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Chrystia Freeland: Carney Was Right to End Trade Talks with Trump

The former NAFTA negotiator argues that giving ground only makes the president demand more

This past February, former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland made an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher and joked that under United States president Donald Trump, America was not being a “very reliable boyfriend” to Canada.

The quip caught on so widely that Freeland, who served as finance minister under Justin Trudeau, used it as the title of her political memoir. Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People is, in part, a polemical account of diplomatic turmoil and trade wars Canada has faced since Trump’s return to power.

But Freeland’s subject is bigger than Trump: it’s the problem of living next door to a superpower whose affections you can never count on. Trump’s America may be Canada’s unreliable boyfriend for now, but the United States has always been our “Uncle Sam,” she writes. “Uncle Sam wants to be loved—and feared. And, sometimes, he’s just not that into you.”

Her advice for those moments? Go around him. Freeland’s “doughnut strategy” means dealing with a hostile US administration by courting the Americans around it, rather than relying on the White House at the centre. During the first Trump-era North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations, Canada cultivated Congress, governors, mayors, unions, businesses, and ordinary Americans, emphasizing how much their communities benefited from trade with Canada. The goal was to build enough support around the president that domestic interests would push Washington to moderate its position toward Canada.

Would that work now? Freeland reminds us that when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general called him “Daddy,” Trump was thrilled. “He craves the approval of what he sees as the world’s other daddies—Xi Jinping, Putin, and sometimes Kim Jong-Un,” she writes. “The rest of us are his harem—or maybe the better, genuinely American metaphor is sister wives. He wants our adoration—and our abject capitulation.”

The Walrus met with Freeland in Toronto to discuss what Canada can do when America goes “from being a kindly trad husband to a violent one.”

You renegotiated NAFTA with Trump’s first administration. What did you take away from that?

My theory about negotiating with him is about three things. One, do you find areas where you can generally agree? We found some areas like that in the NAFTA negotiation.

Second—and this is maybe the most important thing—is something we called the doughnut strategy. The White House was effectively the hole in the doughnut; the rest of the American political and economic system was the doughnut itself. I think telling Canada’s story to all of America is tremendously important. It’s why I tell the story........

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