Category: Chairman’s Desk

The Trump and Trudeau campaigns also proved that what politicians do still matters — both on the campaign and in government.

To say that election campaigning has changed significantly over the years is to state the obvious. And nothing has propelled campaign teams to grow more sophisticated and develop sharper insights than the rise of technology.

At one time, local campaigners would stand in front of the local Tim Hortons and meet every voter who came by. Now, campaigns mine data bases to find the three people on a given street most likely to vote for their candidate and go talk just to them.

It’s a whole new world. Big data has given political parties a greater understanding of not only who votes for them and why but how they think and feel as well. Facebook clicks, tweets, and TV-watching habits are parsed by campaign teams. Knowing your favourite TV show allows them to predict your opinions on climate change policy.

By and large, this new world order works: Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign’s ability to do a superior job of mining information propelled it to victory. The Stephen Harper Conservatives were masterful in targeting their voters and hammering home their message, ignoring the distractions of the media.

Both campaigns successfully, and with intention, spoke to voters who were open to their message and to their policies.

Both also had an important understanding of the shape of the electorate.

Both campaigns delivered wins based on their strategic appeals to specific segments of the population.

But, as anyone who has experienced a computer meltdown knows, technology is not always king.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the Republican party that chose Donald Trump as its presidential candidate are very different: one party prides itself on its evidence-based approach and thoughtful co-ordination, while the other stakes its claim on brash talk.

But both have similar electoral roots. Donald Trump’s victory relied on blue-collar white voters across the Midwest who had grown increasingly conservative in their outlook over the course of the last two decades, but who tended to stay home on election day.

Before the election, the media and the Democrats seemed to think states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio would all remain part of the Democratic coalition simply because many disaffected white voters would simply sit out the election and not vote. The states were discounted by media and the Democrats as part of an immovable ‘blue wall’ that would see them remain part of the Democratic coalition for years to come, in spite of the disaffection that was swirling within them.

Justin Trudeau’s victory relied on young voters, whose voting participation was historically far below that of middle-aged and older Canadians. Their views, which were stridently out of touch with Harper’s, were discounted. As people who conventional wisdom said would never vote, they were simply of little concern to the Conservatives.

The 2015 Canadian election and the 2016 U.S. election delivered stunning rebukes to those who believed citizens who were unlikely to participate in elections never would.

One of the under-reported facts of the last Canadian federal election is that the Conservatives lost few actual voters. Instead, the Liberals’ margin of victory was in large part due to the large turnout of young voters who had been discounted as non-voters.

Hillary Clinton’s lumbering, data-heavy campaign was similarly overtaken, against all expectations and prognostications, by a surging white vote.

The campaigns proved that, for all data can account for, it can’t account for passion.

The campaigns also proved that what politicians do still matters — both on the campaign and in government.

When Donald Trump announces a travel ban against people from seven countries, it may enrage media pundits, but only cements his political future, because as much as it upsets some of the electorate, it makes it much more likely that those former non-voters will become ongoing members of his voting coalition.

When Justin Trudeau announces a marijuana policy that ignites criticism from social conservatives and older Canadians, it doesn’t hurt his government: rather it reinforces the idea that he is something new and exciting for young voters and helps ensure they will return to the polls in 2019.

In fact, Trump and Trudeau have to govern in a way that keeps the faith of their target voters. Should they fall in to the trap of the same old politics that led their target voters to sit out previous elections, they risk losing the enthusiasm they generated with the result that those newly animated voters will return to their La-Z-boys.

It’s a data-driven world, to be sure, but these two transformative political figures have demonstrated that organic enthusiasm can still trump cynical technocracy.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

In this era of shrill, untested and unverified political extremes, we need to amplify voices in the middle and to represent clearly and fairly what is balanced and reasonable and true.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s political career started with a lie. He emerged on the political scene by repeatedly questioning whether then-President Barack Obama had been born in the United States. The highest-profile ‘birther’ is now the leader of the free world.

Consider how far he has departed from reality. His spewing of ‘alternative facts’ or more appropriately termed ‘bald face lies’ include saying Obama founded Daesh, also know as ISIS or ISIL, calling the Clintons literal murderers, and declaring false numbers for the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

In Trump’s mind, if he believes it, it must be true.

Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking initiative, currently lists as entirely true only four per cent of the statements Trump has made since the election. Fully 17 per cent are listed as ‘pants on fire,’ Politifact.com’s most egregious grade. For comparison, on his last day in the Oval Office, PolitiFact graded 21 per cent of Obama’s comments as ‘true,’ and only two per cent as ‘pants on fire.’

Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century German chancellor, famously said: ‘People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.’ This is now truer than ever.

In what is being called ‘post-truth politics,’ politicians frame the debate largely by appealing to listeners’ emotions and without addressing the factual underpinning of a policy. Then, when confronted with factual rebuttals from credible sources, these politicians simply repeat their talking points and ignore the facts.

The digital world makes it easier for politicians to get away with this behaviour. Social media outlets allow people to get news from sources that echo their own opinion; to surround themselves on social media with commentary that affirms their biases. The result? The traditional value attributed to evidence, consistency and scholarship is both weakened and diminished.

In fact, citizens have now told politicians that they have had enough of experts.

But in throwing out the experts, we have thrown out the fact checkers. The holders-of-feet-to-the-fire. And in doing so have, perhaps, made the rise of a politician like Donald Trump inevitable.

The Trump administration’s corrosive, deliberate lying is very different from the usual broken promises we have experienced from politicians, of all stripes, in the past.

A broken promise impacts the future. A political lie impacts our perceptions of the past.

In Canada, countless prime ministers have been elected and have then broken promises. Take, for example, Jean Chr’tien’s promise to do away with the GST, Pierre Trudeau campaigning against imposing wage and price controls and Stephen Harper running a deficit.

On the other hand, Trump dismisses facts. He alters his positions on a whim, and depending on the audience, declares that which will guarantee him the most attention and the loudest applause.

The consequences of this practice will be far-reaching. His administration has already begun destroying American credibility internationally.

When Trump is, inevitably, forced to respond to an international confrontation, America’s ability to rally support will be diminished. Its allies will doubt America’s intentions and facts on which those intentions are based.

Sadly, post-truth politics is not confined to the United States. Other international leaders are trying to make gains by lying to their electorates.

Britons voted to leave the EU in June on a campaign largely based on false information. Among the lies is that EU membership cost the UK 350 million pounds a week; money that would be better spent on such things as the National Health Service. It was also falsely propagated that Turkey was guaranteed membership in the EU by 2020.

The era of post-truth and alternative facts is not going away anytime soon. The refrain ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ has been lost on political leaders and campaign managers everywhere.

In consequence, in this era of shrill, untested and unverified political extremes, we need to amplify voices in the middle and to represent clearly and fairly what is balanced and reasonable and true.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

Typically, we’ve had to read between lines of speeches to gain an understanding of American policy positions. Not so with Donald Trump.

It was as contentious a beginning to a presidency as it was inauspicious. With the world already on edge, Donald Trump’s administration spent much of its first week arguing with the media and, by extension, the public over the size of the crowd at his inauguration compared to that of the one at Barack Obama’s.

In a spectacular display, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer was sent out on Saturday to insist to a crowd of disbelieving journalists that their eyes had deceived them and that they had, in fact (or perhaps in ‘alt fact’), witnessed the largest crowd ever seen at an inauguration.

It was blatantly untrue. In actual fact, it was a bald-face lie. Watching Spicer haplessly try to convince a room of experienced journalists — from the presidential press secretary’s lecturn, no less — of what both he and they knew to be a fabrication was as surreal as it was disorienting.

It was pure Trumpian politics.

But as we have come to expect in this Trump era, petty spectacle over optics occludes other far more significant stories. In the days since the Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump has issued a number of executive orders that fundamentally alter long-standing positions of the U.S. government.

A wall between Mexico and the U.S. has been authorized. The Keystone XL pipeline has been revived, along with the Dakota Access Pipeline. The U.S. has immediately withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Funding has been withdrawn from international groups that perform abortions or lobby to legalize or promote abortions.

And there is more. Late Friday afternoon, Trump announced that the issuing of visas to people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen will be suspended for 90 days.

Each of these is a significant and abrupt policy shift from the Obama era. But none should be a surprise. After all, Trump had made it clear again and again that this is exactly what he would do as president.

Trump’s actions may well be belligerent, but they are transparent as well. Transparent in way we have never seen before.

In the past, we have often been left guessing as off-the-cuff remarks from former presidents have set the world on edge. Now, we have a president who cheerfully offers every thought to open scrutiny. His tweets act like a window into his mind, a roadmap to his policies.

This presents Canada with an advantage we’ve not had before. Typically, we’ve had to read between lines of speeches, parse conversations, and spend hours analyzing congressional positions to gain an understanding of American policy positions.

In fact, the Obama administration was one of the most opaque in recent memory. Led by a man who defined himself by being measured and even-tempered, it operated in a manner that kept its opponents and allies guessing as to its true intentions.

Take, for example, the Obama administration’s slow push against Israel, which developed over the course of eight years. Only in its dying weeks did the administration truly unveil how much it believed Israel to be hampering the peace process, implicitly supporting an unprecedented reprimand of Israel at the United Nations that represented a major break with historical U.S.-Israel unity.

A second example was Obama’s approach on the Keystone XL pipeline, which provided significant challenges for the Canadian government. For close observers of the deal, it was obvious that his administration was always uncomfortable with its approval. In spite of this, Obama delayed making a decision for years out of a desire to avoid making concrete commitments. Only in his last days in office did his administration formalize its opposition and kill the process.

Viewed through the prism of traditional government communications, Trump’s administration can be seen, in one sense at least, as a breath of fresh air. His pettiness and aggressive use of Twitter offend the senses of many — for good reason, of course — but such a novel approach lends clarity for the purposes of figuring out the administration’s view on any given piece of public policy.

There is rarely a question on where Trump stands on an issue. A quick scroll through his Twitter history reveals his thoughts on an entire range of topics.

As Carl Bernstein says, it provides an ‘MRI of his brain.’ It lets us understand his temperament, the way he thinks and, ultimately, his policy positions.

For the Canadian government, it is akin to playing poker with all of the cards face-up on the table.

And that, regardless of what we think of the man personally, provides a never before seen advantage to Canada in dealing with our single most important bilateral relationship.

Jaime Watt is executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

The Trudeau government has navigated the challenges well thus far, but a Trump presidency fundamentally alters the waters.

It’s perhaps ironic that it is an iconic quote by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father that sums up the situation that confronts him today.

Pierre Trudeau once remarked that living next to the United States was ‘in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or even-tempered is the beast ﾅ one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’

Trudeau’s relationship with former President Barack Obama was often compared by the media to Brian Mulroney’s infamously close relationship with Ronald Reagan; his relationship with Hillary Clinton, once cast as the inevitable successor to Obama, was no less warm.

Together, this promised a golden era of Liberal and Democratic rule in North America that would include increased environmental regulation, a focus on growing the social safety net, and, increasingly, aligned foreign policies that would emphasize brokering international peace rather than imposing it.

Friday’s inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has suddenly, abruptly, rudely ruptured that idyllic vision.

The elephant isn’t so much twitching as having full-body convulsions.

Following its election in 2015, the Liberal Party mapped out a four-year guide to re-election. They did this thinking they would have an American counterpart marching in lockstep on major policies.

Instead, the Liberals now face a president with plans antithetical to core components of their platform.

That said, the Trudeau government has shown it understands the enormity of the challenges it faces. The irascible St’phane Dion has been shuffled out of the global affairs portfolio in favour of Chrystia Freeland who, in addition to having performed well at international trade, knows the United States well. A team specifically focused on U.S./Canada policy, led by Brian Clow, the very capable former chief of staff to Freeland has been drafted. High-level staff members have been dispatched to Trump Tower to meet with Trump administration officials.

And yet the enormity of the challenge has only begun to present itself; a challenge that will come in three principal forms.

The first is environmental policy. Carbon pricing grew increasingly popular with the Democratic establishment as the U.S. election approached. It is very possible that increased environmental taxation would have been a top priority for Hillary Clinton. But that reality does not exist: President Trump is uncompromisingly opposed to any increase in business regulation for environmental purposes, a position at odds with the Trudeau government’s decision to enact carbon pricing.

With a president who opposes environmental policies he sees as harming business and who favours reducing taxes, the Trudeau government could be forced to reconsider its commitment to a policy that will handicap Canadian businesses. Already, there has been pressure from our business community wary of the challenge.

The second challenge surrounds foreign policy. Again, the Trudeau government had found itself largely aligned with the less aggressive positioning of the Democratic establishment. A reluctance to be drawn into commitments on regional conflicts, support for increased consensus-building, and support of international institutions defined both the Obama and Trudeau administrations.

As Trump moves into the Oval Office, that harmony moves out. Even during the few, short months following the election, he has demonstrated a belligerent, anti-establishment approach. NAFTA, the European Union, and the UN find themselves under attack by a president who dismisses them as either useless or malicious. For a multilateralist like Justin Trudeau, the problem will be standing up for such institutions while trying to remain in the Trump government’s favour.

Finally, personality may itself be a challenge. On the international stage, Trudeau has been framed as an inspiring figure, the personification of a new generation of hope and promise.

Trump, on the other hand, has been positioned as a throwback to a time when America was meaner, smaller, more insular and selfish.

Should that narrative take hold, Trudeau will risk developing an adversarial relationship with a president who has demonstrated time and again that he has not only a fragile ego coupled with a narcissistic personality, but who takes up all the available oxygen in a room.

The Trudeau government has navigated the challenges well thus far, but a Trump presidency fundamentally alters the waters. No longer are we in an age of North American liberal ascendancy; instead, many of the underpinnings of such an agenda are under direct attack.

The ability to adjust to real life circumstances while keeping strategic focus is at the core of the challenge of governing. In 2009, Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty, elected on — and believing in — a platform of strict fiscal conservatism, found themselves deciding to run a deficit. They adapted to circumstance for the good of the country. Whether Trudeau can do the same may decide the fate of his government in 2019.

Jaime Watt is executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

There are a couple of things Trudeau needs to do to chart a path forward with Trump. He needs to reassure the Americans that we have their back on security.
He also must demonstrate that the economies of both Canada and the U.S. have been served well by constant, constructive engagement. He must demonstrate that the relationship is not a zero-sum game, that what is good for Canada in the bilateral relationship is also good for the U.S., and vice versa.

TORONTO—Donald Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency of the United States didn’t so much rewrite the rulebook as burn it altogether. It remains to be seen how conventional and therefore predictable his presidency will be. The early signs indicate that Canada’s stewardship of the bilateral relationship will be tested as it hasn’t been since the last Trudeau was in office.

The sky hasn’t fallen.

In the weeks following the U.S. presidential election, the stock market was on fire, the nuclear arsenal had yet to be launched, more goods continued to cross the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor than any other international border crossing in the world and Americans are still going to work and to school every day.

However, change is coming; change that affects Canada. And how Canada chooses to respond to the change will play a big role in the impact it has on our country.

This change will manifest itself in two ways. First, political campaigners will have to rewrite the rule book. Second, in terms of policy, Donald Trump will present several challenges to the Trudeau government because each has very different goals, including on current challenges such as the environment and refugees.

The unorthodoxy of the Trump campaign was astonishingly successful laying waste to the idea that cookie-cutter political campaigns are winning campaigns.

Trump threw out the campaign rule book because he had never read the rule book. In doing so, he created at least three new rules for elections to come.

First, the candidate with the best ground game no longer necessarily wins. Second, television advertising is not the key to success it once was. Third, authenticity no longer matters.

Throughout the campaign, Trump insisted he did not need to rely on traditional campaign tactics to win. Hillary Clinton used the data-driven, on-the-ground machine that propelled President Barack Obama to two straight electoral victories. Trump, meanwhile, pointed to the overwhelming nomination victory he achieved with a relatively small team on a tight budget, and he stuck to that strategy for the election campaign.

Then, Trump campaigned in a different way. Instead of spending millions of dollars on television advertising, he focused on old-school rallies, his message seeping through the free media coverage and his often ridiculous Twitter posts.

Finally, rather than strive for authenticity, he played a consistent role, just as he had done on his reality TV shows, The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.

Campaign professionals strive to create an authentic candidate to whom people can relate—one with a backstory that captures the essence of voters’ aspirations.

This was never going to happen with Trump, an unusually privileged son of a businessman, a billionaire who hasn’t paid federal taxes in years.

But what Trump lacked in authenticity, he made up for with consistency. His contrivance was perfectly constant, across all media, whether it was a major network interview, a stadium appearance in front of 10,000 adoring fans or a late-night Tweet.

The new campaign rule book fundamentally alters the political landscape. No longer should we equate electoral success with those with the deepest pockets, oldest party roots, the most endorsements or a perfect Norman Rockwell resume.

Looking ahead, and with regard to policy and the future of the U.S.-Canada relationship, many have argued that Trudeau’s mandate and many of his policy objectives are less likely to succeed with a Republican in the White House.

There is, however, another way to look at this—the Trump presidency might, just might, afford Canada economic good fortune.

In fact, it is not Trudeau’s legacy and progress that’s on the line.

Instead, more than a few policy tenets close to the hearts of past Conservative governments are the ones at stake. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), American rapprochement with Cuba, the Syrian civil war, engagement with Russia, unconditional support for Israel—the list goes on.

Trump’s presidency poses a greater threat to former prime minister Stephen Harper’s trade and foreign policy legacy than Trudeau ever did.

Given this new world we find ourselves in, it’s important that Trudeau respond only to concrete policy proposals that Trump puts forward, and not to his abstract Twitter proclamations.

For the most part, Canadian governments have maintained a businesslike approach toward the United States, and such an approach will continue to serve Canada well with Trump in the White House.

There are a couple of things Trudeau needs to do to chart a path forward with Trump. He needs to reassure the Americans that we have their back on security.
He also must demonstrate that the economies of both Canada and the U.S. have been served well by constant, constructive engagement. He must demonstrate that the relationship is not a zero-sum game, that what is good for Canada in the bilateral relationship is also good for the U.S., and vice versa.

The new U.S. president and Canada’s prime minister have very different policy goals. However, whether they like it or not, they will be forced to work together on certain key bilateral issues.

Trump’s foreign policy acknowledges the fatigue that Americans feel about foreign military interventions. This sets the stage for the country to take a pass on multilateral conflicts.

Trump has already mused about scaling back American treaty obligations in Asia and with NATO, an alliance that he has attacked as ‘obsolete.’ Meanwhile, he has exchanged kind words with Russia, NATO’s old nemesis.

On a more concerning note, Trump has threatened to ignore any invoking of Article 5—the principle of collective defence—by NATO allies who do not meet the minimum spending on defence. Canada spends less than half of the minimum.

On trade, Trump has expressed a desire to renegotiate NAFTA. If Canada or Mexico object, he could withdraw from the deal entirely—closing off the lucrative American market. That means that Brian Mulroney’s 1987 free trade agreement with the United States goes back into effect, but Trump may want to renegotiate that, too.

The dealmaker-in-chief will not be content to let the status quo in trade continue, and he won’t stop at NAFTA. Leaked transition documents show that he’s taking aim at Canada’s softwood lumber and beef industries, through country-of-origin labelling.

On taxes, Trump touts an aggressive plan to attract investment that could put Canadian business in peril. His tax plan features tax cuts across the board, with the hope that individuals and businesses will have more money to invest. Personal taxes would be simplified to three brackets, while corporate taxes would be reduced to 15 per cent from 35 per cent.

RBC Capital Markets reports that the move will boost the American economy, which would be positive for Canada. However, those moves would make Canada’s Harper-level corporate taxes less competitive and make a southward brain-drain more likely.

And finally, Trump would put global climate agreements in jeopardy. He has declared that he doesn’t believe in the science of climate change. He has said he intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, end carbon emission limits on American power plants, and deregulate coal, natural gas and offshore oil drilling. Trudeau was an enthusiastic signatory of the Paris agreement, and if Trump follows through, the prime minister will face a choice between keeping his word or making adjustments to guarantee Canadian competitiveness.

American energy independence is a core tenet of Trump’s philosophy, and he will try to reduce reliance on oil from countries he views as antithetical to the American experience. On the bright side for Canada, he has voiced support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Earlier this year, The Economist listed the possible election of Donald Trump as one of the top 10 risks facing the world. He was rated as posing a greater risk than Britain leaving the European Union, or an armed clash in the South China Sea.

Trump’s election to the Oval Office is a sign that choppy waters are straight ahead. Canada, like the rest of the world, has no choice but to sail right through.

John F. Kennedy, commenting on the relationship between the U.S. and Canada in his address to Parliament in 1961, famously said: ‘Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies.’ Words now graven in stone in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.

Less than a decade after JFK uttered those words, prime minister Pierre Trudeau had to deal with an American president who was overtly hostile to the Canadian government.

In the peculiar way history repeats itself, Pierre’s son will soon have to deal with a potentially hostile White House.

Conservative strategist Jaime Watt is a member of CBC’s popular Insiders panel on The National, and executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. jwatt@navltd.com

This piece was first published in the January/February issue of Policy Magazine, edited by L. Ian MacDonald.