Then-Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland speaks at a news conference at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, on Aug. 16, 2017.AARON P. BERNSTEIN/Reuters
The Trump administration was just a few weeks old and already Canadian jobs were under threat. It was early 2017, and Donald Trump had decreed that U.S. oil and gas pipelines would be banned from being made with foreign metal – a potentially devastating blow to an Evraz steel factory in Regina.
Chrystia Freeland, who at the time was Canada’s foreign affairs minister, went to see U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to ask that he stop the policy. But Mr. Ross demurred. So Ms. Freeland played to Team Trump’s famous fractiousness: she let Mr. Ross know that she was having a drink that night with Dina Powell, a White House adviser and one of Mr. Ross’s rivals. If Mr. Ross couldn’t help Canada, Ms. Freeland told him, maybe Ms. Powell could.
Not long after, as Ms. Freeland sat at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington’s tony Georgetown neighbourhood, Mr. Ross called. He had spoken with Mr. Trump, he said, and they had agreed to let U.S. pipelines use Canadian steel after all.
This episode – recounted by one former and one current Canadian government official – was an early display of Ms. Freeland’s tactical toughness over the next four years. She would become Ottawa’s public face in the fraught trade negotiations that culminated in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and the continental trade war over Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium.
Several people who spoke to The Globe and Mail about her for this story did so on condition that they not be named in order to share sensitive details of closed-door, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring.
When she abruptly quit as Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister on Monday, citing disagreements with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on how to handle Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 25-per-cent tariffs on all Canadian goods when he returns to the White House Jan. 20, the president-elect’s reaction was strikingly personal.
“Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada,” he wrote on social media. “She will not be missed!!!”
Ms. Freeland’s managing of bilateral relations at one of their most difficult points is the centrepiece of her record. And it is certain to be studied endlessly as Ottawa again scrambles to turn back one of the most serious economic threats the country has ever faced.
To some who worked with her on the file, Ms. Freeland was deft and effective, standing up for Canadian interests in the face of a protectionist onslaught. To others, she was needlessly obstructionist and provocative, irritating the Trump administration for little reason.
All agree that she took a strongly assertive line.
Kenneth Smith Ramos, Mexico’s chief USMCA negotiator, said Ms. Freeland formed a united front with Mexico’s then-economy minister, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, to fight back successfully against some of the Trump administration’s protectionist demands.
Among other things, the Americans wanted to remove the trade deal’s dispute-resolution mechanisms and curb Canadian and Mexican companies from bidding on U.S. government contracts. Ms. Freeland also pushed for environment and gender-equality provisions in the face of resistance from Mr. Trump’s people.
“I saw her stand her ground very powerfully on issues like dispute settlement and the environment. She was tough but she was fair,” Mr. Smith recalled.
Her comportment, he said, wasn’t off-side for these sorts of high-stakes talks. “I wouldn’t call it obstructionist – that’s part of negotiating: seeing how far you can take your priorities.”
The Canadian strategy, which entailed refusing to make concessions until the very end of negotiations, caused Mr. Trump’s irritation with Ms. Freeland to boil over in public. “We’re very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada. We don’t like their representative very much,” he said at one news conference late during the talks.
In his memoir, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, accuses Canada of “sixteen months of stalling” during negotiations and mocks Ms. Freeland for “uttering platitudes like ‘I get paid in Canadian dollars, not U.S. dollars,’ ” during her frequent news conferences.
He is more laudatory of Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, Mr. Trudeau’s two top advisers at the time, whom he credits with pushing forward a last-minute agreement on U.S. access to Canada’s protected dairy market, a key step in closing the deal.
A different former Canadian official and one U.S. industry source substantially agreed with Mr. Kushner’s portrayal, crediting Mr. Butts, Ms. Telford and David MacNaughton, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time, with driving talks forward. The former official said Mr. Trump’s people tried to go around Ms. Freeland to find others in the Canadian government they could talk to.
Others offered a more nuanced view, including another Canadian official who said Ms. Freeland displayed intelligence, a strong grasp of technical details and was good at crafting strategy. But her style, this person said, rubbed some of her U.S. counterparts the wrong way.
In one notable episode, Ms. Freeland delivered a speech in Washington during negotiations criticizing the Trump administration’s go-it-alone approach to international affairs. “If history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s pre-eminence is eternal,” she warned. The next day, Ms. Freeland made a point of hand-delivering a copy of the text to Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s trade representative during his first term.
Mr. Butts portrayed closing the deal as the work of a group of Canadian officials: Ms. Freeland, himself, Ms. Telford, Mr. MacNaughton, then-deputy ambassador Kirsten Hillman, then-U.S. relations adviser Brian Clow and Mr. Trudeau himself.
“From my perspective, it was a team effort. Different people played more or less prominent roles at different times, but I’d disagree with anyone who is claiming disproportionate credit for any member of the team,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Flavio Volpe, the head of Canada’s auto parts industry group, who advised the Trudeau government during trade talks, said Ms. Freeland was “the quarterback” of the Canadian team. He characterized American irritation with her as sour grapes.
“I was at every round of trade negotiations and there was one constant through all of it: Chrystia Freeland was throwing the passes, Chrystia Freeland was at the centre of it,” he said. “The Texas Rangers hate José Bautista but that’s because he played so well for the Toronto Blue Jays.”
In his own book last year, Mr. Lighthizer, who dealt most directly with Ms. Freeland, portrays the Canadian side in general as playing hardball in negotiations. But he says he nonetheless developed a “quite friendly” rapport with Ms. Freeland, whom he describes as “quite likely a future prime minister.”
After talks concluded, he even flew to Toronto to have dinner with Ms. Freeland and her family at their house.
In the end, USMCA mostly preserved the open market of the previous NAFTA deal. And Mr. Trump ultimately ended tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium without Canada having to concede anything.
With all of this now under threat again, some observers say Ottawa will be worse off without Ms. Freeland’s previous experience to help guide the response.
“A lot of the time, politicians just go through the motions and don’t really understand the technical details. But Freeland did,” said Laura Dawson, executive director of the Future Border Coalition, a group working to eliminate trade barriers at the Canada-U.S. border. “You just couldn’t get anything past her.”
John Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national-security adviser for part of his first term, said Ms. Freeland was “a tough negotiator” whose experience with Mr. Trump highlights a strategic tension for foreign leaders over how to best handle him.
“Trump likes to bully people and the question is whether just giving in eases the pain, or whether you need to fight for what you think is best for your country’s interest,” he said in an interview. “I think the latter is the case.”
With a report from Mark Rendell in Toronto