Here's an interesting editorial in the Toronto Star about the PM meeting the President,.. rather philosophical actually.. (the guy is a moderate conservative writing this by the way)
Sound and fury from Washington
Dalton Camp
COLUMNIST
It was nice of our Prime Minister to be the first foreign
leader to call upon the nearly-elected president of the
United States the other day in Washington.
For a guy like Jean Chrétien, who has never lost an
election, George W. Bush must appear as something of a
novelty. While Bush is the titular leader of the mightiest
nation in the world, he was promoted to the office by the
Supreme Court of the United States.
According to the national edition of my morning paper,
the Prime Minister made his call a brief one, thus
``minimizing the chance of inadvertently insulting
(Bush).''
My morning paper, as we know, does not approve of our
Prime Minister, but it is also true one needs to be
cautious in one's relations with American presidents,
some of whom have cursed and conspired against
Canadian prime ministers, as did Kennedy against
Diefenbaker, or physically hit them, as Johnson did
Pearson.
Apart from these distempers of the time, Chrétien was
meeting a world leader who had previously known him
as Prime Minister Poutine, and who, abandoning a
precedent followed by previous presidents who made
their maiden trip abroad to Ottawa, is instead going first
to Mexico, an innovation explained by one of the
president's new cabinet appointees as justified by the
fact that Mexico is America's ``largest trading partner.''
Then again, as my morning paper took pains to point out,
our Prime Minister had, from time to time, said things
about our Great Neighbour which, in the context of this
gigantic event of calling upon Bush, might strike some as
having been injudicious.
For example, the Prime Minister was quoted as saying
that while he was in favour of free trade, ``the National
Rifle Association is one export Canada will never buy.''
This is almost true enough to be trite; most Canadians
share their Prime Minister's opinions on the NRA and
gun control.
But all that aside, it was just as well our Prime Minister
kept a civil tongue in his head.
On the same day he was visiting Bush, a man entered an
Illinois engine factory and shot to death five people and
wounded four others. The killer was armed with an
AK-rifle, a shotgun, a hunting rifle, and a .38 calibre
snub-nosed revolver. The man had a criminal record,
including convictions for criminal sexual assault and
theft. He was, of course, a Charlton Heston fan and a
supporter of the Second Amendment.
(My morning paper, parenthetically, did not carry the
story among the pages of its Tuesday edition, but the
coincidence of the murderous gun rampage in Illinois
and my morning paper's fortuitous publication of the
Prime Minister's views on gun control and the NRA
made him seem prescient.
Because of the presumptive importance of the
Chrétien-Bush meeting, I bought both national editions of
the morning papers. While The Globe and Mail does not
approve of our Prime Minister, its competition, the
National Alliance Post, really does not approve of him.
It would be more likely, then, that its coverage of the
Washington event would be more critical than that of the
other morning paper. And so it was.
Reporting from the site of the joint news conference, the
Post found the Prime Minister ``ill at ease.'' The author
of the story explained this was ``hardly surprising, given
Ottawa's loud and sometimes clumsily expressed
differences with George Bush.''
These differences, however clumsily expressed,
included Bush's planned national missile defence
program, drilling for oil in the Arctic, and included
``undiplomatic'' remarks uttered by Canada's then
ambassador to the United States, who is Chrétien's
nephew. (He had declared himself as favouring Al Gore
over Bush in the recent campaign, as did most Canadians
and, indeed, most Americans.
We cannot be sure the Prime Minister was all that ill at
ease, as reported in the Post.
According to The Globe, he had enjoyed a personal
relationship with Bill Clinton that was cordial as well
as comfortable. This invited candour and improved
understanding. We forget that Chrétien is a former
foreign affairs minister and his awareness and feel for
Canada-U.S. relations, and international affairs, is much
greater than that of Bush who came to this first meeting
as a world leader whose only trip abroad had been to
Mexico, as would be his second trip. The wonder is that
they could find anything to talk about, other than bass
fishing.
We are inclined to make too much of this historic
relationship. While Brian Mulroney put himself out, and
ran real political risks, in order to accommodate
American global interests, the U.S. State Department
wrote memos to file, reminding all concerned that
Canadian good works did not warrant any favoured
treatment for Canada. No one knows better than Chrétien
how avidly the U.S. government, and its presidents,
disliked and mistrusted Pierre Trudeau. He was, after
all, a ``socialist.''
Still, our press seem to think it important, as an augury
of the future, that the president would let our Prime
Minister in the side door for a fireside chat. Apparently,
the media were holding their collective breath in fear
our man might say something ``clumsy'' or use the wrong
fork, or mention the NRA, or the near universal
American hatred of its private health-care system.
We are in a new era of journalism, now that our national
newspapers represent not our interests as a people but
the interests of multinational corporatism. Thus, what is
demanded of a Prime Minister of Canada is good
behaviour, facile flattery and swift accommodation. This
is not a policy but merely an abject posture.
thestar.ca |
