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3

Basic Steps

There is no big solution in our dealings with the United States. Rather, we need to take basic steps and adopt fundamental principles to guide and manage the relationship. To do this we must appreciate how the U.S. system of government works, and how the relationship with our neighbour functions so that we make decisions based on our interests and not our fears, emotions, feelings, ideologies, and old habits of thinking.

Our discussion about the U.S. relationship is senselessly polarized. Our debate amounts to left-nationalists saying integration is bad, stop it, and right-continentalists saying it’s good, bring it on. It is time for a change, an opportunity for a more constructive debate.

The U.S. is our best friend, whether we like it or not. It cannot be avoided or dispensed with and it’s not a kind of enemy. The real issue is what our interests are. We can’t avoid the U.S., yet we have to be mindful that one does not integrate with the U.S. but into the U.S. Ours is a relationship of two nations, and of the interdependence of two economies. By necessity our friendship with the U.S. needs to be a wary one, as we are a separate country benignly under siege. As a culture, English Canada is somewhat fragile — it’s the only OECD country that doesn’t have a home-grown drama among its ten most popular TV programs.[1]

We must not be shy about giving our government a mandate to advance our interests. We are a medium-sized country bordering the world’s hegemonic power. Our leading industries have been dropping like flies to American and other companies. It makes sense to give our foreign investment review authorities a mandate to consider whether some of these sales are perhaps not in our interest. The Americans, despite their very public adherence to the free market, do not hesitate to disallow and otherwise discourage the sale of American companies when they feel it is not in their national interest.

The credo upon the launching of the CBC is one for Canadians to remember: “The State or the United States.” I’m not arguing for or against left or right ideology, I’m simply saying we have a government and in our situation with the U.S. we need to use it.

When we mindlessly reject things as American, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We can’t have a rational debate about health care because it is shut down by the phrase “American-style health care.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a system of health care that wastes billions of dollars on unnecessary administration and leaves millions uninsured. But I do think we would be well served by a reasonable debate. Right now we can’t benchmark our health care system against ones in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the U.K. because some elements of these are described as “American-style.” It is a weakness for Canada to be caught in this polarized anti-America–pro-America dichotomy. It’s hard for Canada to win when our debate is ill-framed.

We need to outgrow our habit of fighting for or against an imperial connection, first with the British and now the Americans. It is an old way of thinking, and a paradigm that allows us to miss what makes sense for Canada. The question that needs to be foremost in our mind is “What makes Canada as strong as possible?”

We must creatively mix points of view to arrive at policy prescriptions that respond to our needs, not to our ideologies. We let ideology interfere with what makes sense for Canada. Canada objectively has interests: let’s advance them. We must take the best of the nationalist school, its counsel of caution in our relations with the U.S., and the best of the integrationist school in its appreciation that some of our national interests are served by our relations with the U.S.

As I’ve said, I’ve done some of the research for this book by going to what seems like every conference on the subject. I can tell you it is very different going to a lefty conference than to a right-wing conference on this issue. The former is full of serious indignation and the latter serious purpose. At a right-wing conference American speakers are, if not stars, important and listened to carefully.

At a lefty conference, the American speaker has to pass a litmus test. They have, after all, been invited so they’ve generally passed this, and within about three minutes also pass the test with the general audience. They are then treated respectfully, and always with a large dose of consideration that the guest has also solicited — consideration that it’s difficult being an American progressive activist and particularly one who painfully and bravely persists in living in the United States.

From the coal face of our polarized discussion about our future with the U.S., I always come away thinking that somewhere between these divergent mindsets there must be a third way.

The left and right tell us we have a problem. Like with any problem, what’s required is a solution. Part of defining and finding a third path is to stop looking for the solution. Our relationship with the U.S. is a paradox. It is simultaneously both dangerous and helpful. Understanding this moves us out of, past, and beyond the old paradigm of left and right ideology and imperial connections.

We must dissolve and drive from our minds the old conceptual framework with its comfortable and tired rhetoric, touchstones, and shibboleths so that a new model of understanding can emerge which embraces the contradiction of our relations with the U.S.

There is an enduring paradox to be managed. The new paradigm requires we put at the centre of our understanding the contradiction that the U.S. simultaneously both assists and hinders us. It cannot be avoided or dispensed with. There is no problem to be solved, but rather an enduring situation to be managed. This is why this part of the book about managing our relationship with the U.S. is central to my thesis.

Those who advocate big solutions of a NAFTA-Plus variety seem oblivious that continentalism is a force of nature that should not be encouraged, as it threatens to consume us. Society in the U.S. is more neoconservative than in Canada, more supportive of minimalist government and lower taxes. Within Canada the orientation of leading business organizations, while outside the Canadian mainstream, is within the norm of American opinion. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Thomas d’Aquino, associated with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and Nancy Hughes Anthony, formerly with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, advocate further integration with the U.S. — it is a way of advancing the economic interests of their members and of making Canadian society more like that of the United States.

Advocates from both groups with the best of intentions can inflame Canadians understanding of the U.S., doing us a disservice, whether it is nationalist Linda McQuaig (promoting her recent book Holding the Bully’s Coat[2]) who spent five minutes of a forty-five-minute talk on American invasion plans for Canada, or d’Aquino telling us “security trumps trade,” and our only course is to fall in line with the U.S. Both are respected and influential proponents of the two sides of the debate, as it is currently structured, and both misunderstand our relationship with the U.S. Not only does the current debate have its advocates talking past each other, but their battle has a lack of reality to it. These are the very conditions that signal and precede a paradigm shift.

Ironically, the prescriptions of the left and the right take us to the same outcome! D’Aquino feels it is very logical and normal that in our relationship with the U.S. we will enter into a Customs Union and a Monetary Union. A Customs Union means Canada and the U.S. would have a single uniform tariff for the rest of the world. A Monetary Union means both countries would have one currency.

Maude Barlow would have us avoid the U.S. — costing us jobs, giving our children fewer opportunities, and making us poorer. That route poorly positions us to face the force of the U.S., and would eventually have a dramatic integrative outcome.

Barlow and d’Aquino lead us to the same outcome. D’Aquino’s approach gets you a Customs Union and a Monetary Union. Barlow’s approach leads to economic decline and less negotiating power, in which the ensuing crisis would still lead to d’Aquino’s end point. These diametrically opposed approaches to Canada’s relationship with the U.S. take us by different routes to the same end.

We are walking the line of a ridge. To have significantly more or less integration is to tumble down one side or the other. Rhetorically, we are told the “status quo is not an option,” when it is largely the only option.

The U.S., a huge presence, is not going away. Our starting point must be to recognize and manage that reality. That must be the premise we start from, which will give us prescriptions and outcomes. From the two false premises, with which we are currently sadly saddled, come poor prescriptions and unnecessary and undesirable outcomes.

This part of the book explores fundamental ideas for understanding the relationship and how to manage it. A central element, and truth, is that we don’t understand the United States: how it’s society works or how it’s system of government works. We imagine the Americans think about us, but they don’t. When I asked Colin Robertson, the former head of outreach to Congress at our embassy in Washington, “What do they think about Canada?” he replied, “They don’t think about Canada!” Such an attitude should not be disappointing or frustrating; it is an opportunity. It means we have a freedom we haven’t allowed ourselves.

With a fresh approach, we can see there are things in our history with the U.S. that could have happened that did not, and things that are now possible. As explored in the previous chapter, we might have made the Avro Arrow a success. And as we will see in future chapters, we would not focus on Mexico and we would look to our energy reserves for our needs and not those of the Americans — and know the difference. We might see the Americans as allies in the Arctic rather than as bullies. We could have said “no” to ballistic missile defence without the hand-wringing. We would not have gone to Afghanistan in the way we have. Canadians there would not have died — and some that may in the future will not have to.

By taking some time to understand how our neighbour works, we are in a much better position to manage relations with them so that we get the most out of it for ourselves — not selfishly or with anti-Americanism, but sensibly.

Notes

1. BBM Nielson Media Research.

2. Linda McQuaig, Holding the Bully’s Coat, Canada and the U.S. Empire (Toronto: Random House, 2007).