A few days before the U.S. election, a senior government official in Ottawa was asked if there was a briefing book to cover Donald Trump winning the presidency.

“That’s not a briefing book,” the official replied. “That’s an evacuation plan.”

Well, here we all are, getting used to the idea of President Donald Trump. What does it mean for Canada?

It opens a lot of important files to change — on trade, energy and the environment, as well as immigration, defence and foreign policy.

Trade with the U.S. is the life blood of the Canadian economy. Canada exported $397 billion worth of goods to the U.S. in 2015 — fully 75 per cent of our exports worldwide. For our part, we purchased $363 billion in goods from the U.S.; Canada is the best customer of 35 American states. Altogether, more than $2 billion in goods move back and forth across the border daily, and that doesn’t include trade in services such as banking and consulting.

One of Trump’s top priorities is to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Never one to understate the case, Trump has called NAFTA “the worst trade deal in the history of the world.” It’s one of the reasons Trump won the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, which put him over the top in the Electoral College.

He’s targeting Mexico, and not just with his promise to build a wall and make them pay for it. But Canada would be sideswiped in any re-opening of NAFTA.

The U.S. president must give six months’ notice of invoking the cancellation clause in NAFTA. Canada’s first response was a pre-emptive offer Wednesday to re-open the deal.

“If they want to have a discussion about improving NAFTA, then we are ready to come to the table to try to put before the new administration anything that will benefit both Canada and the United States, and obviously Mexico also,” Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. David MacNaughton told journalists on a conference call. “So we are prepared to talk.”

MacNaughton’s comments were obviously cleared by the centre — the Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office. This overture to Trump does not exactly show Canada dealing from a position of strength, but at least the Trudeau government is trying to be creative and get ahead of Trump’s NAFTA curve.

The second big trade file is the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal negotiated by the U.S. with 11 Pacific Rim countries, including Canada and Mexico. Again, Trump hasn’t minced his words in denouncing TPP as a “another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country.”

It’s not clear what Trump means by the U.S. getting a 25 per cent “piece” of Keystone. But it would be a big deal. It’s not clear what Trump means by the U.S. getting a 25 per cent “piece” of Keystone. But it would be adeal.

The TPP is essentially dead on arrival. It has no prospect of being passed in the lame-duck of session of Congress, so there is no point in Barack Obama sending it forward. Nor is there any point in the Trudeau government bringing implementing legislation to the House.

On energy, Trump’s election has revived the Keystone XL project to build a pipeline from the Alberta oilpatch to the refineries on the Gulf Coast. Obama killed Keystone. Trump has said he would “absolutely approve it, 100 per cent” — but added, “I want 25 per cent of the deal for the United States … I want a big piece of the deal, otherwise I won’t approve it.”

It’s not clear what Trump means by the U.S. getting a 25 per cent “piece” of Keystone. But it would be a big deal. Keystone’s proponent, Trans-Canada Pipelines, has estimated Keystone would be a $10 billion project, creating 9,000 jobs during the construction phase.

The revival of Keystone would make it somewhat problematic for Trudeau to make the case for the $7 billion twinning of Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline from Alberta to Burnaby B.C. The argument is that Canada needs to build more capacity to tidewater, so it can diversify oil markets beyond the U.S., which now accounts for 99.4 per cent of our oil exports.

It’s no coincidence that Trudeau announced a $1.5 billion ocean protection plan Monday in Vancouver, where there is intense opposition to the Kinder Morgan proposal. The project was approved by the National Energy Board last spring and the government is prepared to go ahead — or not — in mid-December.

By then, Trudeau will have met provincial and territorial premiers to discuss carbon pricing. This is supposed to be Ottawa’s major initiative in implementing the 2015 Paris agreement’s 30/30 goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Trudeau and Obama were both signatories to the Paris Agreement, but it’s obvious that Trump has no intention of pursuing it. To make this point, he has already appointed a prominent climate skeptic as head of his transition at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

When Jim Prentice was environment minister, he used to say that Canada could only proceed on climate change in lockstep with the U.S., or risk being stuck with an unlevel playing field on the economy. This was apparent, for example, in the agreement with the U.S. on reducing auto emissions. At the Three Amigos summit in Ottawa in June, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico agreed to a target of 50 per cent of renewable clean energy targets by 2025. It’s hard to imagine Trump signing on to that.

On immigration, Trump’s agenda is no mystery: a ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S., including a moratorium on Syrian refugees, whom he has described as a “Trojan horse.” Canada, with one-ninth of the U.S. population, has accepted 32,000 Syrian refugees; the U.S. agreed to accept only 10,000, and that was under Obama.

On defence, Trump has called upon America’s allies to meet the NATO target for defence spending — 2 per cent of GDP. Canada isn’t even close to that — we spend at about 1 per cent — and even Obama gently chided Canada about this in his speech to Parliament in June. Beyond that, there’s the question of Trump reaching out to Vladimir Putin. What are the implications for the allies on a thaw with Russia, and where does the mission against ISIS go from here?

There’s no shortage of issues for Trudeau and Trump to discuss at their first bilateral meeting, which normally would happen sooner rather than later. As Ambassador MacNaughton pointed out: “It is traditional for U.S. presidents to make their first foreign visit to Canada, and I think that would be something the prime minister and president would talk about.”

In the meantime, it might be a good idea for Trudeau to visit Trump in New York for a get-acquainted conversation during the transition.

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