After Trump, Trudeau pushes trade deal with European Union

OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau arrives in Europe on Thursday and plans to talk more openly about one of the things he didn’t discuss with Donald Trump — the merits of free trade in the face of increasingly hostile, populist opposition.

The prime minister is to deliver his pro-trade message in an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France on Thursday — a first for a Canadian leader — and to top business leaders a day later in Germany.

On Friday, he’ll be in Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who wasn’t shy about reminding Trump the day after his surprise victory that Germany and the U.S. were “bound” by common values and that she looked forward to working with him on that basis.

Standing next to Trump in Washington on Monday, Trudeau said it wasn’t his job to lecture foreign leaders when he visits them. He had been asked to comment on Trump’s controversial executive order banning people from seven mainly Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

While he may have demurred on immigration, government officials say Trudeau won’t be shy about praising something else now under attack from Trump: liberalized, multilateral trade deals such as Canada’s deal with the EU, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA.

The European Parliament is set to ratify CETA today, which will pave the way for 90 per cent of it to come into force once Canada’s Parliament follows in coming months.

But government officials who briefed journalists Tuesday on the condition they not be named, said the prime minister will be “sharpening” his message on the need for political and business leaders to do more to sell the merits of the free trade to an increasingly skeptical and anxious public.

Trudeau will use his final event of the whirlwind two-day tour to deliver that message to a particularly well-appointed crowd at the St. Matthew’s Day Banquet in the German city of Hamburg Friday.

Trudeau will use his keynote address to warn that more needs to be done to address the anxieties of middle-class people who aren’t getting ahead, because if nothing is done to ease those concerns, the world will have larger problems on its hands, officials say.