OTTAWA — As Prime Minister Mark Carney left his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, officials left behind gifts seen as fit for a president with whom Canada is trying to forge better relations.
They also spoke to the president’s favourite sport: golf.
For his visit to Washington, Carney and the rest of the Canadian delegation — which included several of his ministers, senior advisors and top bureaucrats — gave the president a photograph taken by a Canadian military photographer of a
known as the “Tea Bowl,” which was played between Canadian and American soldiers before a wartime crowd in London during the Second World War, several months before D-Day, in 1944.
The photograph captures a moment shared between each team’s captain and speaks to a sense of coming together in the midst of global turmoil — something Canadians are hoping to restore with their U.S. neighbours.
Carney’s delegation also gifted Trump a hat and golf gear from the Kananaskis Country Golf Course.
Kananaskis is where the leaders are next set to meet, when Canada plays host to the G7 in June. Trump also provided Carney with a gift, which has yet to be disclosed on the registry for office holders.
Gift-giving is customary among world leaders during official visits.
French President Emmanuel Macron gifted Carney a bottle of Martell Cordon Bleu Cognac and a bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages 2014, which would each set the average consumer back several hundred dollars.
The French also gifted him a Hermès Tie, which would cost roughly the same.
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom Carney also visited on his trip to Europe back in March, gave him a crystal bowl with a laser engraving of 10 Downing Street’s door.
But as Carney turns his mind to that next month’s meeting, he does so with the issue of U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum still being unresolved. He is also under pressure from business leaders to forge a path to ensuring the extension of the free trade agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, which is due for review next year.
After leaving Washington, it appears he can now tackle that to-do list in better standing with the president than his predecessor.
“Everybody felt, that I’ve spoken to, from ambassadors to people who were in the room, to secretaries that I’ve spoken with who’ve gotten briefs and debriefs, everybody felt that there was a total reset that took place here between the relationship between the prime minister of Canada and the president of the United States of America,” said Business Council of Canada CEO Goldy Hyder, in an interview from Washington.
“That was critically important,” he says, “that there was a relationship being established there, that even on the sensitive issues that were provocative on 51st state and so forth, they threw their jabs the way they’re supposed to, but they didn’t let it dominate the rest of the discussions that took place privately.”
Some of those travelling back with Carney felt the same, noting how productive they felt the discussions were and how direct the president was behind closed-doors.
Going into the visit, Carney had tried to lower expectations of what he would be able to accomplish through one day of meetings.
Trump himself told reporters there was
nothing the prime minister could say to convince him to lift the tariffs
on Canada, but nonetheless emphasized he wanted to have a friendly visit.
The president was also effusive in his praise of Carney, saying he has a great deal of respect for him.
Trump made it clear that he likes Carney much more than his predecessor, former prime minister Justin Trudeau, as well as Chrystia Freeland, who served as foreign affairs minister during Trudeau’s first term in office when Canada, the U.S. and Mexico negotiated the free trade deal that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement.
For Hyder, who spoke with Carney when the prime minister attended a business event he hosted in Washington the day before meeting with Trump, he believes Trudeau’s exit plays a factor in the president’s openness towards Carney, but is not the only reason.
“I don’t think we should underestimate that it probably has a lot to do with who Prime Minister (Mark) Carney is, in the eyes of the president,” he says.
“Someone who respects global stature, someone who respects global achievement, someone who respects people who have prominent friends in different parts of the world. I think he respects that,” Hyder said of the president.
Carney successfully ran an election campaign on the promise that his time spent as the governor of central banks in Canada and the United Kingdom during the 2008 recession and Brexit, respectively, made him the best leader to go toe-to-toe with Trump.
A senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that behind closed-doors, the president and Carney discussed foreign policy, with Trump asking for his perspective on issues from Iran and China, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the official took as an encouraging sign.
Matt Holmes, the executive vice-president and chief of public policy at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said the visit signalled the best restart of the Canada-U.S. relationship they could have hoped for, particularly because of the time senior members from both countries’ governments spent out of public view, where talks about trade and negotiation should happen.
However, he cautioned that despite a positive first meeting, the times ahead will still be difficult.
“It’s important that we don’t create any false urgency or false timelines, here. This is not going to be an easy process.”
In terms of next steps, Holmes said significant milestones will come when Canada plays host to the G7 in June and then attends the NATO Leaders’ Summit right after.
That requires Canada to become a serious player when it comes to national security, he says. “National security is economic security.”
Hyder believes the government ought to take a “minimalist” approach and focus its immediate attention on next year’s scheduled review of the free trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
In fact, he believes Carney should invite Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to next month’s G7 meeting and set aside some time to talk about the deal with Trump.
National Post
staylor@postmedia.com
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.
