Don’t blame Freeland antics
Minster not reason NAFTA deal is in peril
Justin Trudeau has to take Donald Trump very seriously, even if he has become a laughingstock at the United Nations.
This, after all, is a man who could sink the Canadian economy with the stroke of a pen, were he to impose tariffs on cars imported into the U.S. from Canada.
The president famously said that every time he has a problem with Canada, he just pulls up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala, a car assembled at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ont. (For the record, Canadian officials say Trump has never shown them such a picture.)
But while they pay heed to what he says, the president’s drive-by smear of global affairs minister Chrystia Freeland — “We don’t like their representative very much,” Trump said this week — is not going to change who sits across the table from Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative in NAFTA negotiations.
One senior Canadian official confirmed Thursday there will be no shift in strategy or changes made to Canada’s negotiating team.
Justin Trudeau waved away Trump’s comments, saying the Americans are finding negotiations tough because “Canadians are tough negotiators.”
There is undoubtedly some pique in Trump’s comments because he is not getting his own way. But is his antipathy toward Freeland justified — and is it likely to become a potential barrier to a deal?
The minister has been sweating spinal fluid for the Canadian cause. She is competent and on top of her files. But she seems to have gone to extraordinary lengths to incite Trump on occasion.
In June, she made a provocative speech while accepting an award in Washington, referring to “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, ‘incels,’ nativists and radical anti-globalists” in the same sentence. It has been suggested she later gave Trump’s Lighthizer excerpts of that speech. An email to her office to find out whether she did so (and if so, why) received no response.
She steered further to the north of good opinion in Washington when, at a Toronto event earlier this month, she took part in a panel called Taking on the Tyrant, in which Trump was compared to Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
The taciturn Lighthizer is said to be upset at Freeland for holding press conferences on a regular basis, even though the two have agreed not to negotiate in public.
While boosting Freeland’s profile and popularity in Canada, all these nose-tweaking stunts are said to have driven the Trump administration to distraction.
Critics like Brian Lee Crowley and Sean Speer at the MacdonaldLaurier Institute think-tank have pointed out that Trudeau himself said a key measure of any Canadian government is how it manages the Canada-U.S. relationship, regardless of whether it agrees with the incumbent in the White House.
In a recent paper Lee Crowley and Speer argued that Ottawa had made a series of miscalculations and errors that provoked the Trump administration and exacerbated bilateral tensions, putting the NAFTA negotiations at risk.
They cited Canada’s initial negotiating position of proposing a deal that was “more progressive,” through the insertion of “ideological causes completely at odds with Trump’s priorities. This was both a distraction and needlessly provocative,” they wrote.
Much the same could be said about the agenda at the G7 summit this summer in Charlevoix, Que., which focused on issues like gender and the environment despite knowing this would “annoy and isolate” the president.
These are valid criticisms but they should be tempered by the knowledge that signing a trade deal with a protectionist, scatterbrained, hairtrigger president whose ignorance about most areas of policy seems encyclopedic is mission impossible — and is acknowledged as such by most clear-thinking Canadians.
Accordingly, the Conservatives have been loath to point fingers at the prime minister and his global affairs minister. In question period Thursday, Andrew Scheer asked why Trudeau did not seek an audience with the president while both men were in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly.
Trudeau countered by saying the Conservatives want to sign “any old deal, quickly and at any cost.”
Scheer left it at that — and wisely so. The deal, as currently proposed by Trump, is hung up on quarrels like that over the Chapter 19 dispute resolution clause, which are not worth risking an adolescent tantrum from the president.
But there remain disagreements on the de minimis threshold that dictates the maximum value of goods Canadians can buy from a foreign country without paying duties or taxes, and on wine. The Americans want to dismantle market controls by provincial liquor boards that favour Canadian vintners, but this Conservative Party is not going to demand a deal that decimates the wine business in the Okanagan Valley and Niagara bench, where it controls most of the seats.
The Liberals are also justified in resisting any deal that does not include language guaranteeing the U.S. government will not in future invoke Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the president to slap tariffs on countries deemed to threaten national security.
Senior officials say the list of issues on which the two countries disagree is smaller than ever. A deal may still be done before Monday, the U.S.-imposed deadline for Canada to agree to the text of a new NAFTA — but don’t hold your breath.
Efforts to get a deal have not been helped by the Trudeau government’s management of the relationship with the Trump White House. But no Canadian government — certainly not one that hopes to get re-elected next year — is going to sign on to the offer on the table at the moment.