What’s behind Trudeau’s U.S. charm offensive?
Everyone is getting the nice treatment from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau these days, but for the United States, it’s extra nice.
On Tuesday night, Trudeau popped in at the U.S. Embassy’s Christmas party — the first time in years, maybe even decades, that a Canadian prime minister has put that event on his social calendar.
At a press conference on Wednesday, a smiling Trudeau boasted that he would be the guest of honour at a state dinner in Washington early in the new year.
“Our relations, quite frankly, with our allies are better now than they have been in a long time,” Trudeau said. “If you need an example of that, it’s been almost 20 years since a Canadian prime minister has been invited down to a state dinner in the White House.”
Meanwhile, thanks to prolonged magazine production schedules, we’re learning only now that Tru- deau spent some precious time in the days after his swearing-in granting big interviews to Vogue and the New York Times Magazine.
The Vogue magazine article, complete with sultry photos and adjectives such as “dashing,” appeared this week. The New York Times Magazine piece, all 5,000 words of it, appeared last weekend, under a headline promising that Trudeau would be redefining what it means to be Canadian.
It didn’t go without notice, either, at the swearing-in in November that U.S. Ambassador Bruce Heyman was among the crowd walking with Trudeau and his new cabinet up to Rideau Hall. This would not have happened with former prime minister Stephen Harper, whose government made few efforts to make nice with Heyman or most members of President Barack Obama’s government.
Politics is a practical business. If Trudeau is spending all this time getting friendly with the U.S., whether through diplomacy or big, glossy media outlets, one immediately wonders what he wants.
When I posed that question to Trudeau’s advisers this week, I was pointed to a speech he gave in June to the Canada 2020 organization, which was devoted to the need for improvement in Canada’s relationship with the United States. The speech may not have received the notice it should, since, to be frank, no one was thinking that Trudeau would end up as prime minister by the end of the year.
In that speech, Trudeau said a former prime minister — not his father — had advised him that the job came with three big responsibilities: “grow the economy, unify the country and successfully manage our relationship with the United States.”
Trudeau elaborated: “Successful prime ministers get the big things right. And Canada’s relationship with the United States of America is — beyond the shadow of a doubt — one of the biggest.”
My wild guess is that the former prime minister in question was Brian Mulroney, who deliberately cultivated close relationships with presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in a way that made many Canadians nervous. While Mulroney’s fans were probably delighted to see Canada’s prime minister crooning “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” to Reagan at a St. Patrick’s Day summit in 1985, others wondered whether we were dancing, as well as singing, to our neighbour’s tune.
There’s always a real danger of looking star-struck in these situations. Trudeau skated perilously close to that line in his interview with the New York Times Magazine, particularly when he recounted an early phone conversation with the president. Trudeau said it was “very, very cool” to get a call from Obama, and said he’d been urged to call him “Barack.”
The Times’ writer, Guy Lawson, described it this way: “Trudeau shook his head, amazed. ‘That’s going to take some getting used to.’ ”
It’s going to take Canadians some time to get used to this, too. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien came to power in 1993 vowing not to become “fishing buddies” with the American president — a reaction in part to Canadians’ squeamishness about Mulroney’s close ties to U.S. leaders.
It’s worth noting, though, that Chrétien and former president Bill Clinton did become golfing buddies, and that last state dinner that Trudeau talked about was in Chrétien’s honour in Washington in 1997.
The Clinton-Chrétien friendship did yield some benefits, notably a rare and significant intervention by the U.S. president into the thorny Quebec referendum politics of the time.
So this is the practical question amid the current charm offensive that Trudeau is waging with the United States: What do we want?
One Trudeau adviser said this week that the motive behind all this niceness was the real, potential impact on Canadians’ “jobs, security and environment” from good relations with the U.S. But as the trip to Washington looms closer in the new year, Canadians may ask what Trudeau intends to get out of the warming relationship, beyond some flattering profiles and a nice dinner. sdelacourt@bell.net