Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s late dad, Pierre, famously likened his country’s relationship with the U.S. to being in bed with an elephant.
Well, the beast on the other side of the mattress is stirring again and Trudeau — whose political fate may be decided by the nature of his tumultuous, on-again/off-again relationship with President-elect Donald Trump — could be the one getting squashed if he’s not careful.
The frenemies most recently met in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s threatening a 25% tariff on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico if both didn’t do more to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs across their borders. Trudeau, recognizing such a levy would decimate his nation’s economy, jetted to Florida on the day after Thanksgiving to assure the president-elect that Canada would invest more to meet Trump’s concerns. That, though, left some Canadians wondering if the Liberal Party leader’s response might have been a tad too obsequious, especially given that the movement of illegal immigrants and drugs such as fentanyl through the northern border pales in comparison with that through the southern one with Mexico.
“It was the right thing to do,” said Colin MacDonald, managing principal at Navigator, a Canadian research and communications firm, and who has served as an advisor to cabinet ministers and Liberal campaigns. “I think we have to approach diplomacy with second-term Trump on second-term Trump terms. You’ve got to dance with the one you’ve got.”
And that means a Canada-wide effort to convince a president who has all but promised to hit foreign allies and rivals alike with heavy tariffs as a negotiating tool to bring down trade deficits, spark U.S. manufacturing and achieve his policy aims on border security to moderate his demands. The U.S. and Canada are two of the largest trade partners in the world, with highly integrated markets on automobiles, energy, metals, agriculture products and lumber but the contrast between their economies is stark: U.S. gross domestic product is more than 10 times that of its northern neighbor. And while more than three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to and nearly half of its imports come from the U.S., less than 20% of American trade is with Canada.
New Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also signaled that both her country and the U.S. would suffer if Trump imposed the tariffs, though she hasn’t visited personally yet with the president-elect; Trudeau, on the other hand, clearly sought to get out ahead of his North American rival.
The dance between Trump and Trudeau comes at a fraught time for the Canadian PM. His government is facing an election of its own by Oct. 20 (though it could happen sooner if Trudeau calls for it) and his Liberal Party has been polling behind a Conservative opposition led by Pierre Poilievre that is trying to capitalize on many of the same issues — concerns over immigration, inflation and government spending — that helped Trump win reelection Nov. 5.
Nine years after becoming prime minister, that also presents an opportunity for Trudeau, however.
“It’s a long way to Oct. 20th,” said Christopher Sands, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based research organization chartered by Congress to provide nonpartisan analysis on global affairs. “Trudeau is betting if he can show that he can manage Trump without giving into a conservative agenda and marginalize (the opposition), he has a chance of squeaking through.”
“He showed a real sense of strategy (going to Mar-a-Lago),” Sands continued. “Most of Canada was flipping out over the 25% tariff threat… Trump wants to see more border controls on Canada’s side. None of that is a change in policy for Canada. The answer was to go and say, ‘Yes, we’re with you. We’ll do all of that, we’ll spend more.'”
But there are those in Canada who sense a real shift coming from the Trump administration, one that, if followed through, could plunge the northern neighbor into a recession, according to that country’s Chamber of Commerce, even as it would force the price of goods higher for Americans and hurt many states — especially Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and others — which do huge amounts of trade with Canada.
Nowhere is that threat more palpable than in metro Detroit, which shares with Windsor, Ontario, a border crossing accounting for more trade in terms of the value of the goods and services than any other along the Canadian-U.S. border and second only to Laredo, Texas, on the southern border nationally. The auto industry, in particular, counts on supplies and production on either side of the border and relies on just-in-time deliveries and supply chains so deeply, it’s one of the reasons a new $6.4 billion Gordie Howe Bridge between the two cities is being completed next year.
No small wonder, then, that Trump has nominated Pete Hoekstra of west Michigan — a former U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, former congressman and Trump’s hand-picked man to lead the Michigan Republican Party — to be his new ambassador to Canada.
Some think that augurs well for the relationship and that there is so much goodwill and history of shared trade and maintaining supply chains that it’s unlikely to be upended, even by hard negotiating tactics.
“It’s at the business level. It’s at the government level … There is a tremendous amount of discussion happening every day,” said Marta Leardi-Anderson, executive director at the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor, which researches how best to make international borders both safe and efficient. “It’s more than just what happens between two elected officials that happen to be the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada.”
Leardi-Anderson also said that while border security regarding immigration and illicit drugs has historically been dealt with separately from trade, that may be changing. “Both countries believe that secure borders are a smart thing. I don’t think that’s the issue here. I think the issue is, how do we better secure these borders (while keeping them efficient)?” she said. As a businessman, she thinks Trump understands this.
Others, however, see more storm clouds on the horizon in Trump’s threats.
“Being America’s ‘nice neighbour’ won’t get us anywhere in this situation,” the Canadian chamber’s president and CEO, Candace Laing, said in a statement. “We’re facing a significant shift in the relationship between long-standing allies.”
The relationship between the 78-year-old Trump and the 52-year-old Trudeau is far different now than it was after the Republican former U.S. president first took office in 2017.
Trudeau, elected in 2015, had been prime minister a little over a year and was seen as untested and, as Sands puts it, a “soulmate,” of outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama. It was far from clear at the time how Trudeau would handle diplomacy with a bellicose Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on upending trade deals he argued put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. In winning, he surprised the world.
It seemed like it wouldn’t start well: As Trump moved to ban travel into the U.S. from majority Muslim countries, Trudeau went on social media to post, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.” A couple of weeks later, when Trudeau visited Trump in Washington for the first time, media reports credited the PM with neutralizing what was described as Trump’s domineering handshake in which he would yank the other person’s hand toward him suddenly. Trudeau instead leaned into Trump and grasped the president’s shoulder forcefully. The BBC mused whether Trump (or at least his handshake) had “met his match?”
More significantly, Trudeau offered no criticism of Trump’s travel ban, saying he was not there to “lecture” the president. Some months later, Trump praised Trudeau as a “great prime minister.”
The honeymoon didn’t last.
Trump demanded a wholesale renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he and others had long argued cost U.S. manufacturing jobs, but Canada and Mexico were slow to move. By May 2018, Trump hit Canada — as well as Mexico and European allies — with tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Trudeau responded with politically targeted tariffs of his own, on American appliances, Kentucky bourbon, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and plywood. They would remain in place for almost a year, until an agreement on a new North American trade deal was reached. The metals tariffs alone, for instance, cost U.S. automakers and suppliers billions of dollars.
That wasn’t the only source of tension: Shortly after Trump imposed the tariffs, arguing that Canada and other nations were taking advantage of the U.S, the American president abruptly pulled his signature from a broadly written agreement on economic and diplomatic goals among the U.S., Canada and its allies at a G-7 summit in Quebec. Trump called Trudeau “very dishonest and weak,” after the PM criticized the tariffs publicly at the meeting.
And in December 2019, Trump blasted Trudeau as “two-faced,” after the PM was recorded at an event in London with other leaders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations appearing to make light of an unscheduled news conference called by Trump that blew up the leaders’ schedule. It didn’t help that Trudeau hadn’t — and still hasn’t — hit targets for national defense spending Trump has demanded of NATO. Still, the leaders managed to renegotiate NAFTA with the new U.S.-Mexico-Canadian agreement during Trump’s term.
In each case, Trudeau appeared to downplay Trump’s public ire while arguing Canada’s case.
Fast-forward, then, to Trudeau’s Mar-a-Lago visit, where by all accounts the meeting with gracious, cordial and productive, though no firm commitments were made. Trump also joked that if, as Trudeau maintained, the Canadian economy couldn’t withstand the threatened tariffs, which would in turn drive up costs for Americans, maybe Canada should become a U.S. state instead.
Rather than fire back, or invoke a sense of national outrage, Trudeau effectively shrugged it off.
“It was terrific,” Kristen Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., who was part of Trudeau’s entourage to Florida, told Bloomberg News regarding the visit. “The two leaders, maybe in ways people don’t appreciate, have sort of a camaraderie. They’ve known each other for a long time and they’ve developed a relationship through a lot of complicated times.”
Early Tuesday, Trump was at it again, posting on Truth Social, his social media platform, that he looked forward to seeing “Governor” Trudeau from the “Great State of Canada” again soon. What prompted the taunt?
A day earlier, speaking in Halifax, Trudeau had addressed the tariff threat, noting the economic cost that would be borne by both countries if it came to pass. “We will, of course, as we did eight years ago, respond to unfair tariffs in a number of ways,” he said, before adding that while Trump means what he says, he also has a tendency to “challenge people, to destabilize a negotiating partner” and sow “a little bit of chaos.”
“One of the most important things for us to do is to not freak out, not to panic,” he said. “We have to be thoughtful and strategic.”
Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, who also served as the U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton, said the relationship between the two countries is too intertwined to be broken, whoever sits in the top political jobs. But how Trudeau responds to Trump “could have a major impact on his political standing in Canada. It could indeed improve his popularity or it could go sideways.”
As for Trump’s taunts, Blanchard said those in the Canadian business community and national politics might brush it off but not so easily voters. “Canadians take their sovereignty very seriously and the worst thing you can say to a Canadian (if you’re from the U.S.) is ‘You’re just like us.’”
MacDonald said Trudeau understands the importance of trying to work with the U.S. president, whoever he is, and responding rationally and diplomatically — not emotionally — to his jibes. But the taunting probably won’t end there.
“It’s not clear to me Trump is looking to be persuaded he doesn’t need to do this (impose tariffs) and it would seem pretty wild for him to turn around and say, ‘I’m not going ahead with these.’ It feels like it’s going to be more painful than that,” he said.
“People are worried, people are stressed,” MacDonald added. “It’s going to be a real challenge for the prime minister and his team.”
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump and Trudeau: Canadian prime minister renews relationship
