Face of Nation : The moment Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Canada’s steel imports was the moment Justin Trudeau realized he couldn’t take U.S. president at his word.
The book Promise and Peril: Justin Trudeau in Power (HarperCollins) outlines the tumult of Trudeau’s relationship with Trump, including a personal call to the prime minister to register a bitter complaint about Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, as well as Trudeau’s initial stupefaction when the president launched a blistering Twitter attack against him from Air Force One hours after shaking his hand following last year’s G7 summit in Quebec.
Like a lot of people, Trudeau was caught off guard by Trump’s unlikely victory in 2016. Still, the prime minister decided early on to work hard on building a personal relationship with the new president by taking care to criticize Trump’s comments, not Trump himself. “There was a discipline that I imposed on myself early,” says Trudeau.
One of those diplomatic friendships, Wherry reports, was the product of Freeland’s extensive contacts in the U.S., where she had worked for some time. Mutual friends in New York allowed the Trudeau administration to cultivate Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Unlike so many of Trump’s advisers, Kushner would turn out to have staying power in the administration. He and Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, quickly built a rapport after a first meeting in New York. That relationship would turn out to be critical to getting a final NAFTA deal.
The PM’s first visit to Washington after the presidential election happened in February 2017. The meeting was carefully co-ordinated on both sides of the border to make sure nothing happened that would cause either government trouble.
Even that first public encounter between the two leaders, Wherry writes, was closely choreographed by Trudeau’s people, who were fully aware that Trump’s aggressive, dominance-signalling handshakes had become a point of interest for the media.
The Trudeau government was about to embark on a very long campaign to renegotiate a trade deal with Canada’s largest trading partner. Trump had made it clear early on that tariffs would be part of his approach to trade with all countries; he started musing about imposing them on steel and aluminum imports in the spring of 2017. Trudeau attempted to use personal persuasion to protect Canada from the tariffs when he and Trump met at the G7 summit in Italy, Wherry reports. He raised it directly with the president, who then turned to Gary Cohn, his top economic adviser at the time, to insist that Canada be kept off the list of tariff targets.
