Lips are sealed. There is no question for the Canadian government to insult the future by publicly showing any preference for one or the other of the American presidential candidates, even if it will watch with particular attention the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden Tuesday 29. “Being your neighbor is like sleeping with an elephant”, had launched on the tone of the joke, in 1969, in Washington, the former Prime Minister (from 1968 to 1984) Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Half a century later, her son, Justin Trudeau, is, in turn, faced with the difficulty of living alongside a neighbor as powerful as he is cumbersome. Her father had a notoriously conflicting relationship with then-US President Richard Nixon; he himself had to manage, for four years, the unpredictability of Donald Trump, who inflicted many snub to him.
“The era of confrontation”
From the Tweet that he draws barely back on board Air Force One at the end of the G7 in Charlevoix (Quebec) in June 2018, to address the Canadian Prime Minister of “Very dishonest” and of ” low “, until the one where he accuses her of having “A face with two faces” after the supposed mockery of Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the NATO summit in 2019, Donald Trump has never hidden the low esteem in which he held his Canadian counterpart. Who, in return, was generally careful not to poison an already difficult relationship; his long silence of twenty-one seconds after being questioned last June on Donald Trump’s attitude towards the Black Lives Matter movement, was his only and most eloquent condemnation.
The tension between the two men has damaged the historically “symbiotic” relationship between these two nations which share the longest land border in the world, have common defense agreements, and whose economies are closely intertwined. “Since the reciprocity agreement signed in the XIXe century, it is the quality of the personal relations between our leaders which gave the political impetus to advance on the commercial and economic plan, for example during the signing of the first major free trade agreement by Ronald reagan and Brian Mulroney [premier ministre canadien, 1984-1993], the the [accord de libre-échange canado-américain en 1987], explains Jean-Denis Garon, professor of economics at the University of Quebec in Montreal. But with Donald Trump, we have moved from the era of cooperation to the era of confrontation “.
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