Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Vice-President Pence, Governors, friends, honoured guests: Good afternoon.

It is my sincere privilege to be here with you today, to talk about some of the values we have in common, and some of the solutions to the challenges we all face.

Governor McAuliffe, thank you for your kind words of introduction, and your thoughtful opening remarks.

Governor Raimondo, thank you for your warm welcome and this extraordinary Ocean State hospitality. It’s high summer here in Rhode Island, land of perfect sun, sand and surf.

I have to say I am a little bit flattered, and also a little bit surprised, that so many of you in the audience have chosen to be here now rather than at the beach. Maybe that’s on the agenda for this weekend.

Or maybe like me, you agree with Wallace Stevens that perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Now, I have to tell you, Wallace Stevens is my favourite American poet. By day, he worked in insurance up the road in Hartford, Connecticut, and by night he wrote some of the most thoughtful poetry this country – and indeed, our world – has ever seen.

As I get to know this beautiful, historic corner of America a little better - the neatly tended fields and low stone walls, the apple orchards and spectacular ocean vistas – I’ve been thinking a lot about Wallace Stevens.

In his poem Theory, he declares, “I am what is around me.” And it makes me think of the concept of home – what it means, and how we define it.

Of course, home begins with family. It extends out from there – to school and places of worship, workplace, community, city, state and country.

But there’s an aspect of home that goes beyond our national borders – at least beyond the Canada-U.S. border, which is unlike any other. That is the idea, and the reality, of our common North American home.

This is where Newfoundlanders took in thousands of stranded American air travellers after 9/11 – as chronicled in the award-winning Broadway musical, Come From Away, which you really should all see. It is where, 100 years ago, New Englanders rushed to help their Nova Scotian cousins, after the Halifax explosion of 1917.

We saw it just a few weeks ago when the Plymouth-to-Newport sailing race got hit with hurricane-force winds and Canadian Armed Forces personnel, ships and planes went immediately into rescue mode.

That’s what friends and neighbours do for one another. We’re there for each other. We step up.

The Canada-U.S. border is sometimes referred to as “the longest undefended border in the world.” That’s actually wrong: Our shared border is very well defended. We defend it together, against common threats.

From NORAD, the only joint-command relationship in the world, to NATO, to counter-terrorism and to basic street-level policing, Canadians and Americans work shoulder-to shoulder, keeping each other safe. As long as any of us here can remember, and further back than that, we have done this.  

And that is the context in which I’d like to say a few words today about Canada’s outreach to the United States this year - which has variously been described by analysts and pundits as un-Canadian; exceptionally Canadian; unprecedented; highly predictable; and, perhaps most colourfully, a doughnut. And in that one I suspect you governors are all the sprinkles.

My friends, I’m here to tell you that our continuing conversation with all of you is none of those things. Not at all. On the contrary, it is consistent and solid, through-and-through.

And I need to highlight the work of two individuals here as being exemplary throughout this process: Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, and our Ambassador to the United States, David MacNaughton.

Thank you, both, for your terrific work. And we all know that Chrystia and David are not alone in this.

It extends to all levels of governance and society. From my continuing, constructive dialogues with President Trump and Vice-President Pence; to chats between federal ministers and cabinet secretaries; to meetings between state governors and provincial premiers (including the Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, who is here with us today) to conversations between municipal leaders, to business and non-governmental organizations, to the thousands of personal and business ties that form the bedrock of our national bond.

During my time in politics, I’ve noticed this: Pundits - and I say this with the greatest of respect and affection to our friends in the media - really seem to enjoy the word “strategy.”

If you have a plan it’s just a plan. Anyone can have a plan. But if you call it a strategy, suddenly journalists are leafing through Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and making oblique references to chess.

It has the effect of making the obvious seem complex or at least fancy. It makes for an interesting story.

But our strategy – our plan – is actually extremely straightforward.

Canada is a confident, creative, resourceful and resource-rich nation. We are a wealthy and influential country, by world standards. But we are also a country of 35 million people, living next door to one roughly ten times our size – and the world’s only superpower.

My father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, once compared this to sleeping next to an elephant.

But while you, my American friends, may be an elephant, Canada is no mouse. More like a moose – strong and peaceable, but still massively outweighed.

And so, we need to work harder to make our points, to advocate for the interests of Canadian families in a way that will connect down here. That applies across the range of our national interests – from the fight against climate change, to job creation, to our common defence.

Because, let’s face it, this is another truth about good neighbours: Sometimes we take each other for granted. Sometimes the very dependability and ease of a relationship can lead to us paying too little attention. When that happens, the principals invariably live to regret it.

My friends, we in Canada decided we would not allow that to happen to our relationship with the United States of America.

And you will allow me to say that again for the folks back at home, because it’s important.

This is another truth about good neighbours: Sometimes we take each other for granted. Sometimes the very dependability and ease of a relationship can lead to us paying too little attention. When that happens, the principals invariably live to regret it.

My friends, we in Canada decided we would not allow that to happen to our relationship with the United States of America.

When I talk about the importance of maintaining this relationship, I talk about it as a collective. I say “we” because this sentiment extends throughout the cabinet and caucus I lead, but it is actually bigger than our government or our political party. There is an extraordinarily high degree of support for this across Canadian society.

I note, by the way, that we have representatives from two of our major political parties here today: Members of Parliament Mike Lake, Brenda Shanahan and Salma Zahid, as well as Senators Bob Runciman and Art Eggleton -- hello and thank you all for being here.

As I was saying: the Canada-US relationship is far too important for us to assume that Americans are as focused on it as we are. Focused on just how interlinked our economies have become. And just how crucial this is to the prosperity and security on both sides of this border – especially for the middle class, and those working hard to join it.

Given the imminent modernization of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which we welcome of course, we felt compelled to tell you Canada’s story, specifically as it relates to the United States.

It’s a great story. And not just for the nine million American workers whose jobs depend directly on trade and investment with Canada. But for all Americans.

Now, some of you may have heard that last number before - along with the fact that two thirds of American states have Canada as their number one top export market.

This may have something to do with the fact that we’re repeating those numbers to U.S. audiences every chance we can get.

The export number is true, by the way, for a majority of the states represented here today, including: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

To boil this down to one point: Canada is the US’s biggest, best customer – by far. We’re a bigger customer than China by roughly $152 billion. Bigger than Japan or the UK. No one else even comes close. In fact, Canada buys more from the US than China, Japan, and the UK combined!

We have been consistent this year - some might say, relentless, but we’re polite in our relentlessness because we’re Canadian - in sharing that message, beginning in my regular dialogues with President Trump and fanning out from there.

Let me tell you why.

This is the most successful economic partnership in the history of the world. It’s worth about a trillion dollars each year, and most importantly, it’s well balanced.

More broadly, the North American Free Trade zone is the biggest economic zone in the world, comprising a $19-trillion regional market of 470 million customers.

The United States, Canada, and Mexico together now account for more than a quarter of the world’s GDP. Since the trilateral agreement went into effect in 1994, US trade with your NAFTA partners has tripled.

That accounts for millions of well-paying middle-class jobs for Canadians, and Americans. Free trade has worked. It is working now. And those ties have grown well beyond direct trade.

Canadians pay more than $500-million annually in property tax, in Florida alone. And another 25,000 homes in Arizona are Canadian-owned.

Something to do with the weather, I suspect.

But NAFTA isn’t perfect. No such agreement ever is. We think it should be updated and modernized, as it has been a dozen times over the past quarter century. And I have every expectation that it will be - to the ultimate benefit of working people in all three partner countries. 

And I have to add this: We have been gratified by the serious, respectful response that our outreach has met at all levels of American government. We thank our counterparts in the Trump administration for that, and we thank all of you.

The relationship between our countries is historic. It is a model to the world. It is of critical importance for people on both sides of the border that we maintain, and indeed, improve it. We must get this right.

Sometimes getting it right means refusing to take the politically-tempting shortcuts.

More trade barriers, more local-content provisions, more preferential access for home-grown players in government procurement, for example, does not help working families over the long term, or even the mid-term.

Such policies kill growth. And that hurts the very workers these measures are nominally intended to protect. Once we travel down that road, it can quickly become a cycle of tit-for-tat, a race to the bottom, where all sides lose.  

My friends, Canada doesn’t want to go there.

If anything, we’d like a thinner border for trade, not a thicker one.

Allow me once again to repeat that in French.

The relationship between our countries is historic. It is a model to the world. It is of critical importance for people on both sides of the border that we maintain it, and indeed, improve it. We must get this right.

Sometimes getting it right means refusing to take the politically-tempting shortcuts.

More trade barriers, more local-content provisions, more preferential access for home-grown players in government procurement, for example, does not help working families over the long term, or even the mid-term.

Such policies kill growth. And that hurts the very workers these measures are nominally intended to protect. Once we travel down that road, it can quickly become a cycle of tit-for-tat, a race to the bottom, where all sides lose. 

Now, there are some really great arguments to be made for keeping our border thin when it comes to trade, even as we improve cross-border law enforcement that makes Canadians and Americans safer.

Our friends and partners in Michigan and Ohio know well the case of Magna International - a global automotive parts supplier headquartered in Ontario.

Founded in 1957, Magna today employs nearly 140,000 workers in 29 countries. Half of those workers are here in North America. Magna has 65 facilities in the United States, 60 in Canada and 29 in Mexico.

Here’s the point: Magna’s supply chain spans the border. To a car part, the border is invisible. Canadian components are repeatedly incorporated into more complex products before final assembly.

A hydroformed upper crossmember starts in Strathroy, Ontario. It’s imported into Michigan for assembly into a carrier and then incorporated into a full front-end module in Ohio. Magna then sends the front-end modules to Chrysler for final assembly. And Chrysler exports the finished Jeeps right around the world.

That’s teamwork, my friends.

Or take Canam Group, the parent company of Canam Steel. Canam is headquartered in Quebec. It employs roughly equal numbers of Canadians and Americans. Its plants in Point of Rock, Maryland and Claremont, New Hampshire provide jobs that are vital to their communities. Canam’s market is the construction industry – which is a North American-wide industry, by the way.

There are, literally, too many examples of this to name.

Whether it’s CN in Louisiana, or Hydro Quebec in Maine, or Cott Corporation in Missouri, or countless other enterprises and projects across the States, Canadian energy, ingenuity and capital are there, helping you build America - just as American energy, ingenuity and capital are in Canada, helping us build our country.  

And this, ultimately, is why I have such confidence in our shared future. And in the best efforts of every leader in this room, and in Washington, to nurture this relationship, to make it even better: We really are all in this together.

Ambassador MacNaughton remarked on the high degree of co-operation and collegiality among the state governors he talked to , including many of you. That pragmatic approach crosses party lines.

I know that’s because, as governors, you face common problems, and share many of the same goals. I know that you’re focused on creating the conditions for good, well-paying jobs for the middle class in your states.

Whether Republican or Democrat, in this economy, that’s most likely your very first priority.

Guess what? It’s my first priority as well. President Trump has told us all that it’s his first priority. We all have this in common.

This challenge – how to ensure benefits of commerce and trade are more broadly shared, so that every family can look forward to a brighter future – is among the most fundamental of our time.

My friends, I believe to my core that the most important challenge we face, as elected leaders, is that of creating lasting conditions for prosperity and security for all our people – in this, our shared North American home.

By virtue of our geography, by virtue of our interlinked economies, this is work we are called to do together – within a modernized, renewed and strengthened North American Free Trade Agreement.

So, I will leave you with this: Let us meet this challenge. Let us keep talking, as neighbours and friends should. Let us roll up our sleeves. Let’s get to work. And let’s keep making history, together.

Thank you very much everyone.