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Same Piece of Real Estate?

“You’re American.”

“No, I’m Canadian.”

“Same piece of real estate,” he replied.

I didn’t know what to say. On the face of it, I couldn’t argue with him. I felt frustrated. I wondered what his comment meant, its significance. What are the ramifications of being the “same piece of real estate”? I want to know what to say, to finally be able to respond to Bruce Goff’s thought-provoking and irritating comment. A central part of Canada’s past, present, and future are informed by his simple observation.

My adventure was tame, not one of desperate third-world poverty and exotic diseases. I was setting out to explore the gentler, Pacific parts of the British Commonwealth. Places mostly like where I’d come from — yet not the United States.

On my first day in New Zealand, I set out to find a Globe and Mail. I imagined my search would be aided if I gravitated towards the university. I asked someone where I might find this important link to my recently departed home. As we talked, I learned she was a Labour Party activist deeply involved in a by-election. An election campaign can never have enough workers, and part of an activist’s job is to spread the word. I thought of myself as a left-Liberal, and without hesitation I was knocking on doors, singing the praises and policies of a candidate unknown to me.

I found work in Auckland on road crews, on building projects, and as a waiter in a declining luxury restaurant. All the while I continued my involvement with my new political party. That’s the context, more than twenty-five years ago, in which I had the epiphany of Goff’s comment that helped launch this book. I was at a local party talking to the rather gruff Goff, whose son, still a friend, is currently the leader of the opposition in New Zealand’s parliament.

When I left to explore the world, my upbringing had been limited to southwestern Ontario. One of my goals was to understand where I’d come from.

Our relationship with the United States has always fascinated me. From Canada, my father directed a handful of Canadian branch plants in the U.S. Some of my mother’s best friends were Americans, their husbands working for U.S. branch plants in Canada. My uncle and great-uncle both left small-town Canada to do what seemed like big things in the U.S. The latter went to work on the Manhattan Project, building the first nuclear bomb, and never returned. My uncle did an M.B.A. at Harvard.

When I came home from school in grade eight, we watched constant coverage of the Watergate hearings. What was I a part of? I knew others, like the Group of Seven, turned to the North and urged us to find meaning in a landscape that would help forge a new Canadian identity.

In my search for Canada, I learned French in my twenties and did a Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal. I wanted to live in what had once been the distant abstraction of Quebec, and understand how to be a Canadian with fellow citizens — people like the francophones in Quebec.

This book is part of that search, an attempt to understand the relationship with our all-so-powerful neighbour. When I was growing up, the U.S. had much more to do with my identity than Quebec, part of my country. The Americans are so much a part of our reality that they contextualize us.

We are coming more fully into the orbit of the U.S. Free trade has hastened this alignment. As a result of the terrorist attacks on the leading symbols of American power, our military, security, and immigration and refugee policies have come to resemble more closely those of our neighbour.

While the arrival of President Obama heralds new opportunities, discussion in Canada of our relations with the U.S. are still mired within a paradigm polarized between rejecting or embracing the Americans. If you think their system and values are superior to ours, the news is good. If the U.S. is anathema to everything you believe in, the trend is bad. But conceptualizing the issue as an ideological battle between patriots and traitors is not a sound basis for understanding.

We must assess our strengths realistically and pursue our interests, aware that the U.S. is not out to destroy us, but is simply a force of nature we must tame for our benefit.

As former Canadian Ambassador to Washington Raymond Chrétien has said:

The big challenge is how we keep reaping the benefits of our economic integration with the U.S., and use the wealth, the economic power to promote and strengthen our own values, our own beliefs, our own institutions.[1]

And to meet this challenge we need, as former Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy writes, a new approach:

One is [labelled either] pro- or anti-American, a nationalist or a continentalist, a free trader or a protectionist. Such stereotyping replaces analysis and obscures the search for thinking and positioning that doesn’t fall into either camp.[2]

Doing the Continental leaves the two “stereotypes” described by Axworthy and meets the “challenge” portrayed by Chrétien. It is a call to lay down ideological creeds and lift up Canada’s needs.

Far from a middle-of-the-road justification for inaction, the orientation and preoccupations of this book are the basis for taking steps for a more graceful dance with the U.S.

The topic of Canada’s relations with the U.S. is big and broad, with experts who advance knowledge by taking manageable objects of study and exploring them in depth. However, this method of exploration is also a weakness — and that weakness is a rationale for this book. There is a need to bring together what is important in considering Canada’s future with the United States, to gather up the breaking down of knowledge, to bring it into a coherent whole.

From managing water resources to ballistic missile defence, from energy to Arctic sovereignty, I propose a new paradigm for living with our neighbour that advances our interests.

Notes

1. Raymond Chrétien, former Canadian ambassador to Washington, in an interview with the author on March 30, 2009.

2. Lloyd Axworthy, Navigating a New World, Canada’s Global Future (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2003), 97.