Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will meet with U.S> President Donald Trump on Monday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
They repeat variations of the same thing, the people tasked with helping Justin Trudeau navigate relations with Donald Trump, as though trying to persuade themselves along with skeptical reporters.
Sure, it's a weird time to be dealing with Washington, the Canadian officials and advisers concede. But there's no reason to panic. Get members of the new President's administration one on one, and they're reasonable enough. They may not know a lot about their northern neighbour, but they're favourably disposed and quick to grasp why we enjoy a special, mutually beneficial relationship that merits working together in ways that give policy wins to both governments.
If you start from the premise that it's in Canada's interest to make nice with our biggest trading partner, no matter how much the people running that country may offend our sensibilities, it's hard not to admire the (slightly forced) optimism of Mr. Trudeau's Liberals about all this.
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It's also hard not to wonder if their purported faith in preserving relative normalcy will remain intact after Monday, when Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau will for the first time meet face to face.
Ottawa could hardly have done more, in the short span since Mr. Trump was elected, to prepare for this moment. Chrystia Freeland, known for her relationship-building skills, has been appointed Foreign Affairs Minister, retained a Canada-U.S. trade file that normally belongs to the International Trade Minister, and been tasked with spending much of her time in Washington. She is joined on her charm offensive by a parade of cabinet colleagues. One of the Liberals' top political staffers, Brian Clow, has taken up residency in the Prime Minister's Office to manage government-wide Canada-U.S. relations.
The reports out of those early efforts have generally been encouraging. Ms. Freeland seems to have gotten off to a nice start with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, for instance, and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan with James Mattis, his new counterpart. Steve Schwarzman, the head of Mr. Trump's economic advisory council, turned up at a Liberal cabinet retreat to say that Canada shouldn't fret too much about Mr. Trump's willingness to tear up the North American free-trade agreement.
But everything to date has been conventional, by comparison with what may come. The qualifications of some of Mr. Trump's cabinet picks are debatable, but for the most part they and other appointees seem inclined to try to function and communicate roughly according to the norms established by their predecessors – at least relative to the man who appointed them.
A meeting between two countries' leaders is often the most predictable part of bilateral dealings. Everything leading up to that point – legwork by political staff, bureaucrats and cabinet counterparts – is supposed to reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises.
But Mr. Trump's one-on-ones with other heads of state or government seem to be all about unpleasant surprises. This is a President who reportedly hung up on Australia's Prime Minister after flipping out over a refugee-transfer agreement he appeared to have only just learned about, and reportedly paused a conversation with Vladimir Putin to ask staff about the New START nuclear-deployment agreement before denouncing it.
It's possible Canada has prepared more for its leader's interaction with Mr. Trump than has any other country. It's also anyone's guess how much that matters. By all accounts, Mr. Trump lacks interest in the detailed briefings that precede such meetings. That's especially problematic because he likely has less background knowledge about his country's foreign relations than any other modern U.S. president, and often seems to react negatively when caught off guard by something he should have known about.
Mr. Trudeau might try to account for that by playing it extremely safe, letting the President take the conversational lead as much as possible. Even then, there's no telling what might capture the President's attention and how he might act out. Maybe he'll see an unflattering comparison to Mr. Trudeau on cable news, and be defensive. Maybe he'll decide after the meeting to boast that Mr. Trudeau deferred to him, or lavish praise on the PM for doing so, upsetting Mr. Trudeau's balancing act in trying to play nice without looking weak at home.
The best-case scenario, from Ottawa's perspective, has to be as uneventful a Monday as possible, allowing a quick return to less-fraught dealings with less-volatile members of Mr. Trump's administration. And perhaps, in the process, Mr. Trudeau and his officials might be able to get some sense of which of those members actually have control over issues that matter to Canada – something decidedly unclear when the administration already reportedly has warring factions competing for Mr. Trump's attention.
Whatever happens, the Liberals will do their best to convey that it's all perfectly manageable. Hopefully it's not about to become even more difficult to convince the rest of us of that.