The Trudeau Administration, the International Trade Debacle, and A Stroll Down Memory Lane: Too Litt
Strolls down memory lane are often a mix of bitter sweet memories. Those things that you like about yourself and others, and those that you wish you could forget, or do over.
For the Trudeau Liberal government, the International Trade file must be a series of bitter memories that they would collectively like to forget or do over, or so it seems. This morning the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary, trusted friend and key adviser, Gerald Butts, must have been going down memory lane on the International Trade file when tweeted that, “Trade diversification has never been a more urgent national priority. We need to get Canadian resources to markets other than the United States.” That single tweet represents a great realization, a death bed conversion even, for the Trudeau government on International Trade. To say the International Trade file was a bumpy road or one filed with potholes and sinkholes would be an understatement for the government at its most senior level.
Do you remember when our International Trade Minister and now Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland had a massive melt down during the Canada-EU Trade Talks and almost scuttled the agreement? Then there was the Prime Minister’s TPP signing mishap where after agreeing to sign the document the day before, Prime Minister Trudeau missed the event all together. Followed by the Canada-China Free Trade Agreement trip where everyone was ready to make a deal except for China, to which the agreement seemed to come as a complete surprise. In one of those do over moments, the Prime Minister’s Office leaked that they were going to China to get leverage over the US in NAFTA talks. Who could forget Prime Minister Trudeau’s landmark National Lampoon-like trip to India that became a bad joke on at least two continents? The Prime Minister’s Office, and our stroll as Canadians down memory lane, ends with the sad spectacle of NAFTA talks on life support, and a pending trade war with the US that not surprisingly, we cannot win.
So now the Prime Minister’s Office apparently feels, “Trade diversification has never been a more urgent national priority. We need to get Canadian resources to markets other than the United States.” Having antagonized the EU, Asia-Pacific, China, India and the US, who is it that the Trudeau government wants to trade with? Antarctica perhaps?
