CANADA ECONOMICS
NAFTA
1) Itinerary for February 7 to 9, 2018 Ottawa, Ontario - February 6, 2018
Itinerary for the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for Wednesday, February 7, 2018:
Note: All times local
Ottawa, Ontario
9 a.m. The Prime Minister will attend the National Caucus meeting.
11:30 a.m. The Prime Minister will depart for Chicago, Illinois.
Canada Reception Centre (Hangar 11)
Macdonald-Cartier International Airport
Note for media:
Photo opportunity of departure
Chicago, Illinois
12:40 p.m. The Prime Minister will arrive in Chicago, Illinois.
O’Hare International Airport
Note for media:
Photo opportunity upon arrival
2:15 p.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the Governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner.
Quadrangle Club
University of Chicago
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity at the beginning of the meeting
2:50 p.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.
Quadrangle Club
University of Chicago
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity at the beginning of the meeting
4:30 p.m. The Prime Minister will deliver an address at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. An armchair discussion with David Axelrod will follow.
Auditorium
Mandel Hall
University of Chicago
Note for media:
Open coverage
Media should arrive no later than 3:30 p.m.
Media Appearances
8 p.m. EST – An interview with the Prime Minister will air on The Axe Files with David Axelrod podcast.
Itinerary for the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for Thursday, February 8, 2018:
Note: All times local
San Francisco, California
9:35 a.m. The Prime Minister will arrive in San Francisco, California.
San Francisco International Airport
Note for media:
Photo opportunity upon arrival
11:30 a.m. The Prime Minister will participate in a diversity and equality roundtable with the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, and tech leaders.
Salesforce Offices
415 Mission Street
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
2:15 p.m. The Prime Minister will visit the AppDirect offices and meet with employees.
AppDirect Offices
650 California Street
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
3 p.m. The Prime Minister and the President and Co-CEO of AppDirect, Daniel Saks, will deliver remarks. A media availability will follow.
AppDirect Offices
650 California Street
Note for media:
Open coverage
4:30 p.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the chairman and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
St. Regis Hotel
125 3rd Street
Closed to media
5:10 p.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the president and CEO of eBay, Devin Wenig.
St. Regis Hotel
125 3rd Street
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
5:50 p.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the chairman and CEO of Amgen, Robert Bradway.
St. Regis Hotel
125 3rd Street
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
Itinerary for the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for Friday, February 9, 2018:
Note: All times local
San Francisco, California
8:15 a.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the Governor of California, Jerry Brown.
Fairmont San Francisco Hotel
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
9 a.m. The Prime Minister will meet with the Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Fairmont San Francisco Hotel
Note for media:
Pooled photo opportunity
Los Angeles, California
2:20 p.m. The Prime Minister will arrive in Los Angeles, California.
Los Angeles International Airport
Note for media:
Photo opportunity upon arrival
6:15 p.m. The Prime Minister will deliver an address at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Air Force One Pavilion
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Note for media:
Open coverage
Media must RSVP with Melissa Giller: mgiller@reaganfoundation.org / 805-522-2977
Prime Minister to travel to the United States Ottawa, Ontario - January 19, 2018
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced that he will travel to the United States from February 7 to 10, 2018.
This visit – which includes stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago – will provide an opportunity for the Prime Minister to further strengthen the deep bonds that unite Canada and the United States.
In the Los Angeles area, the Prime Minister will deliver remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley. During the remarks, he will underscore the interconnectedness of the Canada-U.S. economies.
In San Francisco, the Prime Minister will meet with local business leaders and entrepreneurs to explore opportunities for increased collaboration between our countries.
Before heading to California, the Prime Minister will meet with key officials in Chicago and deliver a speech at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics to highlight the importance of public service, and how it can contribute to a prosperous middle class and stronger Canada-U.S. economic and political ties.
Quote
“Canadians and Americans know we are all better off when we work together to grow the middle class, and create more opportunities for people on both sides of the border. I look forward to meeting with government and business leaders in the United States again to explore new opportunities for collaboration and growth, so we can build a more prosperous future for people in both countries.”
—The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada
Quick Facts
- Prime Minister Trudeau last visited the United States in October 2017.
- Canada and the United States share one of the largest trading relationships in the world. Bilateral trade between the two countries was valued at nearly $882 billion in 2016, and Canada is the largest secure supplier of energy to the U.S.
- The two countries share the longest, secure border in the world, over which some 400,000 people and $2.4 billion worth of goods and services cross daily.
- Canada buys more goods from the United States than China, Japan, and the UK combined.
- Canada is the number one export destination for most American states, and cross-border trade and investment supports nearly nine millions jobs in the United States.
Canada and United States Relations: http://
The Globe and Mail. 7 Feb 2018. Trudeau aims to influence the influencers. PM’s three-city U.S. tour to save NAFTA will be an uphill battle
CAMPBELL CLARK, Columnist
This will be Mr. Trudeau’s 15th U.S. trip as Prime Minister, and saving NAFTA is again the chief goal.
Good luck selling NAFTA in Chicago, Justin Trudeau. Another leader once tried to sell a trade deal here, but in the end nearly all the elected Chicago-area Democrats in Congress opposed it. That leader was Barack Obama.
Even the president from Chicago couldn’t get close allies to back the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and in this blue-Democrat city, support for NAFTA is worse. When Mr. Trudeau visits Wednesday as he starts a three-city U.S. tour to lobby to save the trade deal, the political terrain will be hilly.
“Is he going to be a more effective salesman on the benefits of free trade than the previous U.S. president, who was a historical figure, who worked extensively to convince people, and failed?” asked Tom Bowen, a Chicago political consultant who advises Democrats. “I think that question answers itself.”
This will be Mr. Trudeau’s 15th U.S. trip as Prime Minister, and saving NAFTA is again the chief goal. He’s lobbying beyond Washington, – in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – in a trip aimed at influencing the influencers – members of Congress, governors, mayors, business leaders and others who might tell President Donald Trump that it’s dangerous to tear up the North American free-trade agreement.
It’s a campaign with bi-partisan targets, starting in Democratic Chicago and ending with a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. – an attempt to underline for Republicans that an iconic hero of their party was a believer in free trade and an architect of a free-trade deal with Canada.
Mr. Trudeau can already claim the lobbying campaign has had some success. In recent months, U.S. business, farm groups, and politicians have been warning against killing NAFTA. That’s not Canada’s doing, but there’s co-ordination. Last week 36 Republican senators wrote to Mr. Trump asking him to renegotiate NAFTA, not scrap it. Mr. Trump’s rush to tear up NAFTA appears to have slowed.
But finding allies to warn Mr. Trump not to make any sudden moves to kill NAFTA is one thing. It’s quite another to get U.S. politicians to fight for it. Would members of Congress try to stop Mr. Trump if he tried to withdraw? For that matter, if Mr. Trump does want to sign a NAFTA 2.0, would Congress approve it?
Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., David MacNaughton, said this week that he’s hoping for a deal within two months, because the uncertainty is discouraging investment. But convincing Congress to vote for a new NAFTA in an election year is a tall order.
Bruce Heyman, a Chicago Democrat who was U.S. ambassador to Canada from 2013 to 2017, said most politicians would rather NAFTA not become an election issue. Among voters, he said, it’s a “punching bag” for those who don’t like trade and blame it for stagnant wages. Illinois has farmers and business who want to keep the trade deal, but for many, NAFTA is shorthand for plant closures.
One Ohio mayor, he said, told him that “80 per cent of the job losses in Ohio are due to automation, but 100 per cent of the people think it’s because of NAFTA.”
That’s why Donald Trump stopped eating Oreo cookies in 2016. When Mondelez, the company that makes Nabisco products, announced 600 layoffs at their sprawling cookie plant on Chicago’s southwest side, sending the work to a new Mexican plant, Mr. Trump said he’d never eat the treats again. It was good campaign politics.
The laid-off workers are still running a boycott of Nabisco products made in Mexico. Anthony Jackson, a 41-year-old Navy veteran who lost his US$25-an-hour job at the sprawling plant on Chicago’s southwest side, said Mexican workers are being paid just over a dollar an hour to do the job he did. Of the 440 who eventually lost jobs, Mr. Jackson guesses that about 300 now make less than half their previous wage, often in retail, with better-paid manufacturing jobs scarce. “NAFTA probably facilitated the destruction of my job,” he said.
Mr. Jackson thinks NAFTA should be reworked with strong labour protections – but he believes most of the laid-off workers would cheer if NAFTA were torn up. He doesn’t believe Mr. Trump will actually do it – but any Chicago politician who campaigned defending NAFTA would not be elected, he said.
At the moment, NAFTA isn’t the campaign issue – people are talking about health care, immigration, and Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, Mr. Bowen said. NAFTA was hot in 2016, but not this year. But that doesn’t mean Democrats support it. When Mr. Trudeau visits Chicago, Democrats will show interest in him, he predicted, but on NAFTA, “his words will fall on deaf ears.”
G7
DoS. February 7, 2018. Under Secretary Shannon Participates in G-7 Political Directors Meeting
The G-7 annually brings together representatives of the world’s leading industrialized democracies to seek common ground on major global issues, including counterterrorism, non-proliferation, North Korea, and Syria. Under Secretary Shannon’s engagement in Vancouver with his G-7 counterparts will set the stage for a Foreign Ministers’ meeting and Leaders’ Summit later in the year.
AVIATION
Jamie Freed, Allison Lampert
SINGAPORE/MONTREAL (Reuters) - Embraer SA and Bombardier Inc are targeting the Chinese market with a limited offering of smaller aircraft for regional airlines because they are allowed to only operate jets with 100 seats or less, according to company executives.
A government policy aimed at boosting domestic flights serving secondary markets in China requires fledgling carriers to operate at least 25 city-hopper jets with 100 seats or less, before graduating to bigger aircraft, the executives said.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) policy issued in 2016 but never fully published in its entirety, would exclude the newer Embraer E190-E2 and the Bombardier C Series. CAAC did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Embraer Commercial Aviation CEO John Slattery said the policy was designed to stimulate economic activity beyond China’s heavily populated eastern seaboard.
“As we look at the terms of the detail of the policy document, the E175 is an ideal aircraft to be compliant with the policy and address those requirements,” he told Reuters at the Singapore Airshow. The E175 has around 80 seats.
Bombardier Commercial Aircraft sales head Colin Bole said he sees Chinese regional carriers “graduating to the C Series,” eventually but the 100-seat cap could delay the plane’s proliferation in the country.
“We are definitely going to get to the point where the C Series will have a significant footprint in China,” Bole said. “But because of that polarisation at this stage there will be a delay before that actually happens.”
Bombardier is looking to boost sales of the 90-seater CRJ 900 regional jet and Q400 turboprop which meet the regional policy requirements, Bole said.
(This version of the story has been corrected to clarify headline, paragraph 1 to show regional airlines are affected, not all airlines)
Reporting By Jamie Freed in Singapore and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Additional reporting by Tim Hepher and Brenda Goh in SingaporeEditing by Muralikumar Anantharaman
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Boeing must look seriously at raising 737 production based on current data, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.
Asked at a Singapore Airshow briefing whether Boeing was considering increasing its planned production rate of 57 aircraft a month, Marketing Vice President Randy Tinseth said: “Right now I look out into the future, and we are oversold at those rates, so we are going to watch it closely in terms of meltaway.”
“If those numbers don’t go away, we have to think very seriously about that (increasing production),” he said.
Meltaway is industry jargon for airlines that fail to take delivery or cancel orders. Manufacturers overbook, or sell more planes than they can produce, in the narrowbody segment in order to build in a buffer against such disruption.
On Tuesday, Boeing and Airbus signaled they were looking at higher production rates.
CANADA - CHINA / NATIONAL SECURITY
THE GLOBE AND MAIL. FEBRUARY 7, 2018. OPINION. Before we sell Aecon to China, Canada’s national security must come first
WESLEY WARK, Wesley Wark is an expert on national security issues and currently an Executive in Residence at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
"The Chinese are coming" may sound like a melodramatic note from a bygone Cold War, but it has been updated for a new reality of Chinese global economic expansion. Developing and developed economies alike have felt its impact. Now, one Chinese enterprise has set its sights on Canada and confronted the Trudeau government with a national-security dilemma that goes to the heart of how Canada functions in a globalized world of trade and economic deals.
At issue is the proposed takeover of a major Canadian construction company, Aecon Group Inc., by a Chinese firm. Aecon is the third-largest construction company in Canada, involved in national critical infrastructure projects and some sensitive nuclear-energy supply shipments to the United States. Aecon is set to be swallowed by a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), called China Construction Group, which has a problematic record.
China Construction has its business fingers in many global pies, with major activities in Africa, in Asia, the Pacific and notably in the South China Sea. It helped build a series of artificial and heavily armed island atolls in the South China sea that the Chinese government is using to extend its extraterritorial reach and claims. As a state-owned enterprise, China Construction does the bidding of the Chinese government. Its business architecture includes a Chinese party "cell" at its core to dispense instruction from Beijing. In effect, China Construction is part of the Chinese military-industrial complex.
China Construction has, to date, done relatively little business in the economies of Canada's key security partners in the Five Eyes network (the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand). The proposed takeover by China Construction of Aecon positions Canada, uncomfortably, as a sort of beachhead for future investments in the West.
Any major external takeover of a significant Canadian company has to be approved under the Investment Canada Act, which involves both a net benefit analysis and national security review. National security review has been around since 2009, following a government decision to protect a Vancouver-based major satellite enterprise, MacDonald Dettwiler, from a U.S. takeover, but is shadowy and little understood.
The first stage of national security review involves a scan of available intelligence to see if a takeover rings alarm bells. If it does, and the Aecon takeover rings a deafening chorus of them, then both the Minister for Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, and the Minister for Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, have to come together to order full-scale national security review and ultimately reach a decision.
For the government to choose not do full national security review of the Aecon takeover would be astonishing. To fail to do so would make a mockery of its own rules. The Aecon takeover checks almost all the boxes of the ministerial guidelines for national security review, especially concern over "the potential impact of the investment on the security of Canada's critical infrastructure."
It is difficult to imagine a bigger negative impact to the security of Canada's critical infrastructure than to have a Chinese state-owned enterprise, close to the Beijing government, deeply embedded in both military and civilian critical infrastructure projects in Canada, including nuclear power. Loss of intellectual property, aggressive influence operations, avenues for Chinese sponsored espionage and hacking would all be in play. The takeover would seriously affect the viability of Canada's "National Strategy for Critical Infrastructure," which depends on a close working relationship between the public and private sector. The Aecon takeover would also fatally undermine Canada-U.S. cross-border co-operation on critical infrastructure protection. The United States, especially the Trump administration, simply wouldn't play with a Chinese SOE in Canada.
The decision point on the Aecon takeover by China Construction comes at a difficult time, as Canada searches for a suitable basis for free-trade talks with China. Hard as it is to balance national security concerns and trade relations, the Aecon case is a stark reminder that national security calculations must take precedence. The Chinese government will not like to see one of their SOEs denied a globe-trotting expansion, and may protest loudly. Privately, the Chinese leadership will understand the Canadian policy, if suitably presented to them.
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LGCJ.:
