A week ago, the Government of Ontario began an ad campaign in the US. It was planned in anticipation of a new administration and is not an explicit response to President-elect Trump’s (in)famous tariff threat. As I mentioned in my previous post, a government that spent $105 million on feel-good ads about itself for Ontarians would naturally turn to producing feel-good ads about Ontario for Americans.

Here is a link to the ad, and if you haven’t seen it already, I encourage you to stop reading, click on the link below, and spend a minute watching it.

The Value Proposition

The ad’s value proposition starts nostalgically (“for generations, this ally to the north has been by your side”) but quickly moves to the present by describing Ontario as “a partner connected by a shared history, shared values, and a shared vision of what we can achieve together.”

The Specifics and the Upshot

The ad then lists specifics of why Ontario is important to the US. They include “energy to power your growing economy,” “critical minerals crucial to new technologies,” “your third largest trading partner,” and “the number one export destination for 17 states.” The result of the close economic relationship between Ontario and the US is “more workers, more trade, more prosperity, and more security.”

The Bad Actors

Every good actor narrative has a bad actor, either center-stage or lurking in the wings. In this case the description of Ontario as “stable and secure when the world around us isn’t” and the exhortation “in a changing world, it’s time to bring jobs back home and build together” suggest economic villains bringing chaos to and taking jobs from the Ontario-US partnership. The unnamed malefactors are Mexico and China.

Sound and Visuals

The visual images focus on the border (Niagara Falls, an old border sign, the Ambassador Bridge, the new Gordie Howe Bridge), commerce crossing the border (planes and trains); major cities (New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Toronto forty years ago and today); mines and factories; and Ontario’s diverse workforce (black female, white male, south Asian male, east Asian female).

The unseen narrator is male, with a friendly tone, and an American accent (note the somewhat nasal pronunciation of the first syllable of Canada). The music starts with a gentle piano solo accompanying an overhead shot of lakes and forest, adds instruments and becomes more upbeat to match the planes and trains and factory robots in the middle and at the end returns to the original soft piano accompanying a peaceful shot of lakes and forests and closing message that “this ally to the north has been here for generations, and for generations more, we’ll still be here.”

This is how the commercial attempts to set out a message about Ontario as being both friendly with and important to the US. I don’t know how Americans are receiving the message. Is it making them feel good about Ontario? If so, it would be valuable public diplomacy in support of Canada’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the Trump Administration. Or are Americans tuning it out as another boring “worthwhile Canadian initiative”? In that case, it would be an ineffective waste of money. Time, and exposure, will tell. Meanwhile, I I hope my American readers will comment.

 An Ad about Ontario or an Ad about Canada?

One important ambiguity is whether this is an ad about the province of Ontario or the nation that Ontario is part of. There are two reasons the Government of Ontario would have made the ad: its penchant for using feel-good advertising as a policy tool and Ontario’s traditional tendency, as the most populous province, to speak on behalf of the nation. But the ambiguity shows in the ad when the narrator starts by referring to “Ontario, Canada,” when the ad shortly thereafter shows a shot of the iconic Peace Tower in the federal Parliament (rather than say, the Ontario Legislature), and when the word “Ontario” is always accompanied by the word, in a slightly smaller font, “Canada.” The ambiguity goes beyond imagery. The first specific of the value proposition refers to Ontario as an energy source. Ontario exports about ten percent of the electricity it generates to the US, but this is nowhere near the value of hydrocarbon exports from the western provinces.

What Isn’t Being Said

Other than one brief image of auto assembly, the ad doesn’t mention the fact that the strongest trade linkage between Ontario and the US is in auto assembly, with numerous factories here, most foreign-owned, sending parts and then finished vehicles back and forth across the border. The imposition of tariffs by the US, and possibly countervailing tariffs by Canada, would severely disrupt this important two-way flow of goods. Viewing trade as President-elect Trump does, namely a zero-sum game, moving auto assembly out of Ontario and back to the US would benefit blue-collar voters in swing states. Though we Ontarians may think of ourselves as partners with the US, we are not voters in the US. Even if you assume that existing auto assembly plants are in Ontario to stay, US tariffs would make it more likely that future assembly plants would be located in the US rather than in Ontario.

The political appeal of the Ford Government’s industrial strategy of supporting manufacturing for the US market is that it would provide large numbers of blue-collar jobs for current and future Ford Nation voters. The economic weakness of the strategy is that tariffs, or even the threat of tariffs, can make those jobs disappear.

In addition to the ads being seen by the broader public and the business community (for example, during NFL games), they will target policy makers in the incoming administration (at the Washington airports and on billboards there). The policy makers will likely be aware of Doug Ford’s panicky response to the possibility of tariffs – calling them “a knife to the heart,” and advocacy of a trade deal with the US that cuts Mexico out of the action. The Premier’s rhetoric, together with the charm offensive narrative of the ads, suggests that the Government of Ontario may be very worried about the future of Ontario’s auto assembly industry. It is well known that desperation is the worst cologne, both on a date and at the negotiating table.