Trudeau – the ‘nicer’ Mr Nice Guy
Facing off with Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau dons the cape of ‘Captain Canada’.
NORMALLY a conciliatory, charming figure, Justin Trudeau is being forced to transform himself into a kind of “Captain Canada” in order to fight a trade war with Donald Trump that has the potential to be as destructive as it is surprising.
A boxing enthusiast who dons his gloves to work off the stress of the job in his rare free time, the Canadian prime minister will have to carefully measure his punches against the United States leader.
Trudeau triggered Trump’s fury after the meeting of the G7 nations in Quebec last weekend when he said that citing US national security interests as justification for slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum exports was “insulting.”
“Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau said after the summit ended in controversy.
The president tweeted from Air Force One that Trudeau was “dishonest,” and weak.
His advisers went further, with White House trade adviser Peter Navarro saying there was a “special place in hell” for leaders like Trudeau who negotiate with Trump in bad faith.
Trump took another poke at Trudeau from Singapore after his summit on North Korea.
“I have a good relationship with Justin Trudeau – I really did, other than he had a news conference that he had because he assumed I was in an airplane,” the US president said at a press conference.
“He learned. That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada.”
Trudeau was elected to head a Liberal Party government in October 2015, after his rivals underestimated him, sometimes condescendingly deriding him as a selfie-taking knock-off of his father, 1970s leader Pierre Trudeau.
Since Trump’s election in 2016, Trudeau has tried to take a conciliatory approach to the populist Republican president and has been careful never to run him down in public.
He has been in regular telephone contact with Trump, calling him more than once a month, more frequently than he did Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.
He has always turned a blind eye to his American counterpart’s polarising and polemical statements, stressing instead that both men were elected to defend the middle classes of their respective countries.
Sometimes described as a “mini-Obama,” not least due to his omnipresent smile, Trudeau is clearly far closer in his political alignments to the US Democratic Party than Trump’s Republicans.
Yet he worked to smooth over the ideological differences and present himself as the best neighbour the United States could hope for. He has striven to keep the nice-boy-next-door image even during the current diplomatic crisis, refusing to respond in kind to the personal jabs by Trump and his aides, and asked ministers to hit back without going below the belt.
“Canada does not believe that ad hominem attacks are a particularly appropriate or useful way to conduct our relations with other countries,” Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said.
On Monday, federal lawmakers unanimously passed a motion saying they stand in solidarity on trade issues and “reject disparaging ad hominem statements by US officials which do a disservice to bilateral relations.”
The motion was proposed by the opposition New Democratic Party, whose legislative chief Ruth Ellen Brosseau stated: “While Canadians stand together, President Trump stands alone.”
With just over a year to go before the next elections, the former teacher, who was born on Christmas Day 1971, could stand to gain politically from the trade war being unleashed by his southern neighbour.
Showing grit will help overcome criticism that he lacks the substance of his father, who ran the country with a firm hand in the 1970s.
Despite his conservative rivals snapping at his heels in polls, Trudeau has seen Canadian politicians from across the spectrum close ranks around him after Trump threatened to slap tariffs on the automobile sector, which would mark a dramatic escalation in the trade spat.
Mocked for cultural gaffes on a recent trip to India, and slammed by others for his efforts in renegotiating the North America Free Trade Agreement at Trump’s behest, Trudeau has also been attacked by the left-wing for his decision to nationalise an oil pipeline that had bogged down in protest and controversy.
Now with Trump piling in with his own attempt to humiliate the Canadian leader, The Globe and Mail newspaper said the US leader’s comments “couldn’t have been better measured to raise Canadians’ national sense of injustice.”
The people have rallied together, with public opinion polling showing there’s wide support for Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the steel and aluminium duties that will kick in for some US goods on July 1.
As Bloomberg reported, key allies have also rallied around him. Several leaders from the G-7 meeting – including Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron – either expressed support for Trudeau or criticised Trump.
“There is a special place in heaven for Justin Trudeau,” European Council President Donald Tusk was reported as saying.
As Roland Paris, a University of Ottawa professor and former Trudeau foreign policy adviser, put it: “Trump’s disruptiveness is one thing, but his treatment of Canada and other US allies is unprecedented.”
Commentators saw a parallel in past tensions between Trudeau’s father and Richard Nixon, when the then-leader of the United States called Trudeau senior, in private conversations, a “pompous egghead” and a “clever son of a bitch.”
“The new Trudeau has arrived,” one analyst told Radio Canada on Monday, noting that thanks to the public and political support building behind him, “Trudeau can think of himself as the great defender of his country and that he can don the cape of ‘Captain Canada’ which served his father so well.” — AFP