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But plans to dovetail Canadian and American climate-change policy are in tatters now that the president-elect is a man who intends to boost the coal industry and pull out of the Paris Agreement.

Justin Trudeau scaled new heights of mutual reverence in his relationship with Barack Obama. But though the prime minister has been assiduous in his neutrality in public, who can believe he didn’t hurl his remote at the television when CNN declared Trump the victor?

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The Canada-U.S. relationship has worked best when it has moved in tandem. Yet on climate change, Canada is about to introduce a carbon tax while the United States seems destined to shift in the opposite direction. The divergence in policy could make this country a high-cost place to do business compared to America, particularly given Trump’s promise to reduce corporate income tax rates.

Canadian government officials said it has only been in the last few days that the prospect of President Trump has been seriously considered in Ottawa from a policy point of view. The government can be forgiven for having no contingency plan for Trump — how do you plan a response to populist hot air and the greatest upset in American political history?

Yet Ottawa now has to fashion a game-plan to deal with a president-elect who has pledged to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The best guess among Canadian government insiders is that the president could unilaterally withdraw from NAFTA, but to do so would wrap the administration up in litigation for years to come, as American companies moved to protect zero-per-cent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada.