Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked Thursday how he would explain Donald Trump’s election victory to young people, including his own children.
His answer: “the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is a deep and positive one.”
The prime minister was in Nova Scotia to reopen a Veterans Affairs office, but it was questions about Trump’s surprise electoral victory that garnered the most questions from reporters.
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Trudeau was asked twice how he would explain how a candidate — who was recorded making obscene remarks about women and faced a series of sexual assault allegations — could be elected president of the United States.
“One of the important things about my job is that Canadians expect me to work with whomever Americans elect to be their president,” Trudeau told reporters. “The relationship between Canada and the United States is deep and is long and indeed is one of the closest and most positive relationships between any two countries on the planet.
“It is important that the prime minister and the president have a constructive working relationship.”
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The prime minister was asked again how he would explain Trump’s presidency to his own daughter.
“I told my kids that the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is a deep and positive one. I actually got to tell that to a hall filled with thousands of kids from across the Ottawa area at We Day to say that look ‘we need to have a constructive relationship with whomever the Americans elect as their president’ and that is exactly what I intend to do.”
While Trump was elected as America’s 45th president, his campaign was filled with divisive rhetoric and comments that were labelled as misogynistic, racist and Islamaphobic.
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And it seems Trudeau wasn’t the only one struggling how to explain the bombastic Republican’s election.
Video of Van Jones, an American attorney and CNN political commentator, discussing the issue was shared widely online following election night.
“It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us,” he said. “You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bully.’ You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bigot.’ You tell your kids, ‘Do your homework and be prepared,’” Jones said. “Then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight and they’re afraid of breakfast.”
Clinical psychologist Cathy Moser told Global News the most important thing parents can do is listen, understand, and reassure their child’s concerns.
“It won’t be exactly the same,” Moser said. “But, you know, the world has lived with nasty presidents and mean presidents and great presidents and all sorts of different presidents of the United States for hundreds of years and they’ve survived, and they’ve still grown.”
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Global News reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office for further comment and was directed towards Trudeau’s earlier statements.
Trudeau has reiterated the importance of the relationship between Canada and the U.S. and said he has spoken with the president-elect about various areas of “mutual interest.”
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The federal government has also said it’s open to renegotiating the North American free-trade agreement with Trump who threatened to tear up NAFTA during his campaign.
“I think any agreement can be improved,” David MacNaughton, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, said Wednesday in a conference call with journalists. “If they want to have a discussion about improving NAFTA, then we’re ready to come to the table.”
During the race for the White House, Trump overcame questions about his temperament and sexism by exploiting middle-class white Americans’ fear of immigrants and terrorism and their anger at the so-called establishment elites in Washington. He promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants, to block Muslims from entering the country, and withdraw the U.S. from the international climate change agreement to reduce carbon emissions.
— With files from Zahra Premji and The Canadian Press