Gerald Butts

I hope everybody else leaves their politics at the door here.

Some things are bigger than the partisan cut and thrust on a day to day basis.

And certainly the renegotiation of NAFTA and broad more broadly, because.

We counted on James and that group for a lot more than just advice on what clause should go into the CUSMA agreement.

It was more, can we build a stable cross-partisan political consensus for how we can deal with Trump?

Because we saw that as a long-term structural change in the relationship with the United States and not just something that was idiosyncratic to Trump.

And that turned out to be right.

Yeah, for sure.

And we deliberately made it a small group for all of the reasons that James described there, Peter, that it was really important to us at the time that we depoliticize what could have been a very fractious issue in the country.

Because by nature of the relationship with the United States,

it means different things to different regions.

And it certainly means different things to different political parties.

So there was, and I think one of the reasons, frankly, that it was seen as a successful exercise was because it was a large part of what ended up being a bigger successful exercise, which was we got out of that round of trade negotiations with the United States with, as James said, an agreement that looked a lot like the one we went in with.

That was not a foregone conclusion at the beginning of it.

And I think on top of the knowledge and background and political affiliation that the people around that table brought, they also brought networks, right?

The thing that I was most concerned about when Trump was elected was that there wasn't institutional architecture in Canada to support the most important relationship we had in the world, right?

And by support, I don't mean people who just go out and boost and say, rah, rah, friends, partners, allies, or whatever the slogan was at the time.

I mean people who get together, have deep networks of business, family, third sector, sporting organizations, all of the things in the apt metaphor that James has used when we talked about this topic in the past, that these two countries are like trees growing on both sides of the fence where the crown and the roots meet.

We needed an org, a sort of ad hoc body that represented the full scope of those touch points.

And we didn't have it.