TRUDEAU PITCHES TRADE BENEFITS

EUROPEAN TOUR

OTTAWA • Justin Trudeau arrives in Europe on Thursday and plans to talk more openly about one of the things he didn’t discuss with Donald Trump — the merits of free trade in the face of increasingly hostile, populist opposition.

The prime minister is to deliver his pro-trade message in an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday — a first for a Canadian leader — and to top business leaders a day later in Germany.

On Friday, he’ll be in Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who wasn’t shy about reminding Trump the day after his surprise victory that Germany and the U.S. were “bound” by common values and that she looked forward to working with him on that basis.

Standing next to Trump in Washington on Monday, Trudeau said it wasn’t his job to lecture foreign leaders when he visits them. He had been asked to comment on Trump’s controversial executive order banning people from seven mainly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

While he may have demurred on immigration, government officials say Trudeau won’t be shy about praising something else now under attack from Trump: liberalized, multilateral trade deals such as Canada’s deal with the EU, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA.

The European Parliament ratified CETA on Wednesday, which will pave the way for 90 per cent of it to come into force once Canada’s Parliament follows suit in the coming months.

“This is Europe’s answer to Trump’s trade policy,” said Manfred Weber, German head of the Christian Democrats in the 28-nation assembly.

“Instead of protectionism, we want partnership. Instead of fear and mistrust of each other, we want openness and even stronger ties with one of our closest allies.”

Added Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels: “The approval by the EU Parliament of the Canada accord means the biggest political crisis in European trade policy has finally bottomed out. Europe’s political capital has stopped bleeding away. It’s an important deliverable politically.”

Once viewed as the precursor of the much-touted EU-U.S. plan for a Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, CETA now looks like a smaller substitute for TTIP as European officials expect Trump to put it in the “freezer.”

Canadian officials who briefed journalists on the condition they not be named, said the prime minister will be “sharpening” his message on the need for political and business leaders to do more to sell the merits of free trade to an increasingly skeptical and anxious public.

Trudeau will use his final event of the two-day tour to deliver that message to a particularly well-appointed crowd at the St. Matthew’s Day Banquet in the German city of Hamburg late Friday.

He will use his keynote address to warn that more needs to be done to address the anxieties of middle-class people who aren’t getting ahead, because if nothing is done to ease those concerns, the world will have larger problems on its hands, officials say. Trudeau is targeting that message specifically for his banquet audience, officials say, because it will be made up of political and business elites, making it an affair akin to the tony World Economic Forum in Davos.