Former Canadian finance minister stresses collaboration amid turbulent U.S.-Canada relations #CanadaFinance

At the MacMillan Center, former minister and former Jackson professor Bill Morneau discussed his experience during Donald Trump’s first administration and recent shifts in tariffs and geopolitics.

Jaeha Jang

12:52 am, Feb 26, 2025

Staff Reporter

Jaeha Jang, Contributing Photographer

Bill Morneau, who served as the Canadian finance minister from 2015 to 2020, visited the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies to reflect on his tenure during President Donald Trump’s first administration and to answer questions about Canada’s economic future.

Introduced by Jay Gitlin, the coordinator of the Committee on Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center, and Brendan Shanahan, an associate research scholar on the committee, Morneau addressed the ongoing tensions between the U.S. and Canadian governments and issues such as climate legislation, China’s rise and the diversification of Canadian trade.

“It’s really important that Americans appreciate how important the relationship is between the United States and Canada. … Having people that appreciate those relationships, commercial but also cultural and social, familial, is really important,” Morneau told the News. “That starts with students and goes through the entire population.”

Morneau initially reflected on what his role as the finance minister of Canada meant both domestically and internationally.

Domestically, he said, his government was successful in increasing child benefits to reduce child poverty and in investing in pension plans to reduce general poverty in the future. He also noted that the messaging of some policies could have connected better with Canadians.

“I really appreciated Mr. Morneau’s talk because of the reflective and personal nature of his talk,” said Stephen Morris ’27, who attended the event. “He recognized his administration’s implementation of carbon pricing wasn’t well implemented. I didn’t feel that he was simply presenting facts, but he was offering his own critical assessment of his time in office.”

Morneau’s international experience was more turbulent. According to him, the actions of the first Trump administration, which started one year into his ministership, reflected the dissolution of the neoliberal economic order. This order, which emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, emphasized values like democracy, capitalism, globalization and technology.

“Most of his tenure as finance minister overlapped with the first Trump Administration, a time in which much of Mr. Morneau’s efforts were directed at navigating U.S.-Canada relations and the renegotiation of NAFTA (now the USMCA),” Shanahan wrote to the News. “In this manner, Mr. Morneau was able to offer concrete insights into how he views the present state of U.S.-Canada relations (especially the threat of tariffs and a possible trade war) in relation to his own time in office, and the lessons he draws from it.”

Morneau felt the shift away from neoliberal economic order in 2017, when he talked to President Xi Jinping of China and listened to Trump’s inauguration speech in the same week. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Xi told Morneau that China was going to be the leader in the rules-based international trading system, which Morneau felt skeptical about.

However, when he heard Trump’s inauguration speech, “addressing a new and more aggressive way to deal with international trade,” he realized the U.S. would no longer be a reliable leader in international trade.

“This is a world that was quite different all of a sudden,” Morneau said. “For Canada, that situation meant that it was much harder to get things done.”

According to Morneau, the departure from the neoliberal economic order has become more stark in 2025. The second Trump administration is willing to use tariffs not only to influence trade but also to generate revenue, he said.

Morneau added that China is on a stronger path toward dominance in global advanced manufacturing, with China projected to produce 45 percent of manufacturing in 2030 and the U.S. projected to produce 11 percent. As advanced manufacturing is directly connected with defense capabilities, he said, there is more incentive to bring manufacturing back to America.

Morneau argued that Canada should “come to some sort of agreement” with the U.S., which might mean that both countries would have to give something up. Instead of arbitrarily putting digital sales taxes on a few American companies, he said Canada could make strategic sacrifices like increasing NATO spending.

He also said Canada should think about factors that could advantage them, including improving the immigration system, contributing to a global sustainable energy investment and improving their nuclear energy capacity.

“There are things that we can do, not only to work together with the United States, but to create more agency for Canada,” Morneau said. “The challenge we’ll have is that we will need to have cool heads in the face of demeaning and frankly offensive dialogue and do that in a way that recognizes the long term positive and very beneficial relationship between our two countries.”

While the relationship between the U.S. and Canada is at a turbulent stage, with Trump’s threats to impose 25 percent tariffs and incorporate the nation as a 51st stateMorneau highlighted the importance of behind-the-scenes dialogues.

“I would not be doing what Prime Minister Trudeau is doing and sending out tweets that are tit for tat because I just don’t see how that’s in any way helpful in this kind of situation,” he said.

For Canadian citizens in America who feel stressed about Trump’s volatile comments, Morneau said it’s important to understand the reason behind Trump’s comments.

“I would encourage people not to take literally what he’s saying,” Morneau said. “The Trump administration is trying to change some aspects of the global trading system, and obviously, we want to make sure that the positive aspects of the trading system that has worked for generations between Canada and the United States can endure.”

Morneau added that he won’t be re-entering politics at the moment.

“Politics is all about timing,” he said. “You don’t jump into a nasty job with all the negatives if you think that the outcome is probably that you’re not going to win anyway.”

Morneau taught “Global Economic Coordination and Cooperation: A Finance Minister’s Perspective” at the Jackson School in spring 2021.