Canada’s closer: How Trudeau’s pitchman is outplaying America

PARIS — At the Paris Air Show, under the piercing roars of fighter jet demos, Canada’s silver-haired, Canali-clad industry minister sells one executive after another on an unexpected pitch: Amid global disorder, boring is best for business.

“When everything is high risk, you go to Canada and it’s very stable and predictable. It’s very attractive,” said François-Philippe Champagne, a U.S.-educated corporate lawyer turned politician and now Ottawa salesman, zipping between air show meetings in a golf cart.

With America’s trading partners gaming out the 2024 elections while still navigating Washington’s retreat from free trade evangelism to “America First” and “Buy American” industrial policies, Champagne sees opportunity. Uncertainty in Europe and the unpredictability of America’s relationship with China have opened a new window for deals.

“One CEO told me recently that their board spends 40 percent of their time now on geopolitics,” Champagne said in an interview.

The pitch is working. Champagne’s biggest win to date was beating the U.S. to lure Volkswagen’s first gigafactory outside of Europe — a C$7 billion project announced in March. Champagne says it started with a cold call after he read that VW was looking for a new industrial site. “None of that happens by magic.”

Champagne’s big wins have landed in close succession — all in the past year. He convinced Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna to spend hundreds of millions of its own money to build a vaccine facility in Montreal with undisclosed funding from the Canadian government. Weeks later, he announced a C$2.8 billion deal with Stellantis to boost EV production in Canada.

His successes in the cut-throat competition for investments are raising his status in the Canadian business class, circles that are otherwise cool to the Liberal government’s progressive politics. And they are landing Champagne, 53, on the short list of potential successors to Justin Trudeau.

Interviews with a dozen people who know the gregarious French Canadian, from world leaders and business executives to his longtime childhood friend, confirm both his long-held ambitions and his blind spots.

He is “minister of creativity, innovation and enthusiasm,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons joked to an audience at the Eurasia Summit earlier this year. Coons said that in his dozen interactions with Champagne, he’s come to rely on the minister as a trusted interlocutor between Canada and the U.S., someone who’s “willing to help convey messages in places where maybe we aren't hearing each other as well.”

Behind closed doors, Champagne is not always taken seriously because he can’t shut off his ambition or salesman tendencies. His optimism can come off as naivety.

When the pandemic hit, Champagne led a rush to rebuild bio manufacturing in Canada. His fixation on scoring new investments overrode any flags from grumpy bureaucrats, reluctant to join the chase for pharmaceutical companies with whom they had prickly relations. Champagne carved a win; Moderna signed a deal to build its first mRNA manufacturing plant outside the U.S. in Canada.

“I don't want to curse him with any political prediction,” says Dominic Raab, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, who befriended Champagne when they were both foreign ministers. “But I would have thought for a guy like that, the sky's the limit.”

Selling America's alter-ego

A cavalcade of high-profile European leaders has passed through Canada in the past year, “totally” a shift from how the continent has previously viewed the country, Champagne says.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed Parliament on her visit to Ottawa. Trudeau welcomed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his first official trip with a dinner at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier toured with a business delegation that stopped in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. EU commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton made an official visit partly to take up Champagne’s invitation to go ice fishing.

“Everyone wants to be best friends with Canada,” he said.

Irritation over the Biden administration's protectionist Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and its exclusion of Europe’s autos sector, spurred countries to take a serious search for alternate long-term dance partners.

“Canada is a great counterweight to all that because we're stable, predictable, we have the critical minerals, we have the talent, we have the renewable energy,” Champagne said.

He’s been selling Canada as a smaller, better behaved version of America.

“We have an aerospace industry, we have an automotive industry, we have a pharmaceutical industry, we have a defense industry,” Champagne says between bites of a ham and cheese baguette between meetings at the air show.

“Montreal is the third [largest] city in the world to manufacture planes — so when you come here, you’re a big guy.”

Canada beat the U.S. to the Volkswagen deal, but there was blowback on the homefront when it was revealed that Ottawa promised at least C$13 billion in taxpayer-funded production subsidies. Champagne shrugged off the debate. “Five years of subsidies is not very relevant” when the German automaker has pledged to be in Canada for 100, he told POLITICO.

“This is us winning in the big leagues,” he said. “We’re competing with the world. We can do big things.”

A ‘very persistent’ salesperson

“He doesn't let go,” Ericsson President and CEO Börje Ekholm says of Champagne’s unconventional tenacity. He has “legendary” DMs to prove it.

The Swedish executive credits his company’s C$470-million decision to expand in Canada to Champagne’s “unusual” political overtures to business — something he’s never seen before. “The personal engagement that he gave, gave us comfort to further expand our presence,” Ekholm said.

Champagne doesn’t deny his methods involve a bit of theater.

During a meeting at the air show, he takes the notebook of an aerospace executive and scribbles his number in the corner of a page. He doesn’t carry business cards, preferring this folksy and gimmicky way of connecting with movers and shakers — especially those who don’t expect to hear directly from Cabinet ministers.

At the air show in Le Bourget, he flits around helicopter displays and climbs into cockpits, aware the scene is catnip for photographers. During one impromptu chat with Textron CEO Scott Donnelly inside a 14-seat Osprey helicopter on display, Champagne makes a quick exit after spotting a Ukrainian delegation. “You have customers,” he explains.

Donnelly said he appreciates Champagne's high energy and corporate background. “He understands kind of what we're trying to do and understands that it's got to be good for the company.”

Champagne is no stranger to business, nor to the ways of Americans or Europeans. He has a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and worked in the private sector in Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Life is funny, he says. “I'm called Champagne — imagine, how would I ever speak Italian?”

Two decades in Europe taught him more than Italian. He was immersed in the politics of regulation in the European Union and took notes on stakeholder consultations that are an abbreviated relative to the process in Canada. “There's a time where you need to consult but there's also a time where you need to decide,” he said. “Our job — to govern — is to choose.”

Champagne is aware that his sometimes cartoonish effervescence has earned him nicknames like “Energizer Bunny” and “Frankie Bubbles” — and he seems to welcome the opportunity to flip the perception of anyone who sees him as a vain politician lacking intellectual depth.

The business of politics has become increasingly hostile. “I've always tried to turn anger into engagement,” he said.

He tells a story from his first campaign when during a diner meet-and-greet a biker rejected his handshake, saying he doesn’t shake hands with thieves. “Really?” Champagne said, “Do we know each other?” He pulled up a chair and it ended with selfies, he says.

Colleagues insist Champagne is a tough negotiator who absorbs every detail in his weekly briefing binder.

“If you write him a 20-page note, he’s going to read all of the 20 pages,” said Madwa-Nika Cadet, a Quebec Liberal member of the province’s National Assembly. She previously served as a policy adviser to Champagne and called him a “very demanding” boss who respects work.

Staffers learned to deliver one-pagers, she said. “Otherwise, he’ll just read everything, and will question you about everything, because he’ll remember it.”

About 10 hours after his plane landed in Paris, Champagne arrived at the Canadian ambassador’s residence to host 850 people at a reception. First though, he commandeered an upstairs room for a meeting. The mood was tense, a stark contrast to a scene that would unfold 30 minutes later where he was mobbed for photos in the garden.

In the run up to the Volkswagen deal, the high-level negotiations were mostly virtual, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions but not authorized to speak publicly, and Champagne emerged as a “hard and fair player.”

The minister’s experience on the management board of European firms gave him insight into the needs of an international company. He ramped up a project team that achieved impossible timelines. Other countries offered subsidies; Canada’s raw mineral reserves and industrial resources in southwestern Ontario sealed the deal.

After details of the Volkswagen deal were made public, multinational automaker Stellantis made noise and demanded to renegotiate its $2.8-billion deal with the Canadian government. Worries that Stellantis would walk compelled the Ontario government to up its C$500-million commitment.

Negotiations overlapped with Champagne’s Paris trip. He would stop in the middle of sidewalks to work the phones, continuing on the minibus to his hotel in the posh 8th arrondissement. Champagne and his staff used the commute to recap the air show meetings, though media-shy bureaucrats were cold to the presence of a reporter in earshot.

Someone cracked a joke about speaking in code — in iambic pentameter. At one point during the ride, Champagne could be heard telling his staff, “I don’t care if they sue” without a clear reference to who.

Champagne’s win streak comes after some high-profile losses, which led him to conclude that industry is a better fit for his skills and global connections.

As foreign affairs minister, he was tasked by Trudeau to win Canada a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2020. After Norway and Ireland prevailed, Champagne was visibly sullen when trotted in front of cameras to explain.

After the 2021 election, he was shuffled to the industry portfolio, a better fit.

“I'm at the right place at the right time,” Champagne said.

In it to win it

Back in Ottawa, Parliament has adjourned for summer, leaving time for Cabinet shuffle speculation. Champagne, who has previously served in three portfolios — foreign affairs, infrastructure and trade — shrugs it off.

“I'm too old for a shuffle," he joked. "I've done pretty much all the departments.”

But he’s never held the top job.

On paper, he fits the profile of a future prime minister. He hails from Shawinigan, Quebec, a former paper-mill town that most famously produced Jean Chrétien, Liberal prime minister from 1993 to 2003, and Champagne’s mentor. Like Chrétien, Champagne has small c-conservative leanings, and argues the party's core is rooted in the middle of the political spectrum. And like Chrétien, he speaks English with a heavy accent.

“The Liberal party has always been the party of the center,” he said, sharing his political vision. “In the world where you see more and more polarization, even coming a bit from the United States, I think Canadians are squarely in the center.”

Sitting at a café on a sunny weekday morning in Paris, far from his southeastern Quebec riding of Saint-Maurice—Champlain, he gets ribbed by wait staff when he orders a pain au chocolat using the Quebec colloquialism, “chocolatine.”

Champagne’s best friend of 40 years, David Bertrand, said the minister’s political ambitions were known when they met during their first year of high school. It was “written in the sky” that Champagne would return home and run for office in 2013, Bertrand said. “He did everything to get elected."

Champagne was a nobody when he started campaigning full time for public office in 2013 — two years before the federal election that swept Trudeau's third-place Liberal party back to power.

He’d introduce himself as François-Philippe and say he was running for election. Some people would respond with a reality check: there’s no election. “No, but there’ll be one, one day” was his deadpan response.

Champagne told the Globe and Mail in 2009, before entering politics, that he’s interested in Canada’s top job. These days, he downplays the prime ministerial speculation, chalking it up as buzz rooted in the perception that he's a “doer.” It follows him internationally.

Eight years inside a governing party have taught Liberals to shut down leadership talk — especially since the boss has said he intends to run again.

Champagne refuses to say if he’s still interested: “My job is to deliver.”

At the Paris Air Show, a company executive tours Champagne through the cabin of an Airbus A330. One of the planes will eventually be outfitted to replace the outdated 1980's-era Airbus CC-150 Polaris that currently flies Trudeau around the world.

When the executive jokes that the pristine cabin-to-be is a good reason to run for prime minister, Champagne offered an awkward chuckle before disappearing to inspect the cockpit.