US vice presidential candidate JD Vance is a study in contradictions

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JD Vance is a mess of contradictions. He once wondered, before he became one of Trump’s biggest supporters, whether Donald Trump, then a candidate for president in 2016, was “America’s Hitler.” Vance is a former venture capitalist who has said that big tech companies should be broken up, an anti-elite, self-described hillbilly who graduated from Yale Law School and who could now be months away from occupying one of the most elite jobs in the world: vice president of the United States.

But there is one question that has animated his views before running for office, a theme that looms over his bestselling memoir, Peasant ElegyIt is the hollowing out of the country’s manufacturing base, particularly in his home state of Ohio, and the resulting devastation for American workers.

According to Vance, the causes are free trade agreements and reliance on cheap foreign labor. Like his Republican running mate, Vance is a staunch protectionist and economic nationalist who supports tariffs, particularly against China, to protect American industries and workers from what he sees as unfair competition.

Biden used part of his speech at Wednesday’s Republican National Convention to sharply criticize trade deals. “When I was in fourth grade, a career politician named Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” he said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed in 1992. “Joe Biden gave China a favorable trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs,” he continued.

As an Ohio senator, Vance opposed a foreign deal to buy American steel, denounced globalization and introduced legislation to eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles in favor of U.S.-made gasoline cars, saying that NAFTA had encouraged manufacturers to build vehicles in Canada and Mexico instead of the U.S. He has said that Trump, who trashed NAFTA as president and upended Republican orthodoxy on free trade, was right.

His nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate ensures that the tough approach to trade will continue if he and Trump take the lead. The White House in November. The presence of Vance, who is just 39, also suggests that Trump’s hardline trade stances could survive a second term.

Canada has plenty to worry about, especially given the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade deal that replaced NAFTA and is up for review in 2026. Trump has also proposed a global 10 percent tariff on foreign goods.

“We now know for certain that the America First agenda is going to gain momentum. The trade deficits that the United States has been running with many of its partners around the world are the litmus test by which a Trump-Vance administration will assess whether trade is good for the United States or not,” said Adam Taylor, a former Canadian trade official and partner at NorthStar Public Affairs in Ottawa. “This is an eye-opening moment for Canada.”

Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, sounded optimistic about Vance earlier this week, saying he has a good understanding of Canada because of the country’s trade relationship with Ohio. In an interview with The Globe and Mail ahead of Vance’s speech on Wednesday, Hillman said the vice presidential candidate has been “very complimentary” about the USMCA, which was signed in 2018. “That was a Trump deal,” she said, adding that she is prepared to deal with the possibility that another Trump administration might seek a 10 percent global tariff.

“If elected, that will be one of our top priorities,” he said. “One thing that is certain is that any kind of tariff escalation between our two countries is bad for America. It’s bad for American jobs. It’s bad for American workers.”

However, similar arguments made during the first Trump administration did not stop the then US president from claiming that “trade wars are good” and imposing tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium in 2018.

“For those people who were hoping that Donald Trump would try to move more to the center and be a more moderate candidate, I think this goes quite counter to that narrative,” Bruce Heyman, the U.S. ambassador to Canada under then-President Barack Obama, said of Vance’s selection.

The United States and Canada could find themselves at odds over issues beyond trade, including environmental policy, abortion rights, immigration and the war in Ukraine, Heyman added. Vance opposes sending aid and said it would be “in the best interest of the United States” to agree to Ukraine having to cede some territory to Russia.

There are already concerns that Canada isn’t sending the right signals to the U.S. “We’re setting the stage for ourselves with a very negative view of what Canada is doing,” said Matthew Holmes, senior vice-president of policy and government relations at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. The lack of clarity around Canada’s NATO defence spending commitments and digital services tax are not viewed favorably in the U.S., Holmes said. “That will definitely influence the kind of conversation we end up having when the USMCA review begins.”

Despite the rhetoric around tariffs and its coming from the Republican ticket, there is still time for opinions to change, she added. Project 2025, a broad policy platform put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation that includes some former Trump administration officials, presents opposing views on trade. One document advocates tariffs and barriers; another for free trade. “That tells me there is still an opportunity for Canada,” Holmes said.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, Mr. Vance does not have much of a legislative track record. Peasant Elegy It recounts his childhood in a working-class Ohio family marred by substance abuse. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps, graduated from Yale Law School and embarked on a career as a venture capitalist. His memoir catapulted him to fame when it was published in 2016, and he was seen as someone who understood the grievances of white working-class Americans and could explain why they supported Trump.

Canada does not appear to have figured very prominently on his radar, although he was highly critical of the federal Liberal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Ottawa truckers convoy. “Canadian truckers have not killed anyone and are being treated like terrorists in their own country.” he wrote in February 2022 on Twitter, now called X. “What’s happening in Canada is a far bigger attack on democracy than anything the left has complained about in recent years,” he wrote in a separate tweet.

His strongest link to Canada may be Jamil Jivani, the Conservative MP for Durham. Both are men from humble beginnings who came to Yale and met at a wine and cheese reception during orientation. Mr. Jivani, who had never tasted wine or good cheese, noticed another student who seemed equally out of place.

“We developed a strong friendship, forged through moments of shared awkwardness over the three years we spent in the Ivy League. We were together in awkward interactions with professors and classmates, in job interviews that changed our lives, and in hundreds of hours of studying,” Jivani wrote in a 2020 column in the National Post titled “JD Vance, My Hillbilly Friend.”

“We became such good friends that I was the one who eventually read the Bible at their wedding,” Jivani wrote.

When Mr. Jivani published his book in 2018, Why Young Men?: Rage, Race, and Identity Crisis, Mr Vance was there to lend support. “Powerful. Jivani shows us how vulnerable young people are to destructive ideas,” he wrote in an advertisement that appeared on the front page.

Mr Vance was equally effusive about the Canadian MP. Peasant Elegy“Of the dozen or so classmates, only one person helped me: my friend Jamil, who also came from a poorer background. Afterward, I told Jamil that we were probably the only people in school who had ever had to clean up someone else’s mess. He just nodded in silent agreement.” In the book’s acknowledgments, Mr. Jivani is one of eight people Mr. Vance said he was lucky to have had in his life. “I consider each of them more of a brother than a friend,” he wrote.

Mr. Jivani did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

Vance’s critics have most recently attacked him for his transformation from a “never Trump guy” to a staunch defender of the Make America Great Again spirit. Indeed, Peasant Elegy It was not a political doctrine for the United States, and the afterword to the 2018 paperback edition is somewhat restrained in its politics. He wrote that it would be easy to accept that there will always be a permanent American underclass plagued by family dysfunction, cultural segregation, and hopelessness. “Or we can do something considerably harder: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass,” he wrote.

In the book, Vance suggests that American workers’ problems are not the fault of others, which contrasts with his more recent statements. “We talk about the value of hard work, but we tell ourselves that the reason we don’t work is a perceived injustice: Obama closed the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to resolve cognitive dissonance,” he wrote. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he wrote in another section of the book, “but I know it begins when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless corporations and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

With a potential Republican presidential victory on the horizon, Canadian officials may be hoping that some version of the more moderate JD Vance is still around.

with a report from Andrea Woo in Milwaukee