Trudeau, Trump find common ground on border
Many things once thought to be impossible have happened through this pandemic, but the prolonged shutdown of the Canada-U.S. border has to be one of the biggest feats of the international lockdown of 2020.
On Tuesday, that border closing was officially extended to June 21, which means that Canada and the United States have somehow stretched the March 21 border closing for a full season — a silent spring in traffic between two of the world’s closest neighbours.
Whenever the history is written about this strange period in Canada-U.S. relations, we will actually need two stories about this shutdown: One will be about how far apart the two countries have been in their handling of the pandemic; the other will be about how closely they needed to be connected to pull this off.
The differences between
Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump on their approach to the pandemic emerge more vividly each week.
The Canadian prime minister is a go-slow leader on reopening the economy; the president is all hurry up. Trudeau is deferential to public health officials; Trump is increasingly combative with his top scientific advisers. The U.S. president is playing red-blue politics with the states on reopening plans, while remarkable harmony has broken out between Ottawa and the provinces. Trudeau is open to wearing a mask, Trump is not. And so it goes.
But, while the two countries’ political cultures have diverged through the spread of COVID-19, there’s no question that it took a huge amount of co-operation behind the scenes to sort out what could and couldn’t get across the Canada-U.S. border while it was closed to all but essential traffic.
As Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, recounted recently in an interview with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton, a border shutdown of this magnitude was not contemplated in pandemic planning, if only because the complexity of the task was so huge.
How, for instance, do you unravel essential from nonessential traffic of goods and people? Just as in the trade battles between the two countries, we often forget that it’s not just Canada that needs the U.S., but the Americans who need us, too.
The auto-parts industry, for instance, which already works extensively across the border, had to repurpose itself in Canada and the U.S. to supply needs for ventilators. A B.C. pulp mill supplies material for masks; around 1,000 healthcare workers in Windsor commute to the Detroit area.
“It’s important to know that we are working very closely with the Americans every single day on the science side,” Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s newly named ambassador to the U.S., told me in an interview a few weeks ago. The
Canadian Embassy talks every day to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, Hillman said, to keep track of how the pandemic is playing out in the two countries. The same is true with the private sector’s efforts on pandemic relief. “We also have a big team down here. Not just in Washington, but across the U.S., that is engaging every day with U.S. suppliers into Canadian manufacturing, and vice versa.”
It was that mutual dependence, Hillman said, that helped Canada win the exemption when Trump abruptly invoked an America-first provision in the manufacture of pandemic-relief supplies in his country.
The exemption was quietly announced a few weeks ago, but its significance can’t be underestimated: It means that, in all this talk of America needing more homegrown supplies, Canada is defined as part of that home.
Here in Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been making similar calls for more domestic production, too. “If there was one maxim we’ve learned that, when it comes to essential items, we should be manufacturing them here, no matter if it’s the N95 masks or the ventilators,” Ford said in an interview with me in early April.
But, even if the two countries are talking about pulling back on globalization when it comes to these supply chains, they will be doing this together, Hillman said. “Self-reliance is being defined as Canada-U.S. self-reliance.”
Ford, though, is also one of the premiers leading the charge to keep the Canada-U.S. border shut. That “alignment” of views by the first ministers is what led Trudeau to help push for the extension to June 21, PMO officials said Tuesday.
Provinces speaking with Ottawa in one voice — on keeping the Canada-U.S. border closed for three whole months. Who in March would have predicted any part of this chapter in North American relations?