Justin Trudeau talks about the challenge of Trump, his relationship with Biden and the Canadian idea the new president might steal

After four years of dealing with Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau says that talking to President Joe Biden in the White House feels like a dam breaking."

In a wide-ranging interview with the Star this week, Trudeau talked at length about how Canada-U.S. relations will be shifting in important ways with Biden now at the helm. Things won't always be easy - as Canadians have already seen with the new president's orders on pipelines and Buy America policies.

But Trudeau says that fundamentally, he and Biden are speaking the same language.

I feel I can be a little more straightforward. Not that I wasn't with president Trump. I was always very clear on where I was and my values," Trudeau said. But you'd emphasize different things in a conversation."

The two leaders have now spoken twice since the November election in the U.S. and their 30-minute call a week ago - Biden's first call to a foreign leader as president - flew by," Trudeau said. It was just a great call."

A full-fledged Biden-Trudeau meeting is due to take place next month, though details are still being worked out on how that will happen.

When Trump was in power, Canada's best strategy was often to stay off the president's radar, but Trudeau believes the challenge now is the opposite with Biden - making sure that possibilities for Canada-U.S. co-operation aren't overlooked while the new president deals with pressing domestic political affairs.

There are so many really important domestic files that are going to be confronting this president," Trudeau said. He is going to have to try to bring people together and heal America in ways that are extraordinarily difficult."

Trudeau has not regarded Biden's victory as a chance to open up about all the ways in which Trump was a four-year-long headache for Canada and the Liberal government in particular. Biden would be well aware anyway - one of his campaign ads featured that now-famous 2019 scene of Trudeau sharing a laugh about Trump with the leaders of France and Britain.

Since Trump was defeated however, the prime minister has seized one chance to pointedly condemn the ex-president; for inciting the rampage on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. Trudeau says he did so to stress a long-held belief about the power of words in politics.

Words matter and leaders have responsibility around how we choose to campaign, how we choose to talk to our supporters, how we engage," Trudeau said. If you get elected by dividing people, then it becomes really hard to actually do good things."

What the Capitol Hill riots were all about for me was demonstrating what happens when someone really doesn't take any care with the impact and the effect of the choices they make," Trudeau said.

So when he decided to call out the departing president for inciting the riots, he says, it wasn't done lightly. It was an opportunity to be very very clear on something that was directly attributable to choices that Donald Trump made."

Asked whether he feared that brand of toxic politics could happen here, Trudeau said he likes to see Canada as more resilient to those forces.

I don't think we have the ingredients in the same way," he said. Obviously there are extremists and there are even violent extremists in Canada. But I believe that the divisions and the polarization that we see in the United States haven't slipped into a general practice among Canadians."

While Biden is trying to repair all that dysfunction and restore Americans' faith in their institutions post-Trump, Trudeau is worried that it will be all too easy for the White House to either take Canada for granted or relegate it to a less urgent, foreign-affairs file.

Canada can and should be in a very different and distinct category of relations," Trudeau said. Because of that proximity on so many different levels, not just geographic, it's also easier for unintended consequences to swipe the legs out from under us because of the differences in scale and magnitude."

That, then, is Canada's main objective as it sets the stage for the next Biden-Trudeau meeting - stay in the sights of the new administration, and look for every chance to work together, especially on battling COVID, but on an array of other issues too.

My priority," Trudeau said, is demonstrating to them and keeping present in their minds that Canada is an ally, a neighbour, a friend, a resource."

When Trudeau uses that word resource," he has particular ideas in mind - one of them Canada's child benefit program, which has attracted Biden's attention. We've noticed his interest in the Canada Child Benefit (CCB)," Trudeau said. (Biden's campaign platform included a proposal for some kind of monthly cheques for families, not unlike what Trudeau put in place soon after he came to power five years ago.)

The prime minister sees this as a success story that he would be keen to see Biden borrow in any efforts to return the U.S. to more progressive politics and policies after four years of Trump. Trudeau said that he and his team have often mused about how a similar program in the United States could lift children out of poverty on a much larger scale.

Those are the kinds of things that we've actually done, that we can say, look, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting over the past few years'... I've got the scars to prove it but I've also got the successes to show for it."

Biden is well acquainted with Canada, Trudeau notes. Biden's first wife, who died in a car accident in 1972, had family roots in Toronto. Biden has never forgotten a condolence call he received from Trudeau's father, Pierre, prime minister at the time of the tragedy, which also killed the Bidens' newborn daughter.

Those long-ago connections were highlighted when Biden came to Ottawa in late 2016 as a farewell gesture to Trudeau from Barack Obama's administration. At the time, Biden said that he was counting on Trudeau to carry the torch of progressive politics after Obama was gone and while Trump was taking the U.S. off in another direction.

When Trudeau and Biden connected on the phone last week, the prime minister said he used the occasion as a bit of a catch-up on that 2016 conversation - an opportunity to say how far Canada, and Canada-U.S. relations, had travelled while Trump was in office.

Biden, for instance, has been signalling strongly that climate change is a major priority. On this, Trudeau says he is also going to be arguing that Canada has been blazing trails (though some environmentalists might disagree). Last week, the new U.S. president elevated climate change to a national-security issue. Should Canada do the same?

I think we've always treated it that way," Trudeau said. In fact, he said, it's more than that to Canada. It's not just an environmental crisis. It has health impacts. It has economic ramifications on a huge level. It has national unity ramifications... I don't think we need to use the label as aggressively as perhaps the Americans will choose to do." Put simply, Trudeau says, Biden has to ramp up the urgency around climate change in a way that Canada already has done.

Four years ago, Trudeau and his team were grappling with abrupt change at the very top of the United States and the massive disruption Trump threatened to wreak on the Canadian economy. Trudeau was still new in power; Biden was the seasoned veteran fading into the background.

Now, in 2021, Trudeau is a battle-scarred prime minister, still managing a pandemic and juggling a minority government. Biden is the new guy now and the relationship can't just pick up where the two leaders left off, even though it may have felt a bit that way when they talked last week.

There is a grounding in shared values and a shared perspective that makes things easier," Trudeau said. I don't have to look at ways to bend or twist the things that I want so that they may align a little more with what the former president was thinking."

Trudeau sounds relieved. I don't have to lay a lot of groundwork to explain why diversity and inclusion is a good thing and why fighting anti-Black racism is important and why real movement on climate change really matters."

It's not the end of a tension in the Canada-U.S. relationship - Biden just may present a whole bunch of different problems. But the tone of the conversation has already changed, in big, dam-breaking ways, Trudeau says.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt