A roadmap to a Canada that’s taken seriously again

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“Make Canada Serious Again,” is the rallying cry of former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. As far as slogans go, it may not be great. But for Canadians seeking a way through the current trade imbroglio with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, it is apt.

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Watching the sparks fly between Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre — including the prime minister’s accusations the leader of the Official Opposition is un-Canadian for failing to join Team Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs — I’m curious to understand what it was like for the Conservatives, and especially O’Toole, watching the Liberals negotiate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) the first time round.

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“Any time I was somewhat critical of the strategy undertaken by Ms. Freeland and Justin Trudeau,” O’Toole explains, “I was told, ‘You’re Team Canada, you’re being disloyal.’”

O’Toole was Official Opposition critic for Foreign Affairs when the USMCA was negotiated (the Canadian negotiating team was led by Chrystia Freeland in her role as foreign affairs minister). And in July 2020, just prior to O’Toole’s election as Conservative leader, USMCA came into effect.

“At one point,” O’Toole laughs, “I debated Catherine McKenna (former minister of environment) on their progressive agenda, and I called it ‘virtue signalling.’  Gerald Butts (Trudeau’s principal secretary at the time) accused me of using an ‘alt-right’ word until I showed him he had used the term ‘virtue-signalling’.”

“I’m a patriot,” O’Toole reflects sombrely. “I never liked people saying I’m not siding with my country. I want our country to win. I want us to be smart.” We both recall Freeland and Trudeau giving speeches, in Washington and New York, launching the Liberals’ progressive agenda, knowing full well Trump had just withdrawn from the Paris climate agreements and “was not renegotiating NAFTA to get more environment-oriented or Indigenous in the agreement, right?” O’Toole adds.

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“So they rolled the dice,” O’Toole concludes, “thinking that Canada wasn’t America’s main concern — it was China.” In the end, there was a bilateral agreement negotiated between the U.S. and Mexico that Canada was given the chance to opt into, O’Toole explains. “People forget that,” he says, shaking his head at the memory.

O’Toole wasn’t the only one frustrated by that experience. In his 2023 book, No Trade is Free, Robert Lighthizer (leader of the U.S. team negotiating USMCA) describes Canada-U.S. relations as being at the lowest ebb in our history. And O’Toole reports, “Lighthizer says, ‘We weren’t serious.’” Lighthizer likes Chrystia Freeland, O’Toole hastens to add, “And she’s very likeable. I like her too. But she was not serious.”

Trump has made it clear he wants American workers rebooted — and he’s willing to impose hefty tariffs on trade partners to achieve that end. O’Toole takes this seriously, especially at a time when globalization has a weaker pulse. This 51-year-old former military officer now leads a global risk firm, ADIT North America, with offices in Montreal, Toronto and Mexico City, “that does due diligence through human intelligence on the ground in 140 countries,” he says.

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“The advice I’ve been giving my clients for the last few months,” O’Toole reports, “is that Donald Trump was likely going to win the election and was likely going to return to a tariffed and a managed trade environment. And if Canada and the E.U. didn’t come into line on EV policies on steel and aluminum emissions and trade issues, if we weren’t aligned on security issues right from Huawei to the South China Sea and Taiwan, then increasingly, we were going to kind of be cajoled into line through the use of trade restrictions or tariffs.”

I catch up to O’Toole, via Zoom, at the end of his business day in the U.K., where he’s working.  As it happens, our conversation is scheduled for the very evening that Trudeau and a small entourage (Katie Telford, his chief of staff and Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety) jet to Florida, to join Trump and his far larger delegation for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Could this be a spark — of what could be labelled “seriousness” — by our prime minister?

“The prime minister … with his socks … and Care Bear economics,” used his brand to great effect in his earlier days, O’Toole concedes, and “he beat me in 2021,” he grins. But this is all catching up, O’Toole asserts.

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What’s it going to take for Canada to be seen as credible and dependable, again, I ask. Applying Trump’s metrics, it’s the $100-billion-dollar question. O’Toole has a shopping list of issues ripe for more serious engagement with Trump’s administration. And curiously, the topics that bubble up in that Trump-Trudeau tete-de-tete over dinner (border security, energy, trade and the Arctic) are remarkably similar to O’Toole’s list.

As a military veteran, it’s no surprise that O’Toole would prioritize Canada’s investment of two percent of GDP into NATO, as fast as possible.  “How many debates in this country have we had about making our Paris targets?” O’Toole posits. “Well, there’s been a target that been existing for decades that is much more tangible than Paris targets. It’s the NATO 2%.”

And O’Toole wants us to focus on the North. “‘We the North’ needs to be more than just the Toronto Raptors playoff slogan,” O’Toole says. “It needs to be who we are as a country, and to defend our sovereignty, we have to have a presence.”  And he continues: “We could make a strong impression by saying, ‘We’re gonna own the North, Canada’s North. The Northwest Passage is Canadian and we’re going to have presence there to make sure the world knows that.’”

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For a couple of reasons, O’Toole’s also recommending Canada offer to help finance the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline: “One, there is political symbolism to it … it was cancelled by Obama under Trudeau. It was reversed by Trump, and then was cancelled by Biden on his first day in office.” And, secondly, O’Toole suggests, use this symbolic pipeline to kickstart a  wider discussion about energy security in North America.

While Canadians await Trudeau’s next steps in Ottawa’s plan for engagement with the Trump administration, it’s useful to evaluate what’s feasible in a managed trade environment where tariffs, sanctions, emissions standards, human rights — a whole range of issues — curtail “free” trade. Given what’s at stake, O’Toole is hoping differing points of view on the plan aren’t misconstrued, this time, as disloyalty or crass partisanship.

“I really tried to be Team Canada,” O’Toole says. And I believe he’s serious.

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