OTTAWA — Public Safety Minister David McGuinty has been busy trying to show key people in the U.S. government that Canada is doing enough on border security to avert punitive tariffs. A big part of that job has been explaining to Americans what the fight President Donald Trump has picked is even about.

McGuinty was in Washington, D.C. at the end of last week to meet legislators and Trump administration officials like Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar.

“We were surprised to learn that a number of congressional folks didn’t know what the Safe Third Country Agreement was. Didn’t know that it existed. Without naming names, I’m talking senators here,” McGuinty said in an exclusive interview with The Logic.

That treaty covers asylum claims in Canada and the United States, essentially saying that a claimant who’s already in one of the two countries can’t leave it to seek refugee status in the other. Its terms are critical to understanding migration across the Canada-U.S. border, especially illicit crossings.

“One of the points we made in Washington repeatedly was that, on some days, on a per-capita basis, the tragedy of fentanyl is killing more Canadians than Americans. They were shocked,” McGuinty said.

That information vacuum in Washington might shock Canadians who have been following the tariff threats with rapt horror, but it has its uses.

“Right now there’s a much more open-door policy to Canada and Canadians,” McGuinty said, with legislators trying to understand why Trump has threatened 25 per cent tariffs on most imports from Canada. They’re receptive to facts and figures, he said.

“Almost all the information we put in front of them was from their own sources,” he said.

On Monday, when Trump suspended his tariffs for 30 days, it was the president who asked for a pivotal second phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after a first one in the morning, McGuinty said.

“I suspect he would have been well briefed, with more data, more analysis, more of his own information coming from his own sources, put to him, and here we are,” McGuinty said.

Canada is responding to Trump’s calls but it has concerns of its own. McGuinty pointed to one January bust in Toronto in which police said they seized 835 kilograms of cocaine that came from Mexico via the United States, and a border-agency seizure of 189 kilograms of cocaine at the crossing in Coutts, Alta.

“More than 1,000 kilos of coke. That’s a big problem. Meth is a problem—comes from the United States,” he said. “The scourge of drugs, including fentanyl and other narcotics, is a joint problem we’re not going to wrestle to the ground individually.”

Another promise Trudeau made to get the tariffs postponed was to appoint a “fentanyl czar” to coordinate everything from RCMP work to sharing intelligence with the U.S. to fighting cartel money-laundering. The government is putting together a list of possible names, even as it works out the job description, McGuinty said.

The job will be “very central” in the government but not part of the cabinet, he said. Expect the details—but not an appointee—to be revealed Friday.

The duties will be practical, not making theoretical recommendations for the government to consider, and with Trump’s next tariff deadline coming in early March, “this is not a job where someone’s going to have the luxury of getting up to speed,” he said.

McGuinty himself has not had that luxury, either. He became public safety minister in December, one of the dominoes in the cascade touched off by former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland’s resignation from the cabinet. His one day off since then was Christmas.

On Tuesday, the day before he talked to The Logic, he’d visited the border crossing at Emerson, Man., and has another such trip scheduled later in the week but couldn’t remember where to. (Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, Que., an aide piped in.)

The ministerial office suite, on the 19th floor of a downtown Ottawa tower, is so uncluttered, undecorated and nondescript that he and his staff could be just borrowing it. Maybe they are. A new Liberal leader is due to become prime minister and name a new cabinet in March, days after the next tariff deadline, and an election is widely expected to follow.

Although McGuinty is a rookie minister, he isn’t a neophyte. He won his Ottawa South seat in 2004, as the Liberals were headed toward a decade in the political wilderness, and has held it for nearly 21 years now. He headed the national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians (NSICOP) from its creation in 2017 until Trudeau named him to cabinet; the group digs into the work of agencies like the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the RCMP, the military and Global Affairs Canada.

Now McGuinty is in charge of several of those bodies—CSIS and the Mounties, the Canada Border Service Agency, the prison system, the parole board. He has a hand in economic security, the fight against foreign interference in Canadian politics and cybersecurity.

A new national cybersecurity strategy is to be revealed Thursday, now that the country has run off the end of an action plan that covered 2019 to 2024.

“The pace of change in cyber challenges is increasing exponentially; the speed is unbelievable,” McGuinty said. “With AI coming down on us at breakneck speed—good and not so good—this is a big challenge.”

The Liberals’ Bill C-26, meant to overhaul cybersecurity in key infrastructure sectors, died inches from the finish line when Trudeau prorogued Parliament. McGuinty said he hopes to have a chance to reintroduce a version of it, and that legislators will quick-step it through in spite of the Liberals’ very precarious position.

But for now, the border is driving McGuinty’s days.

“I’ve got people calling my office crying,” he said. “Businesspeople in my riding, in this city, saying, ‘What am I going to do if this happens? Am I going to have to let employees go? Is it true that I’m going to be forced to move to the United States? What’s going on here?’”

Trump’s own publicly stated motives have veered around. The list has included drugs and migrants; the trade balance; forcing Canada into annexation; generally preferring tariffs over income taxes; and American banks’ access to the Canadian market. McGuinty shrugged off that confusion of messages. Whatever mix of factors is driving the tariff threats, the border is on the list.

“Yesterday, our target was to stop the tariffs. Today, our target is to stop the tariffs, and tomorrow it will be the same.”