‘We have a narrow window’: Canada needs to act quickly on international trade, expert says

University of Calgary School of Public Policy International Policy Director Carlo Dade speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about international trade.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Donald Trump says Mark Carney told him, ‘Let’s make a deal.’ What kind of window is being opened here?

Carlo Dade: We obviously need to slow our role in any terms of rush to engagement with Donald Trump. The good news is, we’ve had a partial reset. Not unexpected. You see this often in international relations. There’s a tense relationship, say China and Australia over the past couple of years, you have a change in leadership in one of the two parties and it offers a natural chance for a reset, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

I wouldn’t raise my expectations for the ending of the crisis, certainly, or anything that wild, but it certainly does give us a chance to reengage the Americans. It also gives the Americans a chance to walk back some of their rhetoric. So forget what we said last month, we’re talking to a new person.

So it gives that natural pause and opportunity, but I wouldn’t expect too much of that.

MH: As we’ve heard for a number of weeks now, we’re being told the old Canada-U.S. relationship is dead and gone. So in terms of this new government being prepared, what are you looking for in a change of approach?

CD: There has to be two tracks here. One is management of the obvious, immediate crisis, the tariffs. You’ll hear from pretty much every analyst involved, there’s a quote unquote, expert working group with former trade negotiators and government officials that we’re part of at the School of Public Policy and we’ll have a statement out essentially making some of those points start with the immediate crisis, the revocation of the rescinding of the tariffs.

Giving Canada exemptions will, of course, be the number one priority, but to Mark Carney’s point about the relationship changing and not going backward, that is hugely, hugely important. To have that revelation of what we now realize is the reality stated by the leader of Canada points us in the direction of trying to think about a new path of engagement, new terms of engagement, stop living in the era when we first signed NAFTA and start living in an era where we have, not just Donald Trump, but we have a tax on trade from the left and progresses in the U.S.

What we’re seeing in the U.S. is generational change. We’re going to be undergoing changes with the U.S. for at least a decade, if not longer, going forward. So I think that longer term reset has to be done but what we’re looking for immediately, obviously, are the talks to mitigate the impact of the tariffs, if not to try and roll some of them back for Canada.

MH: On the point of pivoting away from reliance on the U.S. market, Mark Carney on election night referenced doing things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations. So to what degree is the clock now ticking on rebuilding the Canadian economy?

CD: The clock has been ticking since the first Trump administration, it’s the second one that’s certainly given us the kick that the first one seemed not to. We have a narrow window where folks are apprised of the crisis to work on not just removing internal trade barriers, but actually putting forward resources to help Canadian firms take advantage of the Canadian market.

Think about a firm in Lethbridge that sells to Spokane because it knows Spokane, it’s a five-hour drive. What do they know about Quebec City? Who do they know in Quebec City? So we really need to take steps that go beyond our past.

We realize that we need to build things. It’s one thing to talk about accessing markets. It’s an entirely different thing to be able to actually match your talk with actions, to actually be able to move products to market. If you can’t move it, you can’t sell it, and if you can only move it to the U.S., then that’s your market.

I think the public has come around. The general public, the group that didn’t pay attention to these issues, has come around, but the window is narrow. The good sign is that the Liberals have the leeway in Parliament to be able to move these motions. So there really is no excuse for them not to do this and there’s even less of an excuse for the Conservatives to not help them do things that are in the national interest, like building trade infrastructure or providing resources to help Canadians impact or take advantage of the Canadian market.

MH: From the Smith government, industry associations, there’s likely to be a stack of demands piling up on the prime minister’s desk. Contentious policies, remove regulatory barriers, fast track infrastructure projects, namely, pipelines. What does this new government need to prioritize?

CD: I think the priorities are the same for the Liberals and the Conservatives. The deep difference, of course, is in the detail, but that’s a huge difference. We’re not looking at deep ideological divisions. We’re instead of talking about the details. So an agreement that we need to prioritize trade infrastructure.

To do that, we need to be able to decide what’s most important for the country, how to leverage investments we make. I think rather than agreement on specific projects, there should be the ability to unite on a vision of how we do this, and not just a vision but the technical means.

At the Canada West Foundation, where I was working on trade infrastructure, we worked at the Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, manufacturers and exporters, pretty much everyone in the country who works on trade infrastructure was in agreement that before we start with a list of what to build, we need to come up with a system to be able to understand the entire integrated supply and production chains and where to make investments that will benefit the entire system. This is what Australia does, Malaysia, the U.K., pretty much every major economy in the world except Canada.

So before we start fighting over specific products, let’s come to agreement on something where there is already national unity, at least on the private sector side and the academic side, and that is the need to come up with the system to be able to prioritize projects. From there, we can move on to specific projects. So there are those opportunities, those who are looking for a bridge to start being built, I think, will be disappointed and should be disappointed.

We need to get the system down before we take the immediate steps, and the prairie provinces have done this. The MOU between the prairie provinces. We are already doing this on the prairies. So we are the ones that are leading the country and using this type of system so we really should insist that that goes national.