Trump comeback could see familiar faces re-emerge — and they may spell trouble for Canada

Canadians are watching the U.S. election campaign with more than their usual mix of trepidation and fascination, as it careens from a near-miss assassination attempt on one candidate to an unprecedented step-aside from the other.

Two-thirds of Canadians say a second Donald Trump term would be either ‘”bad news” or “terrible news” for Canada, according to a poll of 1,435 adults conducted by the Angus Reid Institute.

(The online poll was conducted over the four days following the shooting in Butler, Pa., and has a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)

“It’s not just about the Canada-U.S. relationship, although there’s a significant amount of anxiety and pessimism around that,” pollster Shachi Kurl told CBC News.

“There’s also the prospects for what happens in the United States, what happens around Ukraine and U.S. support for Ukraine and the broader NATO relationship. Does that continue to hold together or does it come apart? [There are also] issues around the continuing fight on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.”

A majority of respondents said a second Trump term would be negative for global stability (68%), U.S.-Canada relations (65%), the unity of the United States (67%), the fight against climate change (67%) and Canada’s economy (60%).

“So across a number of domestic Canadian, U.S. and international issues, there is that sense of anxiety and unease,” said Kurl.

“The word we used is dread, and it is palpable among Canadians.”

Some Trump picks more alarming than others

Trump is no longer the unknown quantity he was in 2016, and Canadians have had experience with his high-pressure trade negotiating tactics which have included threats, the mixing of unrelated issues and the use of bogus economic data.

The people Trump would name to key posts will be critical to deciding how tough his administration would be for Canada — and some potential names are more concerning than others.

The Canadian government learned during the first Trump administration that there were individuals who could be counted on to tone down some of the wilder suggestions — like Trump’s son-in-law and senior staffer Jared Kushner — while others seemed to stoke Trump’s worst instincts.

Unfortunately for Canada, those who tried to moderate Trump’s behaviour — people like former national security advisor H.R. McMaster, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, former chief of staff John Kelly, defence secretary Mark Esper and former vice-president Mike Pence —  eventually fell out with Trump and won’t be returning.

Instead, it’s the firebrands who are on the recall list for 2025.

From the jailhouse to the White House?

One cabinet member went so far in attacking Canada he got out ahead of his boss and had to apologize: Peter Navarro, director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.

Navarro described his role under Trump as to “provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right.”

Navarro was almost sidelined by Wall Street insider Gary Cohn, a relative moderate who headed Trump’s National Economic Council.

But Cohn, like many establishment figures who entered Trumpworld convinced they could moderate the leader’s more radical impulses, ultimately lost and found himself on the outside after arguing against tariffs on steel and aluminum.

This year, Navarro served a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over documents relating to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

On his first full day of freedom he headed to Milwaukee to give a speech at Trump’s convention.

Navarro is one of the few cabinet members from Trump’s first administration who is ready to endorse him for a second term, and his role at the Republican National Convention — where the MAGA movement greeted him as a hero who took one for the team — suggests he could return if Trump wins.

That could be bad news for Canada.

Trump’s tariffs, part two

As soon as Trump came to office in January 2017, Canada began to hear complaints about its dairy industry. A tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum — one of Navarro’s pet projects — followed shortly after. Then Trump threatened a tax on Canadian auto imports. 

Canada went through almost two years of painful renegotiation of NAFTA, which President Trump frequently called the “worst trade deal ever made,” before signing off on the new Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade (CUSMA) that Trump has called “the best trade deal ever made.”

But that doesn’t mean Trump considers trade with Canada to be a closed file, says Lana Payne, president of UNIFOR (formerly Canadian Auto Workers), a union that was heavily involved in the last rounds of renegotiation.

“I think we have a very big hurdle here. Trump has already announced that he would put a 10 per cent  tariff on everything that is imported to the United States, which would have an outsized impact on Canada, of course, because we sell most of our goods to the U.S.,” Payne said.

“So this is a very big concern, and it is something that would be contrary to the trade agreement that we already have with the U.S.”

Lighthizer still advising the campaign

One name Canadians became familiar with during the NAFTA renegotiation was that of now-former U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer.

While the Canadians said he was not as rude and dour in private as he appeared in public, he had no compunction about citing false data in his effort to strongarm Canada into “rebalancing” trade between the two countries.

He has continued to advise the Trump campaign from the America First Policy Institute, and last year authored a book called No Trade Is Free that may give some insight into a future Trump trade policy.

Much of the book focuses on “decoupling” from China, but Lighthizer also claims that “many of our closest allies and partners across the world also treat American producers unfairly.” He proposes a regime of tariffs and trade barriers more protectionist than anything seen in decades in the U.S.

It’s not clear if Lighthizer will return to his old post. But his ideas look likely to make a comeback.

‘Mass deportations now!’

At the Republican convention, delegates waved signs saying “Mass Deportations Now,” and border security is a cornerstone of the Trump campaign today as it was in 2016.

Trump’s former immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan is reportedly in the running for the Homeland Security job.

He was quoted by NBC News as saying that Trump would come back in January — and he would “be on his heels coming back” and would run “the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

Homan faces a challenger for the Homeland Security job from Rep. Mark Green.

While Trump’s focus is heavily directed at the U.S.-Mexico border, Green has been trying to steer the focus to the northern border.

Another cabinet contender who could put the heat on Canada is Rep. Elise Stefanik, the number-four Republican in the House, who had been considered a contender for the vice-presidential nomination until J.D. Vance secured that prize.

Her 21st congressional district covers most of New York state’s land border with Canada.

MAGA fixates on the northern border

There was a time when northern border politicians acted as a voice of reason when colleagues tried to use the U.S.-Canada border to make political hay.

But the new generation of MAGA politicians in border states like New York, New Hampshire and Montana have been among the loudest voices calling for more enforcement there.

Stefanik co-chairs the Northern Border Security Caucus and has portrayed the border in New York’s north country region as out of control, saying it has helped to create “an unsustainable environment that has taken a financial and humanitarian toll on the state.”

Stefanik was one of Trump’s most aggressive defenders during the Jan. 6 hearings, and has let it be known she would be “proud to serve in any capacity” in a second Trump administration.

Haley: ‘We will do a wall’

Nikki Haley ran against Trump in the primaries, promising she would never endorse him if she lost. She then went on to do exactly that, receiving in return a primetime speaking slot at the RNC.

Her tepid appearance in Milwaukee may not be enough to secure her a post in a Trump administration, although Trump has previously said she’ll probably get one.

By the standards of today’s Republican Party, Nikki Haley is considered a moderate, but when it comes to the Canadian border, she has been anything but.

Haley raised the issue much more during her primary campaign than Trump, who remains focused on the southern border.

“We don’t talk enough about the northern border,” Haley told a crowd in Henniker, N.H., adding that hundreds of suspected terrorists were being apprehended crossing from Canada.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics do indeed show that more people who appear on the U.S. watchlist of suspected terrorists have been apprehended in recent years at the northern border than at the southern border. That said, all but a tiny handful crossing from Canada have been stopped while crossing openly at regular border crossings, while most of those coming from Mexico have been caught trying to enter the U.S. surreptitiously.

“We will do a wall. We will do any sort of border patrol that we need to have on there,” Haley told supporters in Peterborough, N.H. “Whatever it takes to keep people out that are illegal from coming in, we will do it.”

NATO: Trump’s hands may be tied

The fear that Trump will remove the U.S. from NATO may be overblown in the short term.

A law passed with bipartisan support last year makes it much harder for him to do so unilaterally — one of the few instances in which Republican lawmakers have sought to rein in the former president.

Most of the people being touted for national security posts have in the past described themselves as supporters of the alliance.

That includes Elbridge Colby, a deputy assistant secretary of defence from the first Trump mandate who may be in line for a bigger job in a comeback administration.

“I certainly count myself as a strong supporter of NATO,” he told CBC News during the recent NATO summit in Washington.

Colby was the main author of Trump’s 2018 national defence strategy, and has been floated as a potential national security advisor in a second term.

Colby counsels punishment

Colby has spoken harshly of Canada’s defence spending and commitment to NATO, suggesting that he would counsel a punitive pressure campaign to get Canada to raise its budget.

Colby said the head of the Canadian military has been “very clear about the completely unacceptable condition of the Canadian Armed Forces,” calling Canada an “outlier” in terms of hitting NATO’s minimum threshold of spending two per cent of a country’s GDP on defence.

Canada is “also behind” on another NATO standard, Colby said — the requirement that a minimum of 20 per cent of all defence spending go to new equipment.

“I don’t think it’s consistent with being a G7 member to openly flout your collective defence responsibilities,” he told CBC News. “What kind of signal does it send for Canada to be in the G7 when it essentially mocks the bare minimum of what’s required?”

Colby also said current U.S. President Joe Biden has been too tolerant with Canada.

“This administration has really not put serious disincentives or penalties,” Colby said.

“I would basically recommend that there would be an intelligent, strategic use of tools across the elements of international relations that would go beyond pure military capabilities, because obviously Canada is not going to be moved by things strictly in the military domain.”

Colby said that the U.S. could seek to expel or exclude Canada from multilateral organizations other than the G7.

“It’s important that we use essentially economic benefits of access to the American market or American technology. I think those are all fair game.”

Colby’s approach represents one of the hallmarks of Trump administration diplomacy: the willingness to mix unrelated issues in order to get what it wants.

Canadian officials should be forewarned that a Trump White House likely wouldn’t hesitate to use trade access to get concessions on defence, or to threaten to bar access to sensitive technologies in order to get concessions on the border.