Ambassador Bruce Heyman discusses Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's visit to the White House, USMCA, and Canada's disputes with China. Watch on Bloomberg
Quotes from the interview:
"It’s nice to see Prime Minister there and the President using language that I think is more collaborative than he’s used with Canada to date. So hopefully we’re on a better path, they still have a number of challenges, but hopefully this meeting will allow them to discuss those and find an artful way to have a diplomatic outcome here."
"Look we have NAFTA, it is in place, this is an upgrade to it. We would love to see the upgrade move ahead, but they’re going to have to work out those details with the Democrats in Congress. More importantly, the relationship is based on so many levels. I think that there are border issues between our two countries. There is this issue with China which is causing tremendous stress not only because two Canadians are being held in China, probably inappropriately, but more importantly China is doing retaliatory actions against Canadian agriculture and they’re in a box here and the U.S. put them there. They need to start working those kinds of problems out."
Ambassador Heyman served as U.S. Ambassador to Canada from 2014 to 2017. He continues his work strengthening U.S.-Canada relations by serving as a strategic advisor to Canada 2020, a Canadian progressive think-tank based in Ottawa; as co-chair of the advisory board to the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center; and as an honorary patron to the Council of the Great Lakes Region. He is the co-founder of Uncharted LLC, an organization that convenes and connects diverse groups of Americans and Canadians.