Turnbull: Parliament is kind of at a standstill. They’re not getting legislation through, but they’re still meeting and still talking. They’re still doing Question Period, and actually today was unusual in that the Prime Minister briefed the opposition leaders on what’s going on in his negotiations with President-elect Trump. Elevating it to that level is unusual because you don’t typically see a Prime Minister just calling opposition leaders to tell them what’s going on. That usually happens when there’s a war or a pandemic— something really out of the ordinary. But this is really unusual. We’re at this point in our relationship with the U.S. where President-elect Trump is threatening 25 per cent tariffs on anything coming into the United States from Canada or Mexico, which would be devastating to our economy. He threatened to do that as one of the first things he would do once he takes office on January 20th. So we’ve got a runway between now and then to try to get through to him and see if we can manage this so that outcome doesn’t happen. Of course, we don’t know if he’s serious, but we have to take him at face value; otherwise, we could be caught off guard, which isn’t acceptable. So we are in a weird space where the Prime Minister and his team are negotiating with someone who is not yet President, and we are doing that in a context where the Prime Minister has a minority government. He might end up needing the support of opposition leaders to get things through if legislation has to be approved to make Trump happy at the borders. We are in a very strange time. McLaughlin: Yes, it is. This is pretty bizarre. The most important role of any Prime Minister in Canada is to preserve the unity of the country and maintain the economic relationship with the United States. Those are jobs one and two, but they’re coming together now. You know, unity of the country with premiers and business, Team Canada, and the rest of it, to figure out how to tackle this uniquely disruptive situation of an incoming president who is a real disruptor in chief, and in a way, an outgoing Prime Minister in the last leg of his mandate. There’s a total power imbalance. The Prime Minister handled Trump 1.0 pretty well. We got through the NAFTA conversations in the first Trump term. Trump 2.0 looks to be more intense, more disruptive in many ways than before. I think Canadians, and certainly people in Ottawa and across the country, are wondering: is there a Trudeau 2.0 who can take this on, preserve the unity of the country, and handle these new challenges? Lori, your observation about the Prime Minister briefing the opposition is a perfect example of that dynamic. We’ll have to see how it pans out. Turnbull: Absolutely. Given Trudeau’s circumstances now, some of the speculation we’ve heard about whether there will be an election, or whether Trudeau might take a walk in the snow over Christmas, he now has a renewed incentive to make the most of the time between now and January 20th. Even if he got some kind of win out of this— if he managed to get through to Trump, to put together an approach that saved us from potential economic wreckage—this wouldn’t necessarily save him politically. But it would leave some sort of legacy for him, even if it didn’t change the result of the next election. I also think, regarding the idea of Team Canada, I’m not sure that anybody necessarily wants to be on it. He’s really up against it. McLaughlin: Legacy is the word that came to my mind too. At the end of the day, regardless of how it plays out politically—and I’m with you, I don’t see this giving the Prime Minister a popularity boost—it is the responsible thing to do. No Prime Minister can be cavalier about this. No matter how capricious Mr. Trump is—what he’s trying to do, how he’s doing it, and joking about Canada becoming the 51st state—we’ve got to just buckle down and work through it. I think the Prime Minister is doing it the right way — professionally. Whether it politically helps him or not, that’s another conversation. But the stakes are just so high. We don’t have a playbook for a U.S. President who threatens like this. We have to take it seriously, and especially our political leaders have to take it seriously. It’ll be a different kind of Team Canada than last time. I hear you, and we’ll see how they do. Lori, what’s your take on the premiers? We’ve had some elections and some premiers have renewed mandates—not so much the Prime Minister. How do you think this Team Canada piece is going to play out? Turnbull: I think the premiers are going to want to avoid any circumstance where sectors of the economy are shaken, even for a short time, by a tariff situation. Also, we can see the premiers are not on the same page right out of the gate. Doug Ford didn’t even wait for a signal from Ottawa. He put his own foot forward and suggested a negotiation strategy that leaves Mexico out. McLaughlin: He was unilaterally negotiating NAFTA, trying to get back to CanadaU.S. Like an FTA, not NAFTA. Turnbull: Yeah, and it didn’t seem like Ottawa was pushing him to stop; they seemed to be going along with it. So there’s a strange dynamic among the premiers. They don’t necessarily want all the same things. They’re each going to map out what works for their own province. Some will be more prominent on this than others, but they’ll all want to avoid an economic crash. There’s a balancing act: they want to score some political points by taking hits at Trudeau, but not hit him so hard that the federal bargaining strategy collapses and Trump sees Trudeau as weak. McLaughlin: That’s asking premiers to be nu26 / Canadian Government Executive // WINTER 2025 GOV GURUS Canada’s premiers are meeting in Toronto today, and cross-border trade is topping the agenda, on the heels of a tariff threat from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. Ontario Premier Doug Ford steps out of an office to speak to the media at the Ontario Legislature in Toronto on Wednesday, December 11, 2024. File photo by The Canadian Press/Chris Young
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