In business, as in life, you can worry yourself into a curled fetal position under the desk. You can vent and bay at the moon about the cruel circumstances of commerce. You can decry and vilify to salve the wounds of loss and harm to your initiative.
But with Donald Trump as president starting this wonderful weekend, it might be more instructive to get past that and attend to the advice in Shakespeare’s line lately delivered by Benedict Cumberbatch as a modern Sherlock Holmes: “The game’s afoot.”
So, Canada, time to play, even with the mysteriously powered perceived villain of non-American business practices.
No kidding, Sherlock: how the country economically engages the Trump presidency will be critical to the well-being of almost everyone reading this column – and to our newspaper/website/operation itself, for that matter. After all, a sneeze below the border gets wiped on our sleeve. No, any angst of 2016 must translate into advocacy in 2017, as does earlier frustration need to morph into day-by-day navigation, on what will surely be destabilized ground. Vertigo has been named the newest state in the union.
Still, too much is at stake for any of us to do anything but act accordingly. And Justin Trudeau has staged our government intriguingly for however many Trump years we will embrace or endure.
It requires performing the Canadian edition of Trump’s vaunted book, The Art of the Deal, with the lead actor Chrystia Freeland, appointed last week our foreign affairs minister but retaining the valuable Canada-U.S. file as she departs the balance of the trade portfolio. We know Freeland’s recent history. She cemented the Canada-Europe trade agreement, knows Russia in a way even Trump might not (although they appear to know much about him) and has shown herself capable of elbows-up, sleeves-rolled-up behaviour.
That Freeland already met Trump’s transition team and got on a first-name basis with a few people heading up the food chain was most helpful. If that was her aides’ idea, give them a raise. If that was her call, then let’s thank a public official for doing one’s job at last.
In B.C., we can only hope she is the lumberjack to save our softwood.
Another key to the relationship is the newish ambassador Trudeau sent to Washington, David MacNaughton, fluent with Capitol Hill and Parliament Hill, experienced in business, and one of the country’s shrewdest minds on the intersection of politics and communications. He gives Canada a fighting chance to decode Beltway cacophony, to separate signal from noise.
Even though MacNaughton was likely planned by Trudeau as a conduit to a Hillary Clinton administration, even though he and Trump are barely the same carbon-based life forms, he would not be a skunk at any of the commander-in-chief’s Mar-a-Lago garden parties.
But the third forward on the Trudeau team power play is a departing minister, John McCallum, and about him we must wonder whether the puck can be put in the net.
McCallum was designated our ambassador to China, presumably part of a grander scheme to diversify Canada’s connection to America in the uncertain Trump years – to build a better pact with the No. 2 economy as a hedge with No. 1.
But he is hardly steeped in diplomacy or accomplishment in this and earlier Liberal governments, and it is difficult to see how he will move from warhorse to thoroughbred in Trudeau’s ambitious trade and investment strategy.
That being said, we have to be relieved in one respect: it was nationally useful for Justin Trudeau to send Stéphane Dion to pasture in releasing version 2.0 of the cabinet last week.
Dion is a fine mind but erudite to the point of woolliness. He wouldn’t have hidden his contempt for Trump or China as time went on, ever an outlier who struggled to master inner Ottawa. Face it, any regular demonstration of intellectualism will not be a preferred trait in the new Washington – even a French accent might seem worthy of wall-building.
Buckle up, Canada. We might need the airbags. Drive on, even if the pedal isn’t to the metal.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
