How will Justin Trudeau convince Joe Biden not to ‘Buy American’?

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This article was published 16/11/2021 (1135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON—“I think the emphasis that we’re going to have in these meetings isn’t just that it’s in Canada’s interest to continue the smooth flow of goods and services across our border, it’s also very much in the United States interests,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told an audience in Washington on Wednesday.

“The U.S. could do worse than to rely on its closest friend, its oldest friend, its most reliable friend, for ensuring that we’re able to be strong and resilient in the North American context, in an unstable world.”

Trudeau was kicking off two days of barnstorming the city to convince Americans that Canada’s priorities should be theirs as well. In some respects, he’s swimming against a heavy tide at the moment.

His speech to a crowd of university students assembled by the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute, a Washington-based think tank, came ahead of his visit Thursday to the White House for meetings with President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That will be the first “three amigos” summit of the North American leaders since 2016 — before Donald Trump became president — and it will be seen in some quarters as a “return to normal” a year after Biden’s election. The leaders will meet face to face again just weeks after the U.S. border reopening, and the tone is expected to be friendly again after Trump’s term of sometimes open hostility.

Friendly, however, doesn’t mean easy. This week, the U.S. Congress is moving toward passing Biden’s “Build Back Better” economic agenda. The problem, from Canada’s perspective, is that the draft of it under consideration contains “Buy American” protectionism that could hurt Canada’s auto industry — subsidies for electric cars in the bill would only be available to cars manufactured entirely in the U.S. by unionized workers, cutting Canadian parts makers out of the supply chain that has served the continental car industry seamlessly for decades.

The measure is popular among many of Biden’s constituents, and I’ve been told that the Biden administration views opposition to it as a “Canadian issue” that may have to take a back seat to the president’s domestic political concerns.

So on that front, a big part of Trudeau’s job will be convincing the president that the seamless cross-border supply chain is good for both Americans and American companies — a view cross-border business associations have been expressing recently, helping Canadians lobby against the protectionism.

But Canada’s job is not as simple as getting the president onside. The bill is being written and rewritten as it makes its way through Congress, where representatives and senators will tailor it to suit their own parochial political needs and concerns. The president only has so much influence on the fine details, and he’s not going to veto his own legacy economic package because it comes to him with a line-item Trudeau doesn’t like.

To that end, the Canadian embassy has been lobbying members of Congress, and appears to have found a receptive ear in Sen. Joe Manchin, whose vote on the final bill could prove decisive. That lobbying — which is also being undertaken by U.S. automakers and businesses that don’t want their long-established supply chains shattered over politics — could prove more important than Trudeau’s meeting with Biden.

Trudeau joined that congressional lobbying effort himself, heading directly from the speaking event to Capitol Hill for a mid-afternoon meeting with a bipartisan group of leaders of both houses of Congress.

That meeting was closed to media, but it’s possible Trudeau got an earful on Capitol Hill from representatives of border states — including Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer — who have demanded that Canada drop its tough COVID-19 testing requirement for cross-border travellers. Later Wednesday, sources told the Star that an easing of the testing requirement for Canadians will be announced Friday, followed by an easing of the same for Americans.

Later in the day, Trudeau’s charm offensive itinerary included the Canadian American Business Council’s “State of the Relationship” dinner, a big-ticket event in Washington that’s attended by politicians who work regularly on border issues.

Trudeau and members of his cabinet are casting a wide net — meeting with think tank policy people, business leaders, Congress, the White House — to make their case to as many relevant audiences as their two days in Washington will allow. Canada has other priorities, of course besides the electric car proposal (although in his Wilson Center talk, Trudeau managed to turn most questions towards it, nodding to the “supply chain” and cross-border co-operation again and again, and frequently referred to Canada’s abundant supply of minerals for car batteries). Among other issues, he’s still fighting a tough battle on behalf of Canada’s pipelines, pushing against both the Democratic governor of Michigan and Biden’s own proudly proclaimed focus on moving away from fossil fuel energy.

Yet it’s a fair bet that after Thursday’s meeting at the White House, the headlines here will be dominated not by the plight of the auto parts supply chain, but by the migrant crisis at the Mexican border, which is one of the U.S.’s top priorities for this meeting.

A Canadian prime minister’s task — now more than ever — is not just to convince the Americans that we’re good reliable friends, but that our concerns are actually their concerns, too.

That’s the challenge.

Towards the end of his talk, Trudeau remarked that the U.S. is so big, with so much happening, sometimes it doesn’t pay attention to the world beyond its borders. Canada, he said, is small enough it’s always watching the U.S, and the rest of the world.

“We need to be aligned, we need to be working together,” he said. “We can’t be competing with each other … in a way that divides us.”

Edward Keenan is the Star’s Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca