Ottawa has been preparing for the next US president ‘for months’, says the foreign minister

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says Canadian preparations for the next US president have been underway for months as US voters decide who will replace Joe Biden in the White House.

“We have been preparing for this for several months through our diplomatic network across the United States, but also around the world,” Joly told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday.

“This government will be able to address issues that are important to Canadians, regardless of who the American people decide.”

Today is the last day for voters to cast ballots in a close presidential race between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Joly’s comments come after one of Trump’s former ambassadors to Canada said Canada should prepare for what could be a more antagonistic bilateral relationship with the United States if her old boss wins.

“Canada, they need to buckle up. The whole world needs to buckle up because President Trump is going to continue his policies from 2016. We’re going to make America great again and we’re going to bring it back to where it was under Trump presidency,” Kelly Craft told Radio-Canada in an interview Sunday.

At the NATO summit earlier this year, Trudeau pledged to meet the defense pact’s spending targets, which Canada has long ignored. Trudeau said Canada will spend two percent of its GDP on the military by 2032.

Craft said that’s not fast enough, and she expects Trump to demand more defense spending on a shorter timeline.

Asked Tuesday about the possibility of speeding up military spending, Joly was noncommittal, saying Canada will “honor our commitment to our NATO allies.”

Trade is likely to be a major issue if Trump returns to the Oval Office. He is promising a tariff of at least 10 percent on all imports into the United States — which would be a disruptive development for Canadian companies and the workers they employ, given that an estimated $3.6 billion in goods cross the border every day.

Joly insisted that Ottawa has been working to forge important ties with officials at the local and state levels who can help advocate for continued open trade between the two countries.

“We now have a relationship that runs deep at different levels of American society,” she said.

Trudeau asked about potential unrest

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau echoed Joly’s statements heading into question period Tuesday, saying he is prepared to work with whoever wins.

Sources say Trudeau has held behind-the-scenes talks with advisers about potential results and has been briefed by Canadian security officials about the potential for violent unrest in the US prompted by a delayed result.

If the results are as close as polls suggest and mail-in ballots become a deciding factor, there will be no clear winner Tuesday night — a repeat of the experience of the 2020 election, when Biden was first declared the winner. after election day.

Trump seized on the delay and declared victory before many states had finalized their results.

The 2020 delay sparked protests and weeks of unrest, culminating in the attack on the US capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trudeau dodged a question about whether he is concerned about the potential for violence.

“My job as Canadian prime minister has always been to work with whoever the American elects to be their president … and that’s exactly what I will continue to do,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

The FBI said Tuesday it has heard reports of a number of bomb threats at polling places across the United States, but none have been deemed credible.

“The FBI is aware of bomb threats against polling places in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible so far,” the agency said in a statement.

The FBI did not identify the states in question, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said earlier Tuesday that the state’s election process had eliminated some bomb threats he said came from Russia.

Officials in Fulton County, Georgia said they received “several calls” and the threats forced the brief closure of two polling places.

Officials continue to warn of what they say is an unprecedented level of foreign influence and disinformation that they expect will continue beyond Election Day.