Gerald Butts

And, you know, it's funny in my current work afterward, I had several clients in the United States, obviously, Eurasia Group, and one of them.

happened to be a senior official in the Bush administration, the W. Bush administration.

And he consulted on their side in the Trump administration in the same way that James did, frankly, with us in the NAFTA process, in the COSMO process.

And he had been in the National Security Council when 9-11 happened.

And he told me that the day after he was sort of in charge of the Americas and in the day the day it happened, he said, I need to talk to the Canada people.

And people looked around like there are no Canada people.

We're all Canada people because it's such a familiar relationship.

And he said that, frankly, terrified him because it meant that there weren't 50 of the smartest people at the State Department thinking about Canada 24 hours a day.

And I found that to be the case in Ottawa when we got here, too, because the relationship was so taken for granted that we never built that kind of, as I said, that architecture to support it, to think about it.

And we had to make it all up as we went along.

And the advisory council was a huge part of that, not just in Ottawa.

The way that they depoliticize the issue, but in the networks, they all brought to the table.

James was at a multinational firm at the time, still is, where they have deep relationships.

Everybody else did.

Obviously, Ron Ambrose had deep ties in the conventional energy business on both sides of the border.

Everybody came with something to the table.

And I think the challenge with a bigger group, and I'm not being critical of the, I think it's a bunch of distinguished people that were appointed last week by the government.

The issue is it's kind of like cabinet, Peter, that the old adage about cabinet that you make 20 friends and 140 enemies.

It's also true of these advisory councils that people who have leadership positions in business, in the third sector, in labor, in other parties, they all have,

you know substantial egos and when they see one of their competitors get appointed to these bodies and they don't it can cause a problem for the government so there's always uh as is always the case in government when you choose one person you by definition don't choose 40 million people and that means you've got an issues management challenge on your hand um