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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Robert Lighthizer didn’t need to look far for evidence that manufacturing in the United States was in serious trouble.

As he left his Ohio hometown over 40 years ago, the steel mills that were the bedrock of the little Lake Erie port city of Ashtabula started to shutter one after another. It is now one of the poorest places in America, the remnants of those plants sent to be recycled elsewhere, the population dwindling.

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For Lighthizer, now 70, the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs in places like Ashtabula has a root cause: unfair competition from cheap, foreign imports.

He went on to devote much of his career to confronting that issue, from negotiating “voluntary” quotas as a 1980s U.S. trade official, to representing steel firms fighting alleged dumping as a private-practice lawyer.

And now, as U.S. Trade Representative, it is Lighthizer — a man who once penned a New York Times op-ed piece in praise of protectionism — whom Canadian officials face in increasingly fractious talks to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement. And who could do much to shape Canada’s economic future.