Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is reaching for one of his favorite political tools in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): town hall meetings.
As the Trump administration calls for “buy American” provisions, Trudeau says the government will continue to accept suggestions sent to its online survey and now plans to have town hall meetings in the future to directly liaise with Canadians.
The public consultation was supposed to end on Tuesday but Trudeau decided to lengthen the process for the time being in an effort to find out not only what Canadians like and dislike about NAFTA but what they would like to see the agreement include in the future.
The government has received 12,000 submissions so far.
The Liberal government does not have a lot of time to organize the town hall meetings. The renegotiation of the agreement will probably commence by mid-August leaving little time for personal interaction. Trudeau engaged with the public in a series of town hall meetings in January that turned out to be an embarrassing series of confrontations with angry Canadians over a raft of issues from the price of electricity to the use of English in Quebec.
The public relations battle was apparently sparked by the Trump administration’s unequivocal statement on Monday that a renegotiated NAFTA must deliver more for the U.S.
“It is important that we do engage with people so that they can understand the benefits of NAFTA and the benefits of the Canada-U.S. economic relationship,” said Foreign Affairs spokesman Adam Austen in a statement.
Trudeau has made NAFTA and good relations with the U.S. a focal point of his administration. Not only has Trudeau found every opportunity to find common ground with a U.S. president with whom he has little real policy agreement, he has sent a several top cabinet ministers to the U.S. on goodwill missions to Congressional leaders and governors of states who most benefit from cross-border trade. Only last week, Trudeau spoke to a group of governors assembled in Providence, Rhode Island and said the employment of 9 million American workers is directly dependent on trade with Canada.
Support for NAFTA varies widely between the two countries, with polls indicating only 50 percent of Americans support the agreement while 80 percent of Canadians are behind it. The opposition Conservatives, who negotiated the original trade deal, remain committed to NAFTA.
New Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was quick to state his position in an interview with The Canadian Press, suggesting that Americans need to be convinced that the agreement is relevant to them: “I believe that trade is good for both countries but when we’re in the U.S. we can’t just ask them to do it out of the goodness of their heart.”