U.S. vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is a study in contradiction

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J.D. Vance is a mess of contradictions. He once mused about whether Donald Trump, then a candidate for U.S. president in 2016, was “America’s Hitler,” before becoming one of Mr. Trump’s biggest supporters. Mr. Vance is a former venture capitalist who has said big tech companies should be broken up, an anti-elite and self-described hillbilly who graduated from Yale Law School and could now be a few months away from one of the most elite posts in the world as vice-president of the United States.

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

The causes, according to Mr. Vance, are free-trade deals and a reliance on cheap foreign labour. Like his Republican presidential running mate, Mr. 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.

He used part of his speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday to excoriate trade deals. “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of 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 sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs,” he continued.

As an Ohio Senator, Mr. Vance opposed a foreign deal to buy U.S. Steel, decried globalization and introduced legislation to eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles in favour of gasoline-powered automobiles made in the U.S., pointing out that NAFTA had encouraged manufacturers to build vehicles in Canada and Mexico rather than in America. He’s said that Mr. Trump, who tore up NAFTA as president and upended Republican orthodoxy on free trade, got it right.

J.D. Vance has brought facial hair back to the political sphere, in line with his about-face on Trump

His nomination as the Republican candidate for vice-president assures the tough approach to trade will continue should he and Mr. Trump take the White House in November. The presence of Mr. Vance, who is only 39, also suggests the hardline trade views of Mr. Trump could outlive a second term.

Canada has plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially with the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement that replaced NAFTA up for review in 2026. Mr. Trump has also proposed a 10-per-cent global tariff on foreign goods.

“We now know for sure that the America First agenda is going to go into overdrive. The trade deficits that America has been generating with a lot of its partners around the world is the litmus test through which a Trump-Vance administration will view whether trade is good for the U.S. or not,” said Adam Taylor, a former Canadian trade official and a partner at NorthStar Public Affairs in Ottawa. “This is an eyes-wide-open moment for Canada.”

Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., struck an optimistic note about Mr. Vance earlier this week, saying he has a good understanding of Canada owing to the country’s trade relationship with Ohio. In an interview with The Globe and Mail before Mr. Vance’s speech on Wednesday, Ms. Hillman said that the vice-presidential candidate has been “very complimentary” of CUSMA, which was signed in 2018. “That was a Trump deal,” she said, adding she is prepared to deal with the possibility of another Trump administration pursuing a 10-per-cent global tariff.

“If they’re elected, that is going to be one of our first priorities,” she said. “One thing that’s for sure is that some sort of tariff escalation between our two countries is bad for America. It’s bad for American jobs. It’s bad for American workers.”

Similar arguments made during the first Trump administration, however, did not stop the then-U.S. president from claiming that “trade wars are good” and slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in 2018.

“For those people that had hoped Donald Trump may try to swing more to the centre and be a more moderate candidate, I think this goes against that narrative quite a bit,” Bruce Heyman, U.S. ambassador to Canada under then-president Barack Obama, said of the choice of Mr. Vance.

The U.S. and Canada could find themselves at odds on issues beyond trade, including environmental policy, abortion rights, immigration and the war in Ukraine, Mr. Heyman added. Mr. Vance is opposed to sending aid and said it would be in “America’s best interest” to accept that Ukraine will have to cede some territory to Russia.

There are already concerns that Canada is not sending the right signals to the U.S. “We’re setting the table 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 the digital services tax are not viewed favourably in the U.S., Mr. Holmes said. “That will absolutely colour what kind of conversation we end up having when the CUSMA review starts.”

Despite the rhetoric around tariffs and coming from the Republican ticket, there is still time for views to change, he added. Project 2025, an extensive policy platform drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation, including some former Trump administration officials, presents opposing views on trade. One paper advocates for tariffs and barriers; another for free trade. “That tells me there’s still an opportunity for Canada,” Mr. Holmes said.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, Mr. Vance does not have much of a legislative track record. Hillbilly Elegy recounts his upbringing in a working-class Ohio family marred by substance abuse. He served in the U.S. Marines, graduated from Yale Law School and embarked on a career as a venture capitalist. The memoir propelled 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 articulate why they supported Mr. Trump.

It doesn’t appear that Canada has figured very prominently on his radar, though he was sharply critical of the federal Liberal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Ottawa trucker convoy. “The Canadian truckers have killed zero people 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 greater assault on democracy than anything the Left has whined about the last few years,” he wrote in a separate tweet.

His strongest tie to Canada might be Jamil Jivani, the Conservative MP for Durham. Both are men from hardscrabble backgrounds who made it to Yale and first met at a wine-and-cheese reception during orientation. Mr. Jivani, who had never tasted wine or fine cheese, noticed another student who seemed equally out of place.

“We went on to develop a strong friendship, forged through moments of shared discomfort over the course of our three years in the Ivy League. We were by one another’s side for awkward interactions with professors and classmates, life-changing job interviews and hundreds of hours of studying,” Mr. Jivani wrote in a 2020 column in the National Post headlined “J.D. Vance, My friend the hillbilly.”

“We became such good friends that I eventually performed the Bible reading at his wedding,” Mr. Jivani wrote.

When Mr. Jivani published his 2018 book, Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity, Mr. Vance was there to provide support. “Powerful. Jivani shows us how young men are vulnerable to destructive ideas,” he wrote in a plug that ran on the cover.

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

Mr. Jivani did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Critics of Mr. Vance have more recently attacked him for his transformation from a “Never Trump guy” to a full-throated advocate of the Make America Great Again ethos. Indeed, Hillbilly Elegy was not a policy doctrine for the U.S., and an afterword to the 2018 paperback edition is somewhat restrained in its politics. He wrote that it would be easy to accept there will always be a permanent American underclass rife with family dysfunction, cultural segregation and hopelessness. “Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass,” he wrote.

In the book, Mr. Vance suggests that others are not to blame for the troubles of American workers – a contrast to his more recent statements. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance,” he wrote. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he wrote in another section of the book, “but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

With a potential Republican presidential win on the horizon, Canadian officials may hope that some version of the more moderate J.D. Vance is still there.

with a report from Andrea Woo in Milwaukee