Scheer boots Bernier from critic post
OTTAWA — Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has removed Quebec MP Maxime Bernier from his role as the party’s innovation critic.
A senior Conservative source said Scheer made the decision after finding out Monday that Bernier had posted to his personal website a chapter on supply management that is part of his forthcoming book.
“He made a commitment to the leader and to caucus that he would no longer promote his book and he misled the leader and the caucus,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Bernier posted the chapter on June 5 but Scheer was not made aware of it until Monday.
Scheer said in a statement Tuesday night that science critic Matt Jeneroux would assume Bernier’s duties as innovation critic on an interim basis.
Scheer defeated Bernier in the Conservative leadership race a year ago.
Bernier first released the chapter in April, as a marketing tool for his book, Doing Politics Differently: My Vision For Canada, which was supposed to be published in the fall. The chapter on supply management blamed the dairy lobby in Quebec for electing Scheer and called its members fake Conservatives, who joined the party to vote against Bernier because he was advocating to get rid of supply management.
On April 18, after a tense caucus meeting in which other Conservative MPs accused Bernier of backstabbing Scheer and causing division within the party, Bernier announced he would postpone the publication indefinitely.
But on June 5, amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest attacks on Canada’s supply management system, Bernier quietly added the chapter to his personal website, where it can be downloaded.
In April 2017, during the party leadership, Bernier penned an open letter to Trump in the Globe and Mail, thanking him for raising the issue of supply management and agreeing with him that “this protectionist system is unfair for the farmers in Wisconsin and other states, who cannot make a better living by selling their products to their Canadian neighbours.”
The issue of supply management could hurt the Conservatives in Quebec in the next election for the same reason it hurt Bernier in the leadership race if dairy farmers feel the Conservatives won’t support it.
The Conservatives have jumped on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in recent days for allegedly offering concessions to the U.S. on dairy as part of negotiations for a new North American Free Trade Agreement. Trudeau met with dairy farmers in Ottawa Tuesday to reassure them of his support.
OTTAWA — As Canada teeters on the brink of a potential trade war with the United States, the Trudeau government has adopted the same motto invoked by the British as they braced for the Second World War: Keep calm and carry on.
That was the message Tuesday as U.S. President Donald Trump continued to take personal shots at Justin Trudeau, blasted Canada’s dairy industry and threatened to make Canadians pay for the prime minister’s alleged effrontery.
Trudeau and his ministers were careful to say nothing that would add fuel to Trump’s ire, hoping it will dissipate once the president is no longer stressed about his historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Behind the scenes, they were trying to re-establish normal relations — professional and respectful, if not always in agreement — and keep lines of communication open with American officials. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, who will be in Washington today and Thursday, is hoping to meet with U.S. trade czar Robert Lighthizer to resume discussions on modernizing the North American Free Trade Agreement. And Finance Minister Bill Morneau is also planning to meet with his American counterpart, Steve Mnuchin, in Washington this week.
“From Day 1 [of NAFTA negotiations], we have said that we expected moments of drama and that we would remain, we would keep calm and carry on through those moments of drama,” Freeland said.
For his part, Trudeau cheered Trump’s bid to broker a deal to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, but he stayed mum on the president’s persistent trash talk. “We support the continuing efforts by the president on North Korea, [and] we look forward to looking at the details of the agreement,” Trudeau said. “On [Trump’s] comments, I’m going to stay focused on defending jobs for Canadians and supporting Canadian interests.”
Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr said Canada has worked hard for decades to establish good relations with the U.S. and “we have no interest in turning up the heat.”
International Trade Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne echoed that sentiment, saying: “We’ll continue to do diplomacy the Canadian way, which is to be positive, to be constructive and to make sure we are firm to defend our industries and our workers.”
Early in the day, it seemed the Trump administration might also be trying to dial back the invective. Trump’s chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, acknowledged an error in asserting “there’s a special place in hell” for Trudeau, whom he accused Sunday of bad faith diplomacy and stabbing Trump in the back after he departed early from the G7 summit in Quebec. “My job was to send a signal of strength,” Navarro said Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal event. “The problem was that in conveying that message I used language that was inappropriate.
“I own that, that was my mistake, those were my words.”
But Trump couldn’t seem to let go of his annoyance with Trudeau, even as he celebrated signing a historic denuclearization agreement with North Korea. In a post-signing news conference and in an interview with ABC News, the president recounted how miffed he was to hear Trudeau’s G7 wrap-up news conference, where the prime minister reiterated Canada’s intention to impose counter-tariffs on U.S. goods in retaliation for Trump’s imposition of crippling tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
“That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada,” Trump said in Singapore. “[Trudeau] learned. You can’t do that. You can’t do that.”