ST-TITE, QUE. – The Liberal campaign will shift gears and provinces Sunday as the Justin Trudeau tour heads into Ontario for the first time since the election was called, where his rivals have had a jump on him in the GTA for days.

But Justin Trudeau has a big catch-up card to play.

The Liberal leader, who is still prime minister, will piggyback on a feel-good celebration of the rising Canadian tennis star Bianca Andreescu, when he attends a big Mississauga rally in honour of her surprise U.S. Open tennis championship.

At campaign stops in Cobourg, Mississauga and Markham, Trudeau is expected to focus his message and the party’s “ground game” on the economy, his job creation record, pocketbook issues, and plans for the environment, even as the campaigns of all parties continue to wage an “air war” over embarrassing or racist social media commentary by nominated candidates.

The economic theme was highlighted Saturday with the Liberals’ release of ads that boast the Trudeau government stood up to U.S. President Donald Trump, although the revised North American free trade deal remains in limbo.

The ads were pushed out on social media Saturday, and will air as radio ads in southwestern Ontario starting Monday.

But the Liberal claim that Trudeau stood his ground against Trump was challenged by a new account written by Blackstone Group’s CEO Steven Schwarzman. In it, the multinational chief executive reportedly takes credit for a breakthrough in the talks, saying he advised Trudeau to “empty your pockets on dairy.”

No one had heard of the book’s claims when Trudeau waded into a crush of western festival-goers at St-Tite, Quebec. But it was clear the new NAFTA deal rankled many.

For an hour Trudeau glad-handed his way through the crowds as RCMP bodyguards scrambled to keep up. Hundreds of people were thrilled to shake his hand, take selfies or say hello. But others muttered their frustrations. Some cursed him, though none confronted him outright.

Alain Couture and Vicky Grondin, dairy and pork farmers from the Beauce region two hours away, scowled and swore when Trudeau’s bus pulled in.

“For me, he’s not welcome here,” said Grondin.

Couture, her husband, said they are losing $4,000 a month, blaming dairy losses on price drops, while he said Trudeau’s actions on China have hurt his pork prices too.

The St-Tite festival is a hugely popular event, the second-largest festival in North America, behind Montreal’s international jazz festival according to the area’s MP, cabinet minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

More than 10,000 camper vans set up in a sprawling makeshift city in surrounding fields, and some 750,000 people, many dressed in cowboy hats, boots and jeans, are drawn to the barbecues, smokehouses and beer tents during the two-week party.

The suds flow freely. So did political opinions, not all favouring the Liberal leader who donned jeans, cowboy boots and a big belt buckle to beat the paths for votes.

Trudeau criss-crossed the streets, as Champagne, like a carnival barker, sang out to people inviting them to come meet the prime minister.

One man who refused to identify himself walked away as Trudeau approached, and muttered his disgust. “He’s too much for the Islamics,” he said, adding he won’t vote for anyone.

At an earlier whistle-stop in a breakfast diner, some voters questioned Trudeau on his stand on Quebec’s secularism bill.

Jacques Corbeil, 70, said he told the Liberal leader that he should respect Quebec’s law and not intervene in a court challenge underway in this province.

Trudeau did not take any questions from reporters as he whipped through Saturday’s campaign stops, leaving his officials to answer the potentially damaging account on NAFTA in the Schwarzman book, which was summarized in a news report.

Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, claims he brokered a deal between Trudeau and Trump that saw the Canadian prime minister give way to Trump with dairy concessions, according to a report in the Globe and Mail about his book, to be published next week.

Schwarzman claims that Trump had refused to meet with Trudeau while they were both at the UN in New York in September 2018, ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline, and that Trudeau asked him to intervene as NAFTA talks had stalled.

“I told him I did deals for a living and the moment had come to stop agonizing. If he refused to meet the U.S. demands of a deal, Canada would almost certainly go into a recession, and no politician wins re-election in a recession. If he did a deal, at least he’d have a chance of political survival,” Mr. Schwarzman writes.

“Empty your pockets on dairy. Make any last concessions you can and draw the line on Chapter 19 [a dispute-resolution mechanism] and the cultural exemption, the law protecting Canadian media from foreign ownership, if you have to. Move the lingering secondary issues to the bottom of the page and state simply what you are or are not prepared to do about them. Send the documents to the administration and walk away,” Schwarzman writes, according to Globe quotes from the book.

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If Schwarzman’s account is accurate, the book undermines the claim that Chrystia Freeland, the foreign affairs minister who led the negotiations, and Trudeau crafted a deal through canny negotiations.

Senior Liberals said Saturday Schwarzman was among many contacts the Canadian government enlisted for advice during the talks, and they dismissed the suggestion that Canada gave in to the U.S. or that Schwarzman played the decisive role.

Champagne said the new NAFTA is a good deal for dairy farmers and other sectors, adding “a lot of people contributed” to the successful negotiations.

“But I think the prime minister, minister Freeland and ambassador MacNaughton did the lion’s share. We always welcome people who can contribute. I think, you know, when things go well a lot of people suggest that they’ve been part of it. If he did something good, I think Canadians all benefit from that. This was Team Canada.”

Champagne said the deal maintains about 97 per cent of dairy quotas for Canadian farmers, and “we understood that there would be no concessions without compensation and I think we stuck to our word.”

Freeland is the narrator of the Liberal ads, in which she says she and Justin Trudeau “fought tooth and nail” in the trade talks, “when the Conservatives wanted Canada to back down.”

She says the Liberal team pushed back at Trump administration when he imposed punitive steel and aluminum tariffs, saying “We fought until they dropped them.

In a statement released Saturday, the New Democrats called the book’s claim “extremely disturbing,” saying electoral considerations influenced Trudeau.

“Justin Trudeau traded away nearly 8.4 per cent of our dairy production and processing capacity. That’s the annual production of 1,200 medium-sized dairy farms in Quebec,” the statement read.

Conservative spokesman Simon Jeffries in an emailed statement, said “Canadians already knew that Justin Trudeau backed down to Donald Trump on NAFTA.”

“We know now that Trudeau sold out Canadian dairy farmers at the express wishes of Donald Trump’s billionaire friends. Trudeau’s weak leadership and bad negotiating put him in a position of having to roll over and Donald Trump’s terms at the 11th hour in order to avoid a total free trade collapse.”

The Liberals’ ad claim that the Conservatives wanted the Liberals to “back down” is a bit of a stretch insofar as the Opposition leader Andrew Scheer wanted the Liberals to drop their demands for so-called progressive elements like gender and Indigenous rights protections in the talks. Scheer claimed those had no business being on the table in a negotiation aimed at improving access for Canadian exporters to the U.S. market.

But it is true that Conservatives argued Canada should show itself to be a better ally and friend of the U.S., with the party’s representatives saying at one point in the talks that Canada should offer to participate in the U.S.-led ballistic missile defence program.

The new NAFTA is still stuck in the Democrat-controlled Congress, having been ratified only by Mexico. The Democrats want tougher guarantees to enforce labour and environmental provisions – which the Liberals say they broadly support.

However with the U.S. presidential election season underway, it’s unclear when the deal might be ratified south of the border, and Parliament was dissolved by Trudeau’s government for the Canadian election without approval here as well.

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