1 week Ago By Chris Selley
Every year when the (Preston) Manning Centre Networking Conference released its program, and every year since it rebranded as the Canada Strong and Free Networking (CSFN) Conference , the Canadian media have gone looking for controversial speakers on the conservative movement’s annual program in Ottawa. The Globe and Mail honed in this week on Robert Lighthizer, a very influential free-trade skeptic who is a veteran of important trade positions in both the first Trump and first Reagan administrations. Those two Republican presidents couldn’t really be more different on the question of free trade (not that Reagan was always doctrinaire in his support for it) .
That’s very interesting! Perhaps we can all agree that a septuagenarian Republican veteran of such policy debates is a great person to listen to right now (I’m kidding; we can’t). But the story wasn’t so much about who Lighthizer is as it was about the fact this particular discussion, moderated by Mark Mulroney, a vice-chair at Scotiabank , would be closed to the media and conducted under “Chatham House Rules.” That means (per the London think tank that established the convention) that attendees are free to disseminate “the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant.
” Unlike many of the CSFN events, the Lighthizer-Mulroney dialogue will not be streamed either on Rumble (from the conference itself) or on CPAC, which is also broadcasting much of the event, the conference spokesperson Alex Spence confirmed to National Post. “Why?” is a legitimate question. And it was underscored by the kickoff event at the conference, which featured a veteran of the first Trump administration with an interesting resumé: Chad Wolf, who was Trump’s acting director of Homeland Security until a federal court judge ruled he had been illegally appointed , thus relieving him of his position and invalidating his suspension of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which granted certain children of illegal immigrants amnesty from deportation.
Wolf is perhaps second-best known for an underling claiming he had ordered him to stop sharing information up the chain of command about potential Russian interference in the American electoral process. It’s easy to imagine mainstream media outlets losing their minds over Wolf’s invitation — all the more so in this brave new world where we’re supposed to consider Wayne Gretzky a quisling and travel to the United States an act of treason. But in discussion with former Conservative Party of Canada president John Walsh, Wolf shared a few key things about the mainstream MAGA view of Canada that we should all want to hear, especially since Americans of all political stripes tend to be so charmingly solicitous when you get them out of their comfort zones.
Apparently, the MAGA royalty don’t really think, or care, that much about Canada. Over and over again, Wolf — who, remember, was in charge of border security — stressed that the Mexican border has always been, and still is, the major problem. ”A lot of people in the United States don’t realize we have two borders,” Wolf said at one point.
“They focus almost exclusively on the southern border. And ..
. the threats — the human trafficking, the illegal narcotics — I mean, it’s where the game is at.” “All statistics” prove this is true, said Wolf.
He seemed to have had very little conception of the fentanyl problem as it pertains to Canada, except to stress that China and Mexico were far bigger problems at the moment. Also: Trump wants us to move way faster than we’re used to — on “Trump time,” as Wolf called it. “Things .
.. cannot happen in months.
We’re talking days and weeks,” he told Walsh. “And that is a little different and a little difficult for folks in D.C.
to contemplate and wrap their heads around.” The Canadian political establishment, presumably, even less so. Haste makes waste, but so does sloth.
We should work on that. Wolf also basically conceded American conservatives like Canada’s traditional immigration policy to the extent it was designed to attract people willing and able immediately to contribute to the economy. That has been the cornerstone of Canada’s immigration consensus (which Walsh mentioned) for decades, at least until recently.
“As a country, to be able to control who comes in and who doesn’t based on their resources is a really, really fundamental concept,” Wolf told Walsh. “Sounds like you guys are doing it. We haven’t done that in the United States in a long time.
” There was plenty in what Wolf said to pick apart, roll your eyes at and otherwise pooh-pooh. There was nothing to suggest the encounter wasn’t worthwhile, however. “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war,” Winston Churchill famously said.
Americans and Canadians haven’t been at war — quite the opposite — for more than 200 years. Engagement is the way forward. National Post cselley@postmedia.
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