The foreign minister has a deep Rolodex and ambition to match. Now does he have what it will take to guide Canada through a period of unprecedented global change?
It’s 1999. A fresh-faced lawyer just shy of 30 walks into the headquarters of a major European transportation company in Stuttgart, Germany. “Where’s your boss?” asks one of the higher-ups that greets him. “It’s me,” he says. “I’m the head of the delegation. I’m the one in charge.”Ahead of a business deal worth nearly US$500 million, ABB, the company the young lawyer represents, and DaimlerChrysler, whose doors he has waltzed into, had agreed four lawyers would sit at either side of the table.
Like anyone in his position, Champagne is a mouthpiece for the positions of his leader, though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has never seemed seized by foreign policy. And unlike his predecessors, this foreign minister has little ownership of Canada’s most important relationship, that with the United States—Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister, has been trusted to maintain the Rolodex she built while closing a new NAFTA.
King, who had died a decade earlier, wasn’t just a hero to Champagne, but a friend, says Katz—“he used to call him ‘Frenchie.’” It was at a rendez-vous with the World Economic Forum that he befriended fellow Canadian Patrick McWhinney, now CEO of a Boston-based conflict management company, Insight Collaborative.
In the interim years Champagne mainly lived and worked outside of Canada. Closer to his electoral run, like many liberal-minded types he attended what is perhaps akin to a mid-career leadership camp at the Banff Forum in Alberta, becoming the think tank’s co-president. “I never heard about it. I didn’t know at all,” she says of Champagne’s politicking, speaking to Maclean’s in French. “Was I consulted? Never. Did he talk to me? Never. … He completely ignored me.”
“He is a political beast like we rarely see. When he is here, he spends the totality of his time meeting people everywhere. We sense that he loves what he’s doing profoundly,” Angers says of the junior Champagne. He says it’s no secret the riding enjoys having a high-profile MP, and through Champagne he has clinked glasses with a variety of cabinet ministers.
Although Champagne’s biggest achievement was to close a new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 12-country deal, the twists and turns of its negotiation were a source of frustration and embarrassment. Behind the scenes, he proved an effective negotiator on major projects, says one former official. “With big global contractors, he could take them to task and really, really press them to get the work done,” the former official says.
In March, with COVID-19 spreading like wildfire and countries closing their borders without notice, Champagne formed an ad hoc ministerial group with a list of countries including France, Germany and Brazil, that has “met” by phone nine times. And he led a department-wide push to repatriate some 40,000 Canadians, phoning airlines and foreign ministers personally as part of the effort.
Much of Champagne’s time is currently spent campaigning for Canada to secure a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council. His pitch to foreign ministers, especially of smaller nations, is that Canada, as a traditional mediator, can use the seat to amplify the voices of its allies.
Although he can list recent interactions with UN colleagues at the drop of a hat, Champagne expresses few specific world-building ambitions. Champagne is more present than some of his predecessors, they say, calling up ambassadors more often, taking lunch at the headquarters cafeteria and touring the building to meet with staff and discuss what he learned from the latest trans-Atlantic text message conversation.Without prompt, several people close to Champagne expressed a reporter would be “hard-pressed” to find anyone who didn’t think he was of good character.
Champagne, although managing to utter “Taiwan” eight times during an interview with Maclean’s, hesitates to elaborate on China’s human rights abuses, aside from saying they are raised in his conversations. He expresses his concern for Hong Kong, as China attempts to legislate away its autonomy, but doesn’t bite on the idea of sanctions.
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