Following the news that Donald J. Trump would return for a second term as U.S. president, the reaction of Canada’s cabinet ministers was uniform. In essence, they have all urged Canadians to stop worrying because they’ve dealt with Mr. Trump before and they have a playbook.
“I want to say with utter sincerity and conviction to Canadians that Canada will be absolutely fine,” Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister and finance minister, told reporters on Wednesday morning. “Let’s remember that our trading relationship today is governed by the trade deal concluded by President Trump himself and his team. That’s really, really important.”
“Throughout the last month and last years, we’ve been developing very strong ties with his team,” Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, said. “So we have a plan and we’re ready.”
For this special edition of the Canada Letter, I spoke with several people who study or have been active in relations between the two countries. And not one of them shared any of the government’s optimistic outlook about how Canada would fare or how easy it would be for Canada to deal with Mr. Trump again.
“Ministers, senior officials, all have to play that game,” Wesley Wark, who studies intelligence and national security issues at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, told me. “I just hope they know in their heart of hearts that it’s a game and they have to be steeled for something much more difficult.”
He added that the idea that Canada could reprise how it dealt with the previous Trump administration this time around has “little merit.”
Everyone I spoke with shared that view and said that Canada faced significant challenges in dealing with its neighbor.
Bruce Heyman, who was the U.S. ambassador to Canada under President Barack Obama, said that, unlike in 2016, Mr. Trump now has a fully developed transition team and an agenda. On it is Mr. Trump’s promise to impose tariffs on everything that enters the U.S., apparently from anywhere in the world, to pay for a wide variety of programs. He has vowed to “demolish” the country’s intelligence agencies, which he has portrayed as part of a politicized “deep state” out to get him.
His agenda also calls for mass deportations of undocumented people — a policy that is likely to prompt a wave of asylum seekers to Canada — along with other measures to restrict immigration, both legal and illegal. And Mr. Trump said that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to members of the NATO defense alliance that do not meet their unofficial commitment to spend 2 percent of their economic output on their militaries. Canada is prominent among them.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if almost all of these things happened within the first hundred days,” Mr. Heyman told me.
It remains unclear whether Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Even so, Mr. Heyman said, Mr. Trump showed in 2018 with tariffs on steel and aluminum, including imports from Canada, that he can circumvent Congress by declaring the duties a matter of national security.
“The most benign of tariffs that he’s floated will have a recessionary impact on Canada that will lead to job losses and will lead to a further decline in our terrible productivity rate,” said Matthew Holmes, the executive vice president of international issues at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Holmes’s group estimates that any sweeping tariff will immediately cut Canada’s economic output by 45 billion Canadian dollars. About 3.6 billion dollars in trade occurs between the two countries daily. Mr. Holmes said that the deep integration of many industries across the border means that any retaliation against Mr. Trump by other countries would make Canada’s economic losses even worse.
Mr. Wark said that Mr. Trump’s proposal to replace long-serving professionals in intelligence agencies with political loyalists would upturn the system, which Canada has relied on since World War II. Canada does not have a foreign intelligence service, like the C.I.A. or the British Secret Intelligence Service, so the country mostly relies on the U.S. through the Five Eyes alliance, which also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re at a point where we cannot trust the United States as a security intelligence partner,” he said. “We have never experienced anything like this since the First World War.”
Then what is Canada to do?
On intelligence, Mr. Wark said that Canada would have to broaden its partnerships to include Japan, France and Germany, and might have to set up a foreign intelligence service and develop a system to collect and analyze openly available intelligence.
On the economy, the border and other issues, Mr. Holmes said that it was impossible to come up with an overarching strategy.
The Canadian government, he said, will “have to be very nimble, adept and dynamic.” He added: “We’re going to need to be there at the table willing to trade and give concessions.”
Colin Robertson, a former Canadian diplomat who served in the United States and was involved in trade talks between the two countries, said that Canada’s approach to dealing with the first Trump administration was “incrementalism,” in effect wearing the U.S. down during protracted negotiations.
Given that he expects that Mr. Trump won’t tolerate delays, Mr. Robertson said that Canada will have to make some politically difficult choices in order to present the Trump White House with “bold ideas.”
They may include agreeing to end, or significantly undermine, the supply management system that effectively keeps out imports of dairy, poultry and chickens from the United States. Canada may also have to revive the idea of forming a joint agency to patrol the border between the two countries. An oil pipeline to the Eastern U.S., Mr. Robertson said, might also be attractive to the Trump White House.
“Trump kind of likes big ideas and then sort of tosses them out for discussion,” Mr. Robertson said. “In the meantime, he’s not on your back. We can’t do incrementalism, it will strangle us. A 10 percent tariff — that’s not incremental. It’s a clear and present danger.”
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected]. More about Ian Austen
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