PM, Trump will get along until refugees come up

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has so far got it right on Donald Trump every step of the way. The question now, as the PM voices approval for the wagons circling around Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, is how far it goes.

Sooner rather than later there will be a time when Trudeau is pressed to go along with Trump in a way that pulls him away from his progressive philosophy. That’s where the relationship will strain and Trudeau will find himself — either by his choice or Trump’s — on the outside looking in.

So far the Liberal leader has been able to get along fine with the president while also staying true to his virtue-signalling base.

During the U.S. election and transition periods, Trudeau wisely avoided speaking ill of Trump, no matter how many times the liberal media goaded him.

On the issue of trade, the PMO got in on the ground floor, cosying up to Trump team members and making sure the incoming administration knew all about our integrated economies.

This didn’t require much betrayal of the Liberal agenda. After all, when it comes to rhetoric about growing the economy and helping the middle class, Make America Great Again and Sunny Ways have a lot in common.

It gets a little rockier with the air strikes on Syria. The morning that American destroyers fired Tomahawk missiles at an Assad government airfield, Trudeau was talking about taking the time to look at the evidence.

The next morning he released a statement saying he “fully supported” the strikes, later telling a reporter he’d received assurances from the U.S. confirming Assad was behind the chemical weapons attack.

This about-face caught Canadians off guard, leaving them wondering if Trudeau was just going along with Trump because that’s what Canada does. If this were Stephen Harper there would be accusations of the PM being Trump’s puppet.

So far so good, though, because Trudeau is deftly hedging his bets. His support, on Friday, was based on the air strike being “limited and focused,” not some broad deployment.

But now that Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, is saying “regime change” is the goal, second only to fighting the Islamic State, the calculus is harder.

Speaking Monday morning, Trudeau told reporters “we need to move as quickly as possible toward peace and stability in Syria that does not involve Bashar al-Assad.” What exactly his and Haley’s words mean are what the G7 foreign ministers, including Canada’s Chrystia Freeland, will be discussing in their meetings this week.

Expect the icebreakers to go well. They’ll agree that chemical weapons used against civilians are a bad thing. And that targeted strikes against infrastructure used for launching those weapons is a good thing.

Where talks will get tricky, where Freeland will begin to feel at odds with the room, is when they talk about the refugee dynamic.

Trudeau seems more interested in welcoming refugees to Canada than preventing the crises that made them refugees in the first place.

This goes against Trump’s philosophy. After all, his executive order bans refugees entering the U.S. from Syria.

It also goes against the concerns of the people of Germany, France and the U.K. They’re worried about the cultural and security implications of any further destabilization of the region that sends even more migrants flooding in their direction.

This will be a concern as allies discuss next steps for the region. And this is where Trudeau’s alignment with Trump could derail.