Politics: The Freeland World
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
Chrystia Freeland Wants to Fix the Twenty-first Century
Chrystia freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, goes about her work in a manner one might describe as hard-nosed. The former reporter prefers direct questions over diplomatic niceties and face-to-face conversations over briefing notes. “You have to talk to a lot of people to get the real story,” she says. In September of last year, Freeland and her top negotiators and advisers met with former prime minister Brian Mulroney in Toronto, at his office in the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. Mulroney had a story that Freeland needed to hear: how he pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement through negotiations. In 1992, when Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government signed NAFTA, the Liberal Party of Canada fiercely opposed him; now, Freeland was seeking his advice in her attempt to keep the deal alive.
As recently as October 2015, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals took office, Canada’s status as a trading nation appeared secure. NAFTA seemed carved into the country’s bedrock—at the time, the agreement accounted for more than $1 trillion (US) in cross-border merchandise trade—and Canada was closing in on free-trade deals with both the European Union and a consortium of Pacific nations. However, just over a year later, the incipient Trans-Pacific Partnership was a shadow of its former self after the United States abandoned it, and NAFTA was suddenly imperilled after the election of Donald Trump, who, ever since his campaign, has promised to renegotiate or scrap the agreement.
The NAFTA talks are due to wrap up this March, if they aren’t cut short or extended. If the US kills the trade pact, the fallout north of the border could be brutal. Canada is the world’s thirty-eighth most populous nation but its tenth-biggest economy. To maintain such outsized prosperity, we buy from, and sell to, foreign markets, mainly the US, which absorbs 75 percent of Canadian exports. Today, industrial supply chains criss-cross the continent; disentangling them would be a costly nightmare. Plus, there’s the risk that if foreign businesses feel they cannot access the US via Canada, they will think twice about investing in the country.
To prevent this scenario, Freeland must stickhandle negotiations with an erratic White House. She is, many believe, the best person for the job: a quick study, a tireless worker, and a true believer in markets and trade. Freeland’s predecessor in the foreign-affairs ministry, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, was a wonkish academic famous for tortuous sentences and wearing a knapsack over his suit. Freeland is slicker and better connected—when she was a journalist, she interacted with most major players in corporate America—and she can talk in ways that resonate with business-minded Republicans, for whom “efficiency” is a virtue but “regulation” is not. “There are some Canadian Liberals who are only grudgingly accepting of business,” says Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “They see it as a necessary evil. Chrystia believes that, by and large, business is good for the world.”
If Freeland pulls out a NAFTA win, she may save Canada from years of economic turbulence. But for her, the challenge represents something bigger. NAFTA, she argues, is a significant piece of a vital political and financial system: a web of treaties, alliances, and commercial networks that the West put in place, beginning after the Second World War, to secure a lasting peace. Freeland espouses a classic liberal vision, whereby democratic countries co-operate and trade with each other, forming a prosperous, ever-expanding bloc. This idea, which came of age during the Truman-Churchill era, is now so old it is largely uncontested, at least among mainstream foreign-policy thinkers.
But as the alt-right conquers hearts and minds, and as nativist political parties gain footholds in the West, liberalism seems under threat. Three years ago, it was possible to think of European countries such as Poland and Hungary as imperfect experiments in democracy; today, these nations seem headed toward authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Trump’s stated intention is to loosen his country’s ties to the international system it helped build. In his September United Nations speech, he articulated his vision of a world dominated not by stable relationships but by temporary, self-serving coalitions.
“I feel very strongly,” says Freeland, “that one of the most pressing challenges today is the threats that the liberal order faces. That order is something we have taken for granted, especially my generation—the postwar peace and prosperity generation. It’s like that Joni Mitchell song, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’”
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.