Concerns are growing about how a far-right policy agenda known as Project 2025 could influence a second Donald Trump presidency — as well as Canada’s relationship with the United States.
Democrats have been attempting to tie Trump to the controversial initiative and convince voters its extreme conservative policies would be representative of how Trump will govern if he wins the U.S. election in November.
At the heart of Project 2025 is a plan to overhaul the U.S. government bureaucracy to make the civil service much more aligned with the political interests of the White House. That would have major implications on the day-to-day business of managing Canada-U.S. relations in important areas like trade, analysts say.
“This presents a real threat,” said Donald Abelson, a political science professor at McMaster University who studies Canada-U.S. relations and American think tanks like the conservative Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025.
The warning is the latest to come from Canadians studying the possible effects of a second Trump administration. Economists have said Trump’s plans on immigration and trade — including a blanket 10 per cent tariff on foreign imports — would hit Canada’s economy harder than the U.S.
What could happen?
Project 2025 calls for the return of a Trump-era executive order known as Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of American civil servants as political appointees who can be easily fired and replaced.
Trump issued the order close to the end of his presidency but was unable to implement it after losing the 2020 election. U.S. President Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F upon taking office, but Trump and Project 2025 vow to reinstate it.
Unlike Canada, which has a permanent bureaucracy in place to administer government work regardless of governing party, the much larger American civil service sees regular turnover at the top level of various departments.
As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But reinstating Schedule F could mean an increase to 50,000.
The measure is widely criticized as a means to retaliate against civil servants and flood the federal bureaucracy with individuals willing to bend the rules in pursuit of political aims. The Heritage Foundation has developed a database of prospective civil servants with conservative credentials who would be ready to fill Schedule F vacancies on the first day of a new administration.
Those appointees may also have little regard for the history and importance of international relationships with countries like Canada.
“You can imagine how chaotic the process would become if people with years of expertise and knowledge, and institutional memory, are all of a sudden replaced by a band of sycophants who don’t have that long-term understanding of history, the importance of the relationship, and why it needs to be nurtured,” Abelson said.
Analysts note the lower-level staff that would be affected by Schedule F help form the “hidden wiring” behind the Canada-U.S. relationship, working to manage bilateral agreements worked out by public-facing heads of state and cabinet members.
Although Trump says he has nothing to do with Project 2025 and doesn’t know who is behind it, Abelson notes there is a “revolving door phenomenon” between U.S. administrations and political think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Officials and staff who lose their jobs after an election will find work at a think tank, and those same institutions will send people to go work for future administrations.
A majority of those who helped write and edit Project 2025 served in Trump’s administration or were nominated to positions in it. Some of the architects of the sprawling manifesto also helped shape the new Republican party platform.
Within the nearly 1,000 pages of Project 2025, the authors recommend flooding the U.S. State Department with loyalists, including senior advisors on foreign policy files. All U.S. ambassadors around the world would be required to resign at the start of a new administration.
Project 2025 also calls for downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which it calls “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
Aaron Ettinger, a political science professor at Carleton University, says the overall mission is to make the government able to change direction more nimbly when a new administration begins.
He said implementing Schedule F and other aspects of Project 2025 means an ideologically minded Democratic president could execute just as quick of a shift in how government runs.
“The logic of all this is that personnel is policy,” he told Global News.
“That would be very difficult for Canada. And there’s nothing Canada can really do about that, because you have to bargain with your counterpart and you have no control over who the counterpart is.”
In April, the Biden administration adopted a rule making it more difficult to reclassify government employees under Schedule F. Trump would likely reverse the rule, though it would still delay implementation by several months.
Canada has been preparing since last year for the possibility of a second Trump administration, using a Team Canada approach to send ministers and diplomats to engage with American partners and shore up relations.
Several of those conversations have been at the state level. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has met with the governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland — both key trading partners — in recent weeks.
Ettinger says those engagements with states and private companies is a strategy Canada should continue and accelerate to ensure some partnerships persevere, despite actions taken in a Trump-ruled Washington.
Despite Trump’s claims otherwise, Ettinger says Project 2025 should serve as a blueprint for what a second Trump administration will do.
“When Trump said America First … at his inauguration address, nobody knew what that meant,” he said. “And now we have 900 pages of what it means. They’re telling us who they are, and we should listen.”
—
—With files from Global News reporter Kathryn Mannie