Trudeau to face skeptical students on 1st leg of trade trip

OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau’s ongoing effort to breathe new life into Canada’s free trade ties with the United States will force him to make the case to a group of skeptical Chicago students.

The topic of free trade and the negotiation of a renewed North American free trade pact will be hard to avoid Wednesday when the prime minister takes the stage at the University of Chicago. Free trade is a delicate issue in the U.S. Midwest, where there is a feeling that the North American Free Trade Agreement has cost American industrial jobs.

Trudeau’s message of progressive trade agreements that work for everyone will be tested in Chicago because not everyone in the audience will believe him, said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Barack Obama.

“There are a lot of young people for whom globalism is not an unalloyed good,” said Axelrod, who will be onstage interviewing Trudeau during the afternoon event. “The discussion ought to be, ‘How can you construct trade agreements that benefit not just industries, but also workers in our respective countries.’ That’s what these kids are concerned about. They’re concerned about globalization as a force that drives inequality and I know that these are issues that (Trudeau) has thought about as well.”

The stop in Chicago will be Trudeau’s first on a four-day swing through the United States, during which he is also expected to push trade during stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he will give a speech to a sold-out audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Institute.

Talking about free trade at the centre founded by the president who signed the Canada-U. S. free trade in the 1980s will invoke a powerful image to Republican lawmakers, said Sean Speer, a Munk senior fellow for fiscal policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. A speech in which Trudeau evokes Reagan could force Republicans who lionize the former president to reconcile abandoning one of their hero’s key accomplishments, Speer said. “It would be counterintuitive and really powerful if he owned the Reagan legacy in his remarks.”