Why the new U.S. administration won't have much time for us

In a column for CTVNews.ca, former Conservative Party political advisor and strategist Rudy Husny says that when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau goes to the G-20 summit next week, it will look more like his goodbye tour.

Rudy Husny is a former political advisor and strategist for the Conservatives in Ottawa. Former director for the Minister of International Trade in the Harper government from 2011 to 2015, he was also an advisor to the Leader of the Opposition. He is now a consultant, speaker and political analyst for Noovo and CTV News.

A few days before the 2019 federal election, I received calls from the embassies of G20 countries. I was a senior adviser to Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer at the time. Their request was simple: if the Conservatives won, how could we arrange congratulatory calls from their leaders to Scheer in the hours following the election results?

They wanted to ensure they were at the top of the call list. We set up a protocol between myself and my chief of staff at the time, Marc-André Leclerc, who was in Regina for election night, while I was at the Conservative Party’s HQ in Ottawa.

It wasn’t the likely outcome but countries were ready for any scenario and reached out directly to us, though political channels, not Global Affairs Canada.

Last week, we learned in an interview on Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle with retired career diplomat Louise Blais, that when Donald Trump won his first U.S. presidential election in 2016, the Prime Minister's Office struggled to find a phone number to contact him.

In the end, Blais, who was Consul General of Canada in Atlanta at the time, used her contacts to obtain a phone number for Trump’s penthouse in New York. Blais said she wrote the number on a napkin and provided it to Justin Trudeau’s office, so he could call the winner.