Northwest leaders offer warmer take on frosty U.S.-Canada relations

Alberta beef is a lot like a Midwestern car.

Auto parts have moved freely across the U.S.-Canada border between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, since the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Cows do the same between Montana and Alberta as they are fattened up before making a final trip to a meatpacking plant like Tyson Fresh Meats in Wallula, Walla Walla County.

But now cows, like car parts, are caught up in the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and Canada. With an Aug. 1 deadline looming for the two countries to strike a deal or face President Donald Trump’s threat to impose 35% tariffs on all Canadian imports, three decades of unfettered cattle trade between Northwest neighbors is at risk.

The stakes are high enough that they motivated Karen Rosvold, a councillor in a rural district in northwest Alberta, to trek to Bellevue this week with over 600 others for the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region Annual Summit, which concluded Thursday. The forum is for political and business leaders to hash out common issues facing the Northwest. Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Seattle, PNWER’s annual summit was last held here 20 years ago.

For Rosvold, herself a cattle producer and an elected official who represents a county of just 26,000 people — 1% of King County’s population — PNWER is her best shot to bend the ear of trade negotiators in Ottawa and Washington who are making decisions that will have an outsize impact on her constituency of farmers and ranchers.

“If we’re not at the table, we’re the meal,” she said.

On Monday, Rosvold and her fellow Albertans — from fellow cattle producers to veterinarians to provincial legislators — got their chance. The Alberta delegation hosted U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra for dinner and a reception. The conversation left Mark Lyseng, government relations lead for industry group Alberta Beef Producers, “optimistic there’s a path forward, one that supports a resilient, mutually beneficial beef sector on both sides of the border.

As a binational public-private nonprofit approved by the legislatures of Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Northwest Territories, Oregon, Saskatchewan, Washington and Yukon, PNWER has the clout to raise Northwest concerns with national leadership, like providing a venue for Albertans to land valuable face time with a Trump administration official on a critical economic issue that receives less attention than trade disputes over aluminum, steel and automobiles.

Those opportunities are coming at a fraught time, with U.S.-Canada relations at the lowest point in decades in the wake of the trade war instigated by the Trump administration, as well as rhetorical threats to Canadian sovereignty like referring to the U.S.’s northerly neighbor as the “51st state.” The resulting Canadian calls for economic boycotts of U.S. products and self-imposed travel bans by Canadians unwilling to cross the border are being felt in Washington state, with fewer southbound visitors and reduced trade.

The focus at PNWER was on damage control and relationship maintenance, as the group tries to keep the flame alight between Northwest neighbors while tensions rise in Ottawa and Washington.

“Relations have never been this strained, but I also believe that they're still intact,” said Barry Penner, who held several positions in B.C. government and served as PNWER president from 2002-03. “We have work to do to repair some of the hard feelings because we are woven together not just by geography, but conscious decisions made over time. We are an interdependent region here in the Northwest, whether people recognize it or not.”

"Mean and nasty

Repairing hard feelings was not on Hoekstra’s agenda. The former Michigan congressman and founding member of the tea party became ambassador in May and initially adopted a friendlier tone toward the close U.S. ally. But he opened the summit on Monday confirming Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s characterization that “the old relationship is done.” He followed with a stinging rebuke for Canadians who choose not to travel south of the border and for decisions by provincial leaders like B.C. Premier David Eby to remove U.S. alcohol from Canadian liquor store shelves.

“There are reasons why the president and some of his team refer to Canada as being mean and nasty to deal with,” he said.

Canadian media reported on the remarks and put them to Eby, who was meeting with fellow provincial premiers and Carney in Ontario for a briefing on trade talks, which resumed in July after Canada agreed to scrap a tax on U.S. tech firms. On Canadian television, Eby claimed Hoekstra’s comments showed economic boycotts and liquor bans were working and encouraged his fellow citizens to “hold the line.” But he also distinguished between a spat at the national leadership level and interpersonal relations.

“At the end of the day we need to get past that,” he said on CBC’s Power & Politics. “When the Americans come up to visit in British Columbia, they’re saying ‘I’m sorry, we’re friends, we’re neighbors, we’re partners.’ Canadians feel the same way about everyday Americans.”

When asked about the much maligned “51st state” taunt, which Hoekstra had previously disavowed, he characterized it as a potential compliment. “(Canadians) say they're hurt and they were insulted,” Hoekstra said. “There's not a whole lot of people or countries that we've asked to become a state.”

Alison Gifford, a Vancouver, B.C.-based political strategist, chalked the rhetorical device to a negotiating tactic. “Trade and diplomatic agreements come with a certain amount of theater, bluster and hubris,” she said. “The folks in this room are professionals who can look past that political theater.”

Northwest priorities

What those professionals are looking for, meanwhile, runs a wide gamut.

Saskatchewan’s agriculture minister wants to keep exporting tariff-free potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, to Idaho potato farmers. British Columbia mining interests seek to maintain the critical minerals agreement the previous Trump administration inked in 2020 in order to export copper, lead, zinc and germanium south. Tourism boosters want crowds visiting the FIFA World Cup next summer to experience smooth trips across the border when attending games in Seattle and Vancouver. Companies like Microsoft that domicile employees in Vancouver, B.C., due to easier Canadian immigration laws lobby for cross-border travel to be as frictionless as possible, in order to take advantage of the proximity between their Redmond headquarters and Canada’s West Coast metropolis.

Another pressing issue is the future of Columbia River hydropower. Big Tech and AI companies building power-hungry data centers and the public utility districts who serve them need clarity on the Columbia River Treaty, which governs the shared waterway. On that bilateral subject of enormous import for the Northwest, Hoekstra professed ignorance. “There’s a couple things I can’t figure out in Canada, one of which is this provincial thing, like on the Columbia River Treaty,” he said. “It's between the province of British Columbia and the United States. How's that work?”

The 1964 treaty’s signatories are the U.S. and Canada, not British Columbia. Since the entirety of the Columbia River watershed north of the border falls in British Columbia, the province is in charge of implementing the treaty provisions for Canada with day-to-day dam operations falling to public utility BC Hydro.

Hoekstra’s gaffe highlights how soured U.S.-Canada relations at the federal level threaten fragile diplomacy on a matter vital to the Northwest’s future. Negotiators reached a tentative agreement in July 2024 after eight years of talks, only to see further progress stalled in March when negotiations were paused in the wake of Trump’s trade war and threats to Canadian sovereignty, including water.

A potential trade deal next month may pave the way to resume talks.

“That will clear the decks for a lot of other kinds of conversations, most specifically and most importantly, the Columbia River Treaty,” said Washington Lt. Gov. Denny Heck. “(The trade dispute) is constipating all other kinds of conversations at this point.”

Regional damage control

While economic saber-rattling between Washington and Ottawa captures national headlines, the true believers in cross-border relations have been diligently working on damage control since the beginning of the year.

In May, Heck led a delegation of Washington legislators to the B.C. Parliament in Victoria. The Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce took local business leaders on trips to Vancouver in March and Toronto in May in an effort to maintain ties. Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, will buck the calls for an economic boycott of the U.S. and reciprocate in September with a trip to Seattle.

In April, a bipartisan group of Washington state senators adopted a resolution “reaffirming our relationship with Canada.” The month prior, PNWER issued a resolution “on the vital importance of the U.S.-Canada relationship” with signatories who defied conventional political wisdom based on their party affiliation, like Idaho Republican State Rep. Britt Raybould, whose national party leader instigated the trade war, and then-B.C. Minister of State for Trade Rick Glumac, whose boss called for an economic boycott of the U.S.

“What you see us doing at PNWER is reflective of what I would hope to see going forward at a national level between the two countries,” Raybould said. “It's an ongoing effort for us to find a way that accomplishes the majority of our shared goals.”

Glumac traveled to Oregon earlier this year and met with businesses who import goods from Canada and are threatened by tariffs. “We don’t have a quarrel with the people and the businesses of the United States,” he said. “From Boeing here in Washington to many other companies in Idaho and Montana that will be negatively affected by these policies, they need to convey that to the federal government.”

That such decisions are made in capitals thousands of miles from the Northwest is an irreconcilable fact of politics, one that leaves the hundreds of delegates at PNWER as bystanders hoping at best to influence decision-making on the margins. But with such a long and recognized history of regional collaboration — a 2008 study by the Canadian government’s Policy Research Institute concluded the Northwest has the strongest cross-border ties of any region — there remains considerable optimism that if anybody will work to rebuild relations between the Land of the Free and the True North, it will be the Pacific Northwest.

“The U.S.-Canada relationship lives and dies away from Washington and Ottawa and this is where you've got a lot of constructive activity,” said Christopher Sands, director of the Hopkins Center for Canadian Studies. “The imagination that comes from this part of the continent is really necessary for the improvement of the relationship on the other side of the continent.”

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