WESTERN PRODUCER — Keep your head down and hope he picks on somebody else.
That’s how you could sum up the advice from Ted McKinney, who heads the U.S. association of state agriculture departments, when he was talking with Canadian ag folks about how Canada could deal with another term for former president Donald Trump in the White House.
“We’re working to make sure what we have in (the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement) is seen as a prize and one that is to be cherished and developed,” said McKinney, who headed Indiana’s department of agriculture before being pulled into Washington to become an undersecretary within Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“I think he’s got other places he’s going to focus on before he’s going to do corrective actions in Canada.”
McKinney’s point is that Trump is proud of the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement as one of his successes, so his ire on trade isn’t likely to be focused on Canada. The danger, however, is that there is widespread unhappiness with Canada’s implementation of the dairy deal reached during the Trump years.
That’s a real danger for Canadians, one everybody in farming and agriculture needs to watch out for. Trump turned dairy anger in Wisconsin into a big rallying point for his administration in the lead-up to the NAFTA renegotiations. It’d be best if Trump was never made aware that Canada has essentially strangled its ability to enjoy its agreed-to access to the Canadian market with a “creative” implementation of the accord.
It’s hard to believe he won’t be made aware of it. And it won’t be dairy farmers who likely suffer any blowback. Our federal system, dominated by Ontario and Quebec interests, tends to favour supply management at the expense of open market agricultural production, like most of what we produce in Western Canada.
We’d better hope our trade negotiators, politicians and embassy staff manage to find a way to keep the dairy issue on the back burner while Trump finds others to fight with, such as China and Europe. Those powers don’t even try to play fair in trade, so it’s going to be possible to keep our heads down and remain unnoticed if we’re lucky.
We can improve our chances of not becoming an issue and irritant to Trump 2 by keeping our trade a continuing strength for the U.S. economy, McKinney suggested.
“We’ve got to make sure we are so integrated and so strong and so important to each other that that message prevails over, ‘I’m going to get even on Irritant X or Irritant Y,’ ” McKinney told a roomful of Canadian farmers, ag leaders and Parliament Hill types.
McKinney is a staunch defender of trade. His concerns come from the dangers that crimping international trade will have for U.S. farmers, who he believes benefit greatly from free-flowing trade, and he doesn’t want to see that unravel.
That’s something we can agree with, and Canada needs to find more like-minded people like him to support the idea that America benefits from close integration with Canada. The reality of a second Trump presidency looms, and we’ve seen what it’s like to have our next door neighbour, historical cousin and ally become suddenly unpredictable.
The best thing we can do up here is make nice with our colleagues south of the border, avoid poking them in the eyes and hope the kid in the playground who gets beaten up isn’t us.
