With just a few days left in Canada’s federal election campaign, U.S. president Donald Trump has once again inserted himself onto the ballot question: the American leader repeated on Wednesday that Canada would “cease to exist” without the United States. Trump also threatened to further increase tariffs on Canadian cars and auto parts.
The sabre-rattling about Canada’s future, on economic independence and our status on the world stage should be top of mind for voters in Monday’s election, says Alan Kessel.
And he would know: Kessel has spent more than 40 years as one of the Canadian government’s most senior legal advisors and diplomats. Kessel, of Ottawa, recently retired from the public service, leaving him to speak more freely about some of the critical international files he’s handled, and what’s at stake, especially the North American free trade agreement Canada signed in 2018 with the U.S. and Mexico—which Trump now wants to blow up. Kessel also worked on cases involving Israel that were brought to the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, and to the nearby Criminal Court, which recently issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, Alan Kessel joins to discuss why Trump’s trade war on Canada is illegal, what Canada’s next leader should do about it, and what’s behind the recent Liberal government’s completely different approaches when it comes to supporting Ukraine, but not Israel.
Transcript
Ellin Bessner: U.S. president Donald Trump’s actually been pretty quiet about Canada becoming America’s 51st state lately. In fact, for the last month, about the time Canada’s newly minted prime minister Marc Carney called the snap federal election on March 23, Trump ratcheted the volume right down,
But at the Oval Office in Washington on Wednesday, Trump weighed in once more on the current Canadian election, repeating that the US doesn’t need Canada, repeating his story that we cost them $200 billion dollars a year, and finishing off with line that’s prompted canadians to rally with ELBOWS UP sweatshirts – that Canada would cease to exist without America. Trump also mused about jacking up import tariffs on Canadian-made cars even higher.
As many observers have pointed out, even though Trump isn’t running on next Monday’s ballot, his threats and economic hostility are perhaps THE most important international election issue facing Canadian voters, as they calculate who the best man might be to have in the prime ministers job to lead canada’s negotiations on sovereignty, to save our economy, and to make sure Canada has an independent voice on national defence. global trade and in world geopolitics..including canada’s role in the conflicts in Israel and the middle east…and with ukraine and russia.
Watching all of this is Alan Kessel. During his 40 year career as a top legal adviser with the Canadian department of global affairs, the Ottawa -based lawyer and former ambassador has had his hand on many of these key international files
He was actually once voted one of the top 100 most influential and powerful people in government and politics in Canada
And while Kessel has just retired, and is still bound by some non-disclosure constraints, he is speaking out publicly now..deeply worried that voters should understand what’s really at stake – (although he won’t outright tell you who to vote for.)
I’m Ellin Bessner and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Friday April 25 2025
Welcome to The CJN daily, a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation
I’ve long wanted to ask Alan Kessel for an interview – he’s been Canada’s legal advisor on all kinds of newsworthy international government files, including this one you may have not heard about. It lasted 50 years: a dispute between Canada and Denmark over a small uninhabited island in the Canadian Arctic close to Greenland.
What happened? In 2022 the countries agreed to a peace treaty. They split the island right down the middle. Canada rules half. Denmark gets the other half. At the signing ceremony the politicians were all smiles and they swapped bottles of Canadian whiskey.
There’s a huge lot more at stake with the North American free trade deal that Kessel also worked on, that the tariff war has now blown up. Kessel says what t=Trump did was foolish but also illegal and dangerous, because it impacts 500 million people in Canada the U.S. and Mexico and about 30 percent of the world’s economy
Alan Kessel joins The CJN Daily now to discuss what Canada should do about Trump, whoever gets elected. And also what voters should know about Canada’s other international files, like what’s behind Canada’s very apparent policy change on Israel in recent years – some might see it as abandoning its ally Israel after decades of unwavering support, while at the same time going all in on support for Ukraine.
Ellin Bessner: And he joins me now from Ottawa. Welcome to the CJN Daily. It’s good to have you here.
Alan Kessel: It is a delight to be with you.
Ellin Bessner: We should start first with Donald Trump. As far as we’re right now in the middle of a trade war, you’ve posted about the legitimacy, the legality of these executive orders. So I want to start with that. The ones that Trump is doing. As an international lawyer and expert on this, what’s your take on whether these are even legal?
Alan Kessel: Well, it’s a very broad question, but the first thing is I’m not going to question his capacity as a president to issue executive orders. He can do that. Every president does. There’s a tradition in the U.S. one president leaves, the next one comes in, and they do executive orders to basically eliminate the past four years. What I can talk about and what is very worrisome is the fact that this is one of the few times ever that we’ve seen a president who’s basically abrogated an international treaty of this nature just by an executive order. As you can imagine, international treaties have processes by which you can pull out of them. This is not the way to do it. You recall that this is Trump’s agreement. He took a very simple title agreement called the North America Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, everybody could say it, and he turned it into sort of an alphabet soup. We call it CUSMA, they call it USMCA. The Mexicans, I can’t even figure out what they call it. But we all call it the most important thing that ever happened to North American trade.
The first thing that happens when he comes into office is, aside from, I would say, a bogus claim that there was a national security issue on the border with Canada, which he had to concoct in order to do this. He pulled out or he threatened or he put on these tariffs, which are just not foreseen within the body of that text. He undermined the most valuable thing that would have given him a way to deliver on his election promises, which was to make Americans richer. And so it’s actually more about making America poor again than it is to make America great again, because America has always been great. Who says it wasn’t? Anyway, from a lawyer’s perspective, this was not legal or valid. And I can understand what the Government of Canada is doing in terms of its reciprocal tariffs. And also the responses which I have, you know, I have to give the government credit for this. They’ve been very moderate in their approach, but they’re going to be hard. There’s going to be a steel fist in a velvet glove on this one.
Ellin Bessner: Go back to what you just said about the legality of these executive orders. How did his executive orders get justified? Under what law? A different law. Not the NAFTA CUSMA, but they used a different law in order to justify these emergency powers type of thing. Do you remember what that’s called?
Alan Kessel: Yeah, I don’t know what the law is, the domestic law. I just know that they had to use something in there and I don’t have their executive order in front of me. They claimed, he claimed that there was a national security emergency on the Canadian border and on the Mexican border. Now I’m not going to talk about the Mexican border. You can claim there was an emergency there with all the folks coming across, but I thought it was being handled.
In our case it was totally bogus. They were talking about fentanyl coming across. But the reality is that most of federal officials in Canada and federal departments have been working so closely with our American counterparts for generations to ensure that we have a secure and safe and free border. It’s in our interest as a country which has two to three billion dollars a day going across to make sure that nothing interferes.
And I personally was involved with treaties that we develop to ensure that there was reciprocal policing on the border. Now turns out by Americans own statistics that it was less than 1% of fentanyl coming into the states. I mean, it’s an absolute joke. Anybody could stand up there in the Congress or in the White House and say that this was a national security thing. What would a real national security issue look like? And then it turns out when after we put a billion and a half dollars into monitoring the border in very expensive helicopters, Blackhawk, it turns out, because that’s kind of Rambo, I think one person crossed the border and it was coming from the States. So, you know. But he doesn’t seem to need reasons. He just came up with a kind of a bogus thing to look to write in the order. And now the order’s in effect and now we’re negotiating. The pieces are moving all the time, but we’re negotiating over something that could have easily been negotiated as friends as opposed to enemies.
Ellin Bessner: Well, we’re talking about these executive orders superceding sort of reality and legality. What do you make of any possible challenges through the court system in the United States in order to overturn this? And I say this because he doesn’t care what the courts say in anything, as we know.
Alan Kessel: Well, I can’t prejudge what my former colleagues are going to be doing. But the, the actual CUSMA, formerly known as NAFTA, does have dispute resolution mechanisms in it. And I can’t imagine that we aren’t going to use the full brunt of dispute resolution, including WTO and other issues related to bringing them to a table to take a look at what we’re doing. The trouble is that in the meantime, they’ve sown confusion, total disruption of the markets. And I mean, this is a guy who looks at the markets as an indicator of his success. Have you seen what the Dow is doing and the Nasdaq and the others are doing? I mean, even I can read a graph, and that graph looks like a Canadian Rocky ski slope. And those people who have 401-Ks, maybe that isn’t his base. Maybe he doesn’t care about what the middle class or upper middle class think. Maybe people in Missouri or other places don’t have 401-Ks, but it’s certainly going to make their food cost more and their F150 trucks cost more. The last thing I saw was between 2 and $7,000. I mean, can’t be blind and miss that.
Ellin Bessner: You talked about who the right person is as a leader to battle Trump one on one. One of the most important decisions we’ll ever have to make. Would you like to weigh in on this as we’re in the middle of an election?
Alan Kessel: No, I don’t think I want to weigh in on that. I think everybody in Canada can make a decision on their own. I think this has galvanized the leadership race in a way that Canada hasn’t seen before. We probably will get a massive turnout. Some people are talking about 70% turnout, which is unheard of in Canada. But what’s very interesting is I do want to thank Mr. Trump. I want to thank him for galvanizing this country, for bringing a patriotic bent to this election. Now we just have to hang together long enough to make this work and to get what we need out of this process.
Ellin Bessner: What about sovereignty? It’s still an election issue, even though both Canadian leaders have said hell will never freeze over before Canada becomes the 51st state. But as a legal advisor, can you explain, is Canada’s actual sovereignty threatened? And if so, what would that look like?
Alan Kessel: So, as a lawyer, there’s no threat to our sovereignty. Now, on the policy, political side, which I, you know, I can only conjecture at, that’s a different thing. You know, if Americans want to use brute force to come across the border, that is an invasion of a friendly nation. And I think that they would be abrogating the NATO treaty, they’d be abrogating the UN treaties, they would be using force. I can’t imagine that that’s what he’s thinking about. More interestingly is, and some people have been writing about this, is that there’s going to be this kind of economic war, and the economic war is going to wear us down. And that he’s going to come and tell us that somehow if we join them, our eggs will be cheaper. Hence, you’ll have seen that the Prime Minister has been traveling to Europe to shore up our friends. And in fact, thank you, Mr. Trump, again, because you managed to actually get Europe to pull its head out of where it’s been hiding and think about Europe as a functioning entity, to take care sovereignty in Europe. Because if we think about the two most existential things that are going on in the world today, what are they? They are the Russian invasion of Ukraine and it is the Hamas invasion of Israel. Those are the two key issues that are playing and should be playing, and we should be on the same play sheet for them in both cases, behind the scenes. “The Axis of Weevils”, or whoever they are, you’ll find Iran, you’ll find Russia, you’ll find. And if anybody with two neurons together can figure it out, their interests are that Ukraine fails and that Israel fails at the moment. Those two situations, those two environments, are fighting our wars for us. We don’t have Canadian young people’s boots on the ground there, and we don’t have it in either place. But they’re fighting existential battles for us. And that leads us to a very strange dichotomy. The U.S. is very much behind Israel at the moment and very not behind Ukraine, which is kind of bizarre. And Canada is very much behind Ukraine and kind of lukewarm on Israel. So what’s with this? I mean, why aren’t we more joined up and why isn’t Europe more joined up? The people who are joined up are the bad guys. And I think that should be a question being asked of our senior politicians at this time as we go into an existential election for us all.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned lukewarm about Israel and pro-Ukraine. So let’s get into that issue at the moment, which is for many Jewish voters, it’s one of the key things that they’re weighing in this election, which is do I do a one-issue vote or do I worry about the sovereignty of our country? One issue being Canada’s support or lack of for Israel at the moment. What can you tell us about the Canadian government’s seeming shift away from support for Israel after October 7th?
Alan Kessel: Well, it’s interesting you say that, and as you understand, I still am bound by my commitments as a public servant. So I will not be divulging either advice or other things. I can only talk to you as Alan Kessel, not public servant, but as an idle observer from outside government. I would ask you, did Canada shift after October 7th? I think it was maybe more evident, but I think there was an inexorable movement prior to October 7th, which was changing things in terms of how Canada was viewing Israel. Yes, we do have a free trade agreement with Israel. But if you take a look, you know, the only G7 head of government that didn’t visit Israel was Prime Minister Trudeau and Japan.
Ellin Bessner: Japan too.
Alan Kessel: Oh, they didn’t go. That’s true.
Ellin Bessner: And so what do you take, what do you make personally of this? What calculations must have been going through their minds in the PMO and in Ottawa. Why they didn’t go?
Alan Kessel: Well, there’s a whole series. You have to go back a little bit because I think that where things started changing was when we were late to the party running for the Security Council. And I think part of what we did in order to shore up votes was we went knocking on doors where normally we wouldn’t be knocking on doors. We knocked on a whole bunch of doors. We suddenly discovered Africa existed after ignoring Africa for a long time. But we also were shopping around in the Middle East. And I wouldn’t be surprised, and I have no personal knowledge, I’m only using basically public sources, that the other two candidates were the ones that were more inclined to be saying the things that I think our Middle Eastern friends wanted. So I just saw, you know, October 7th as a continuation of it. I would have hoped that it would actually have stopped it. So I mean, that’s my take from an outsider.
Ellin Bessner: Right. However, the government of Canada did block permits for exporting weapons to Israel during the October 7th aftermath. Whereas they had lots of them before.
Alan Kessel: Well, they said they did. I mean, I would suggest that good journalists should go and look and see just what actually was blocked. And were we sending anything real to begin with? You know, was that somewhat artifice by saying we’ve done X, Y and Z, or was it real? I mean, Israel’s not depending on us for arms. They don’t, you can ask them. They don’t really depend on us, they depend on the U.S. I mean, I think there’s some things that the U.S. asked us to make that they would then send on that maybe had been cut off. But then I’ll go somewhere else. I mean, we weren’t really a major Contributor.
Ellin Bessner: As far as the changing warmth or lack of between Canada and the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Let’s talk about the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the two different cases. Let’s start with the ICJ first and genocide that South Africa brought. And you were appearing for Canada and representing Canada at the ICJ.
Alan Kessel: Correct. So there were two particular cases that were before the ICJ. One was something called an advisory opinion on Israel’s policies in the occupied territories, and that was something that was requested. An advisory opinion is not a binding opinion, just so everybody understands, even though it has a kind of a moral value. It was sent by the United Nations General Assembly and it asked a number of questions related to Israel’s practices within those territories. The second question was a case that was brought by South Africa against Israel under the Genocide Convention. South Africa asked the court to find that Israel was abrogating the Genocide Convention. Now, you asked also why was South Africa doing it? I mean, the simplest thing to say is that South Africa, as a concerned international player, you know, just woke up one morning and felt, this is terrible, what’s going on in the Middle East, and decided that it couldn’t live with it anymore and had to bring a case to the International Court of Justice calling out Israel. I think many international lawyers would refer to what South Africa is doing as something called lawfare. And lawfare is when you kind of turn international treaties into weaponized instruments. The other one that’s out there, of course, is the International Criminal Court case. And the difference between the ICJ and the International Criminal Court is that in the ICJ, states are on the line. In the International Criminal Court, it can be individuals.
Ellin Bessner: What is Canada’s legal obligation? You mentioned the International Criminal Court. So we’re talking about Bibi and Giga Land and any of the people who get there’s warrants out for their arrest. And Prime Minister Trudeau, the former Prime Minister said if they came to Canada we would follow and abide by the International Criminal Court’s law. And didn’t say that they would arrest them but they, that’s all he said. What does that mean? And why do they have to, what does Canada have? Do they have to?
Alan Kessel: So you asked all of those really good questions, and I think what the Prime Minister at the time said was that Canada believes in the rule of law and we will, you know, believe in the application of international law. And he left it at that.
So he left it murky, which was good, that he did that because Canada’s in a very interesting place. So we’re one of the countries in the world that does not recognize the existence of a state of Palestine. However, we were the major players in the creation of the International Criminal Court. I led the Canadian delegation, and and together with a bunch of our colleagues and Philip Kirch, who was the chair of the drafting committee, we came up with a document that we thought was going to kind of change the status of the world in terms of how we deal with bad guys. So one of the key things in that statute is to say that it’s open for States to join.
Now, there’s been a big argument as to is the state of Palestine a state? How can it be a state if it isn’t a state? Is this just a political policy thing that some countries have recognized it as a State? Should the UN recognize it as a State? The UN hasn’t recognized it as a State because you need the Security Council to actually recognize a member to be a State. They brought them in, in a kind of a quasi observer thing, and what happened was there was a bit of a kind of sleight of hand. The Palestinians then applied for membership to be a party of the ICC and they just deposited their interest of being that.
And when we Canada said publicly, “Hang on a minute. This is not a state, they can’t actually join the various aspects, including the ICC itself”. And the depository for treaties in the UN said, “Well, you know, that’s for you guys as States parties to sort out. tThey’ve done it, and it is what it is. And we’re not going to get sidetracked by that thing.”
So what did Canada do? Canada made a very publicly aware that we did not recognize the State of Palestine as a State. We didn’t recognize them as a party to the International Criminal Court Statute, and we also stated that nothing that they would do or initiate, or be part of would be binding on us.
So now fast forward to the prosecutor coming out with his request that States parties be cooperative with respect to the two [arrest] warrants which he’s got, and put that together with the statement of what the [former] Prime Minister said. And I would suggest as a private, international lawyer that there is no binding requirement that Canada do anything. And that would be in keeping with what Canada has said for many many years.
Ellin Bessner: So was this virtue, signaling.
Alan Kessel: You’d have to ask him. You know. He’s probably in his former riding.
Ellin Bessner: You asked me when we were preparing for this to compare how Canada responded when 24 Canadians were killed in the terrorist attack on 9/11 in the World Trade Centre, versus the 8 Canadians murdered by Hamas in 2023 and how the the difference was
Alan Kessel: After 9/11 there was this incredible outburst, particularly from Canada as the closest neighbour and particularly because we had 24 Canadians that came down in that disaster by well-known terrorists. Al Qaeda came over and did this. So what happened was that we then bombed the hell out of them. We took over the country, we effected regime change. In effect, you know, we brought in, “democracy”. We stayed there for 10 years. We lost 158 Canadians, but that’s what we did. Then fast forward to 10/7: 8 Canadians, they’re killed, and what did we do? What did we do? Zero.
And in fact, if the world, including the Canadas of this world, should be saying right up front and should have for 16 months, “Free the hostages and this will stop”. And if they just said those words instead of all the other words, I think we would have been in a different place from today.
Ellin Bessner: So why aren’t they? What about this “Canada is back. Soft power.” What does that tell you between what we’re seeing, what you just mentioned, and the reality?
Alan Kessel: Well, soft power has hard realities. Soft power doesn’t really, really work unless you have a sledgehammer behind you. And guess what? All our soft power used to be backed up by the hard power of the US, and that’s dribbling away. So, I think we need to be really, really concerned. Will the Canadian election change all that? I don’t think so. We need to be building our alliances. Canada is isolated, and we don’t have anyone around us who is our friend. The Americans have gone; we share a border, but they used to be our best friends. Now they’re just our closest. Who’s looking after our interests? We need a really strong guy or woman. Anyone who has a vision of where Canada should be going. This election has been devoid of vision. The only vision that we’ve gotten is because it’s been imposed from outside.
Ellin Bessner: Why did you want to do this interview? Just to close off. Why did you want to speak now that you’re no longer, I guess you do have a bit of an NDA.
Alan Kessel: I do have an NDA, and I will always live up to my obligation to the Crown and to the Official Secrets Act and the advice I gave as a lawyer to each government that I worked for, whether they be conservative or liberal. The reality is that I am a Jew. I have a strong view on what’s going on in the world. I was brought up to have a strong sense of right and wrong. I went into law because I believed in right and wrong. I believed that I could do international law and be a diplomat for the government of Canada because we were such a great country that was out there doing amazing things. And I’ve had a super career being able to do that. But I’m now out of that business. And I can use my experience and my intellect and my interests and my commitment, Jewish commitment, especially since I’ve got kids and grandkids, to set some of the story right. Jews are having intergenerational acts that we didn’t know we had. And that trauma is coming back, and I’m feeling trauma that I didn’t know I had. I want to do as much as I can to help elucidate on questions, but also to be maybe to say things that other people have been scared to say.
Ellin Bessner: Alan, thank you very, very much for sharing your thoughts with us on The CJN Daily. It’s been an honour.
Alan Kessel: It’s been an immense pleasure. Happy to come back and thank you for doing what you’re doing.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
By the way, while we are focused on the Canadian election monday april 28, the UN’s highest court the International Court of Justice opens a week of hearings on another anti-Israel resolution. This time, it’s from Norway. Whether Israel is breaking the law by preventing the UN from helping starving Palestinians in Gaza..
The UN agency’s Palestinian relief organisation UNRWA had an office in East Jerusalem – But Israel blames UNRWA employees for being active members of Hamas who participated in the Oct 7 massacre. Earlier this winter, Israel kicked UNRWA out of the country..and since March, Israel has been tightly controlling humanitarian aid going into Gaza until the hostages are released.
About 45 countries are slated to give oral or written presentations to the UN court ..but Canada isn’t one of them…Canada abstained when the UN General Assembly voted to send the question to the ICJ for an opinion.
Our show’s producers are Zachary Judah Kauffman and Andrea Varsany
The executive producer of CJN podcasts is Michael Fraiman. Marc Weisblott is the editorial director, and our music is by Dov Beck Levine.
Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Related links
- Read more about the impact of Trump’s tariff trade war on Canadian Jewish business owners, in The CJN.
- What Canadian Jewish leaders think about the ICJ’s January 2024 legal opinion on Israel’s conduct in Gaza, in The CJN.
- Why rising antisemitism is convincing some Canadian Jews to vote Conservative this election.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
Support our show
- Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
- Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
- Subscribe to The CJN Daily (Not sure how? Click here)
