The Trump Unit
Inside Canada’s PMO squad to save NAFTA
If Donald Trump deploys the big bomb during upcoming NAFTA negotiations, and threatens to blow up the continental trade agreement, a unit within the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be assigned to try disarming it. The Canadian government has created an election-style nerve centre to handle White House-related challenges and officials who describe its operations say it has about eight regular staff: two former trade officials, two senior PMO officials, an ambassador, a writer, a cabinet minister, and it’s run by a young staffer with a reputation for staying cool while smothering political fires.
The most blistering inferno it’s preparing to confront is a scenario where the president threatens NAFTA. Everybody involved anticipates the threat level from Trump will rise with the heat of negotiations. A well-connected Washington lobbyist milling about last week’s talks said a Trump pullout threat is virtually assured: “Almost 100 per cent.’’ Trade lawyer Dan Ujczo said it’s a logical play for the president: ‘’The threat of withdrawal is his key negotiating leverage.’’ However one former U.S. trade official says the president has shown himself too eager to play his best card. He said the president has weakened his hand with an April tactical error, when he threatened to blow up NAFTA four months before negotiations started. Robert Holleyman said Canada and Mexico got a valuable heads up on what would happen next: the business community panicked, lawmakers were miffed, and Washington made clear it preferred saving NAFTA.
‘’It was, at a minimum, terrible timing,” said Holleyman, Barack Obama’s deputy United States Trade Representative.
‘’You do that at the 11th hour in the negotiation — not at the throat-clearing stage ... I suspect President Trump will be unable to play that card again. And if he does play it, it won’t be as strong as it would’ve been ... The Canadians and Mexicans will say, ‘You ... will face a huge backlash in your own Congress.’”
Congress definitely holds some power: it could refuse to cancel the law implementing NAFTA, which would set up court fights between the various parties including the president, industries, and possibly lawmakers.
It’s the job of that Ottawa unit to prevent that messy scenario.
The Canada-U.S. unit resembles, in several ways, a campaign war room — though its members hate that term. It gathers data on key constituencies — for instance, it collects American politicians’ opinions on issues and plugs them into a database.
It plans outreach efforts. It coordinates rapid response.
All the relationship-building in recent months involving ministers criss-crossing the U.S. for hundreds of meetings would be deployed in the event of a crisis. For example, should Trump try ending NAFTA, instructions might quickly go out to Canadian minister X to call U.S. state governor Y to lobby friendly Washington official Z. That order would come from the centre.
The idea for a dedicated unit came before Trump’s inauguration, from PMO officials Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, longtime Ontario provincial political officials who had used the approach before on top issues.
‘’This is the unit that spends 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thinking about this — trying to anticipate every possibility,’’ said one official. ‘’The U.S. file is ... so super-hot that you can take the slightest thing and turn it into a huge story that’s in every newspaper in North America. It’s really important to have the right person (handling it).’’