Can Trudeau’s sunny ways sell NAFTA in the Windy City?

Justin Trudeau has some drawing power in the United States. At the University of Chicago, there was an overflow crowd of almost a thousand to hear a glamorous Canadian PM whose name they actually know. The hard part was using his popularity to sell an unpopular pro-NAFTA message in this Democratic-dominated city.

So he veered left: There were the familiar statistics about how many American jobs depend on trade with Canada, but an emphasis on the idea that renegotiating the North American free-trade agreement could widen its benefits. There is anxiety that trade deals only benefit the one per cent and large corporations, he told his audience; NAFTA talks can be about fixing that, with stronger labour provisions, environmental protections, even pro-women measures.

"This is an opportunity for us to listen to the anxiety and the concerns that ordinary people feel," he told the audience.

That's not a new idea for Mr. Trudeau, who likes to talk about "progressive trade." But it's a different emphasis for a trip to the United States. It wasn't just that he was telling Americans that it would be folly to tear up NAFTA because it would disrupt American jobs. It's that he was telling an American audience that NAFTA can be very different.

"The issue is not trade/no trade," he said. "The issue is what kind of trade."

The irony is that Mr. Trudeau was selling something to one side of the U.S. political spectrum that the other side won't accept. Mr. Trudeau's government has put forward labour proposals, and a few other "progressive trade" ideas in NAFTA talks, but no one really expects the administration of President Donald Trump, or his Republican Party, to accept them.

This was Mr. Trudeau trying to tailor the message to the audience. In Chicago, largely a liberal Democratic audience, and it didn't take much to tell the crowd at the university leaned that way.

"We're all superaware of everything going on in the United States," Mr. Trudeau said at one point in his speech, and the crowd, obviously thinking he was hinting at Mr. Trump, started to murmur and laugh.

The Prime Minister has no trouble finding an American stage. He's on this three-day trip to U.S. cities primarily because he was offered an opportunity to speak at the Ronald Reagan Library in California, and the symbolism, the possibility of invoking the free-trading spirit of a hero of Mr. Trump's party, was too good to pass up.

In Chicago, his host was David Axelrod, the former Barack Obama strategist, who also put the PM on his CNN-affiliated political podcast whose invitees are usually major U.S. political players such as Senator Mark Warner and Condoleezza Rice, or celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Hanks. Mr. Trudeau was probably invited as a bit of both.

American liberals tend to see Mr. Trudeau as a kind of glamorous global contrast to Mr. Trump. So the Prime Minister talked about himself, about his path to politics. He told the crowd he came to power by fighting a Conservative Party that was using divisive politics such as an anti-Muslim snitch line and attack ads with more hopeful efforts to pull people together. This crowd understood it as underlining how different he is to Mr. Trump, and gave him a standing ovation at the end.

But the message Mr. Trudeau is really trying to get across, on NAFTA, isn't an easy sell in Midwest cities such as Chicago, where the trade deal is seen as the cause of plant closings. One of Mr. Axelrod's forgotten sorties in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign was to accuse Hillary Clinton of lying to the American people about her role in building NAFTA. For many Democrats, NAFTA is a dirty word.

Mr. Trudeau read off the statistics – that exports to Canada and Mexico of corn, a big Illinois crop, have multiplied seven times, and that more than 300,000 Illinois jobs depend on Canada. There were probably still many doubters of his conclusion that the U.S. and Canadian economies have "thrived" under NAFTA for 25 years.

The fact that Mr. Trudeau regularly gets a public platform in the United States gives him a chance to issue those reminders that Canadian trade matters to Americans, however – and, he hopes, sow doubts on all sides of American politics about the wisdom of simply ripping up NAFTA. The problem is persuading NAFTA critics at both ends of the U.S. political spectrum who don't agree with each other. And the progressive trade message he tailored to Chicago Democrats might have to be reworked a little by the time he gets to the Reagan library on Friday to summon the memories of the Gipper's free-trading ethos.