A companion article perhaps to that excellent letter.
Presto! Canada-U.S. trade spat goes up in smoke
By MICHAEL DEN TANDT
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Amazing, isn't it? After a heated 10 days during which the Canada-U.S. economic partnership purportedly teetered on the brink of disaster, the great rift is suddenly history.
Richard Perle, George W. Bush's personal attack dog, now says Canada is a better friend than France after all. John Manley, the Deputy Prime Minister, says there was never really a problem to begin with. Canadian chief executive officers, fresh from a confab in Washington, are all smiles. Any day now, U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci will reiterate the critical importance of maintaining the world's greatest trading relationship. And — here's a bet — the U.S. President's planned state visit on May 5 will go ahead after all.
The irony is that diplomacy, at the federal level, has little or nothing to do with the emerging thaw. Indeed, Canadian foreign policy might have been directed by a chimpanzee for the past two weeks, for all the difference it would have made. Rather, it's about business, dollars and cents, an integrated energy market, and a 4,800-kilometre unprotected border. For both economic and strategic reasons, the United States needs Canada in its corner, regardless of our reluctance to support the war. Everyone on the U.S. side knows it, from the President and Vice-President on down to the 1,000 or so powerful Washingtonians who influence American foreign policy. All else is hot air.
For proof, we need only consider the appalling clumsiness with which Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his senior ministers have handled this file since U.S. and British forces attacked Iraq on March 20.
During the lead-up to war, except for one brief unscripted foray by Defence Minister John McCallum, the country's position was consistent: No war without international sanction. It was best articulated by Mr. Chrétien himself, in a February speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, in which he strongly urged the United States to continue to work within the multilateral system, for the sake of its own interests.
In the same speech, the Prime Minister succinctly noted a few of the reasons for Canada's strategic importance to the United States. Most memorable were the energy stats: Canada supplies 94 per cent of U.S. natural gas imports, nearly 100 per cent of its electricity imports, 35 per cent of the uranium for its nuclear power generation, and 17 per cent of its crude oil imports. The Alberta oil sands, he noted, contain 315 billion barrels of oil recoverable with current technology — more than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
Since the war began though, it's all been downhill.
First, Mr. Chrétien expressed strong disapproval of the U.S. invasion. Then he insisted that it was legal, and that Canada wished the United States well. A few days later, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham said Canada favours regime change. But the Prime Minister quickly overruled that, insisting we don't. And now, with U.S. forces battling in the streets of Baghdad, the House of Commons is apparently poised to pass a motion declaring support for a U.S. victory. Taken together, it appears to be a ludicrous mish-mash of contradiction.
In fact, it's not. It's a single coherent policy. And it could have been made crystal clear with one statement from the Prime Minister at the outset of the war, saying something like this: "We continue to believe that the United Nations is the proper forum for dealing with so-called 'rogue' states, and deeply regret the U.S. decision to launch a pre-emptive, unilateral invasion. But now that the war has started and young Americans are dying in battle, we hope U.S.-led forces will defeat the Iraqi regime quickly, and with a minimum loss of life, because the United States is our ally."
Incredibly, despite all the backtracking and shilly-shallying, no such full, coherent statement of Canadian policy has yet been made. Small wonder that Canadian business people, no doubt including many who oppose pre-emptive invasions on principle, are concerned. And small wonder the U.S. government has reportedly decided to simply wait out the last months of the Chrétien regime, hoping for better days.
But that's precisely the point, isn't it? The Canada-U.S. economic relationship, all $2-billion a day of it, transcends tensions between any one U.S. administration and whoever happens to be in power in Ottawa. The essence of the partnership is not state to state, but person to person, repeated thousands of times over every day in countless transactions.
Many if not most Americans are less hawkish than their President. And few Canadians are as reflexively and foolishly anti-American as Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish. There's room for a meeting of minds, reinforced by mutual need and mutual benefit. Yesterday's kiss-and-make-up meeting in Washington, fronted by business people, is recognition of this simple fact: In a free society, economic relationships are dictated not by governments, but by individuals. And individual North Americans still want to trade. |
