Given the priorities and problems of the Trump administration, Canada’s best bet is probably to try to work around the White House on these issues, engaging with other players in the U. S., like bureaucratic agencies, members of Congress, and state and local governments. [...] The most urgent challenges to this regional order are threats to NAFTA itself – which Trump first threatened to scrap, and then pledged to renegotiate – and specific trade and investment disputes, like those over softwood lumber and supply-management for dairy, poultry and eggs.2 But the integration of the two societies goes far beyond trade, and the Canadian government has to keep its focus on ma [...] In the mid-2000s, this agenda was negotiated trilaterally, under the umbrella of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), and in the early 2010s, Canada and the U. S. continued to work on it bilaterally through the Beyond the Border (BTB) initiative.5 This border/perimeter security agenda lost momentum after former president Barack Obama’s election, partly because some of the biggest bureauc [...] The importance of this latter avenue has attracted a lot of attention lately, after Max Fisher, in a recent New York Times article, argued that the Trudeau government was “working around” the White House, and dubbed this the “donut” strategy.9 Fisher is right that Canada is unique in the scale and sophistication of its efforts to work all parts of the American system at once, but he is wrong about [...] It might be possible to reframe the post-9/11 border/perimeter security agenda in ways that might be more appealing to Trump supporters, by playing up the restructuring of federal government policies to provide direct economic benefits to embattled border regions (especially in the Midwest), and by emphasizing the strengthening of law enforcement monitoring and control of potential threats to home
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- 11
- Published in
- Ottawa, ON, CA
