean energy because it makes sense and creates jobs. Meantime, we need to move on pipelines to tidewater within Canada so we can get full value from our natural inheritance.
At his first meeting with Mr. Trump, Mr. Trudeau must avoid falling into what former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described as the Canadian penchant for focusing on “condominium issues,” and instead focus on getting to know one another.
If we have one ask, it should be to continue the North American energy ministers’ meetings. It has been a successful catalyst for practical action. Leave the “transactionals” for later discussions at the ministerial and ambassadorial level.
The byword going forward, for federal and provincial governments, should be constant engagement with their counterparts in the United States. The best way to shield ourselves from populism and protectionism is by personally making our case to Americans.
Success will depend on cultivating and sustaining relationships at all levels through a thousand points of contact. For example, Canadian premiers and legislators should attend inaugurations for the new governors, especially those elected in the five border-state elections. Canadian parliamentarians, business and labour leaders should plan to head south for the presidential inauguration and then join Americans to watch the parade from the Canadian embassy. Our snowbirds need to remind their American friends how Canada supports their security and how our trade and investment creates their jobs.
To help better understand the public mood that led so many Americans to vote for Mr. Trump, read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. One astute former U.S. ambassador has observed that Canadians think that they know all they need to know about the United States, while Americans think they know all they need to know about Canada – but we are both wrong.
As Canadians learned again this week, there is still a lot we need to learn and understand about our southern neighbours – and, just as important, that we need to help them understand about us.
Q: We’re into uncharted territory. How would you imagine the Canadian government stepping into the Donald Trump era?
A: First of all you’d look for what would come closest to this. And the closest historical analogy would be Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Well, Jeremy Kinsman was part of the Trudeau government’s advisory committee on the foreign policy side, and he was Canada’s ambassador in Rome at the time [of Berlusconi’s time as prime minister]. If I were them, I’d be phoning him. Are there lessons from that that we can apply to this because their personalities are similar?
Q: What about the tradition of U.S. presidents visiting Canada as their first foreign trip?
A: I think you would still invite the president to come to Canada. Or, if that wasn’t going to work, then the Prime Minister would want to make an early trip down to Washington and those members of his cabinet who had been named.
Q: The Republicans will end up controlling not only the White House, but likely the Senate and the House, too. What are the implications of that? For instance, aren’t there plenty of free-traders among the Republican senators?
A: Well, you have a president who is protectionist, and he will say he has a mandate from the people. You have within the Senate different factions. Yes, you’ll have free-traders, but you’ll also have others, like [Alabama Sen.] Jeff Sessions, who will say, “Our president won.”
Q: So by and large you’d expect the Republicans in Congress to follow Trump’s lead?
A: If you remember, when Barack Obama was elected, it was unitary government—[Democrat majority leader] Nancy Pelosi in the House, [Democrat majority leader] Harry Reid in the Senate. Within a couple of days, Harry Reid had said, “He’s the leader of the party, but he’s not the leader of the Senate.” So I think potentially you get [Republican Senate majority leader] Mitch McConnell saying something similar. There are checks and balances for good reason. It applied to President Obama and it will apply to President Trump.
Q: Where will Canada find itself in all this? Trump has talked tough about trade relationships, and we’re the biggest trading partner the U.S. has.
A: Would we be the first target? No. The first target in terms of trade would be China. The wall with Mexico—I don’t know how that plays out, but difficult. Burden-sharing with [military] allies? We wouldn’t be a first target, but we’d be a target. President Trump would say, “You’re right at the bottom [of the NATO countries] in terms of defence spending [as a share of GDP]. How soon can you reach your NATO target of two per cent of GDP?”
Q: So we would be under pressure to ramp up military procurement?
A: With Trump, he’s tended to talk in punchlines without the texture and detail that a normal candidate has. We’ll have to look at the fighter jet procurement and the refurbishing of the navy.
Q: You saw a lot of potential for co-operation between the Trudeau government and a Hillary Clinton administration on energy and environmental files. How might that work with a Trump presidency?
A: He’s said he would approve pipeline permits on day one. Well, it can’t happen on day one—there’s a presidential permit process that has to be respected. There’s not a current application for a permit for TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline, but if that were to happen, it might move along quite quickly. Trump has also talked about taking his piece of the action. We’d want to seek clarity from his energy secretary about what that means.
Q: What about the climate-change file? Canada and the U.S. both committed to the United Nations Paris agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions last year.
A: Prime Minister Trudeau has said we are going to move to carbon pricing. Clinton had endorsed Obama’s Clean Power Plan. That certainly is not the case with Donald Trump. That would put us potentially at a competitive disadvantage. So you would immediately start getting pressure from Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to reconsider, and there would be pressure from the oil patch on Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
It would also put real pressure on the Trudeau government to get pipelines to either coast. Just being dependent on the U.S. market—Trump might use that. You’re dealing with somebody who is not conventional, not to say irrational. Bluster…is part of his history as a negotiator.
Q: You’re a veteran diplomat. Sketch the reaction in major capitals today. Will all governments be reeling?
A: Not in the Kremlin. But even in China, they crave stability, and this is not stable. The only one smiling will be Vladimir Putin.
Q: Do you think there will be any steps taken by other world leaders to try to make sure that the new president doesn’t destabilize things too much?
A: I think probably leadership would come from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as the senior leader within the G7. I think that’s where it would start. So you’d have conversations. You could well have a polite request for an early G7 meeting. You wouldn’t want to alarm. But it’s probably necessary because he’s such an unknown quantity.
Q: Where’s the comfort here? Maybe we should be thankful for the U.S. system of checks and balances you mentioned.
A: Yes, the system was designed by the Founding Fathers to prevent a king.
CBC Morning with Robyn Bresnahan November 9