Premiers' Team Canada is in Washington. Will Trump divide them?

For the first time ever, all 13 of Canada’s premiers are together in Washington, D.C. trying to sell the United States on the idea that a trade war is a conflict nobody can win, and President Donald Trump should drop his tariff threat. 

The premiers are, ostensibly, putting up a united front – Team Canada and all that. Like the hockey team, except with far fewer people watching, and far higher stakes. They’re also putting on the ritz. The strategy isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it carries risks. The idea is to promote a united front, even among premiers who disagree with the others, like Alberta’s Danielle Smith and Saskatchewan's Scott Moe. Those two Western premiers don’t support retaliatory tariffs from Canada, and Smith went as far as refusing to sign a joint statement on tariffs from the provincial leaders in January. 

Smith, it seems, was playing her own game, looking for a lesser sentence from Trump on oil and gas duties, which she got when the president announced his plan for a 10 per cent tax on energy imports compared to 25 per cent on everything else — subject to sudden change of mind, of course. 

The risk is that the premiers are together until they have a reason not to be, which puts Team Canada at risk for a divide-and-conquer strategy that Trump would be neither unfamiliar with nor unwilling to use. That’s not to say that the premiers shouldn’t be in Washington, nor to say they shouldn’t adopt a united front. It is to say, however, that we shouldn’t romanticize the undertaking. 

On Tuesday, they threw a party with North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer. The shindig came after Ontario PC Leader Doug Ford appeared at an event before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, attended primarily by Canadian business types. Ford tried to sell the room on his Fortress Am-Can plan, a growth strategy predicated on even deeper ties between the U.S. and Canada. On Wednesday, they visited the White House itself, meeting with Jim Blair, deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs. So far, so united. But for how long?

Canada is a federation made up of complicated interests, some of which are shared from one province to the next, and some of which aren’t. Tariffs will hurt Canada as a whole, and no premier has an interest in getting hit with them, but when the going gets tough, who's to say one or two premiers won’t happily turn tail and sell out the rest, and the rest of the country, for their own interests? Two — Smith and Moe — already have.

The Washington trip is an awkward Hail Mary that belies the fact that, while one can talk about Team Canada until they’re red, white, and blue in the face, a premier’s duty —– fiduciary and political —– is to their province first. They’re premiers who are punished or rewarded by provincial voters. Would Danielle Smith or Scott Moe break from the rest if they could get exemptions for one their province’s core industry, energy? Would Ford, if he could get a deal on automobiles? Or, for that matter, David Eby or François Legault, if they could bargain for lumber or steel, respectively? I bet they would. 

As things stand, any perceived unity from coast to coast to coast is a function first and foremost of Trump’s broad-strokes tariff threat – 25 per cent or more across the board, less for energy. Should the president wake up tomorrow and decide on a more targeted approach, an even more refined version of his current planned tariffs on steel and aluminium – say, pulp and paper products from Quebec or gas from Saskatchewan –  you might see the apparent alliance fracture. 

That Ford seems extra committed to the cause may in fact be evidence of the inherent weakness of the Team Canada approach. Ford can don his Captain Canada cape with pride because, after all, Ontario exports more to the US than any other province, particularly vehicles and vehicle parts, which stand to be hit hard by tariffs. In January, Ford warned Ontario could lose as many as 500,000 jobs under Trump’s tariffs — roughly the equivalent of half the population of Nova Scotia out of work if things go badly.

Team Canada appears to be more or less united right now because as a function of economic self-interest, each province has a reason to lobby against broad tariff threats. But however strong the national economic interest may be, it’s not as strong as regional self-interest. Should the tariff threat change, whatever unity we see from the premiers now will dissolve like sugar in water. Canadian nationalist sentiments can’t possibly compete with the economic and electoral self-interest of each province and territory. That’s Canada.