Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Why does this keep happening? (click to view)
Date: February 11, 2011
The unstoppable march of history dictates that as time progresses, the United States and Canada must grow closer and closer together. Few countries are as economically co-dependent as the two states of upper North America, and few have a more vested interest in seeing their cross-border exchange of goods and people occur in a fashion as unhampered as possible.
Things had been marching merrily along in the 80s and 90s, but then 9/11 screwed everything up. Security concerns suddenly became America's #1 priority, and border security suddenly became the worry-wart issue de joure. A new wave of thinking among US legislators began to popularize the idea that the era of "special relationships" was over, and that America should proceed to treat all foreign countries and nationals equally — regardless of how critical of an ally they may be. Things only got further complicated when the late-2000's recession hit, and American protectionism became fashionable once more. Suddenly all the old anti-trade arguments we'd been hearing since the days of NAFTA resurfaced once more.
Canadians, fortunately, have extraordinarily talented lobbyists in D.C., and have been masters at getting lots of "except Canada" provisions added to all sorts of bills. It is still possible for Canadians to travel to the US without a passport, for instance, and Canadian corporations have been largely exempt from resurgent "buy American" legislation.
But it's tiring to have to fight for exemptions all the time, and for years now, economic and security scholars in both countries have been arguing that Canada and the US need to take their integrated relationship to the next level, and establish some sort of formal, legal "zone" to govern their shared interests. Following a series of botched half-starts, President Obama and Prime Minister Harper signed a memorandum of understanding on the issue
last week, and commissioned the creation of a bi-national committee to come up with a series of suggestions on how to best pursue further trade, regulatory, and immigration harmonization through a new, sweeping, treaty-like arrangement.
According to the
Globe and Mail, the new regime "would mean sharing intelligence, harmonizing regulations for everything from cereal to fighter jets, and creating a bilateral agency to oversee the building and upgrading of bridges, roads and other border infrastructure," as well as "more deeply integrate the sharing of intelligence on people and products to ensure that anything or anyone entering either country would be properly inspected and the information shared."
Important stuff! But if you haven't heard much about the plan, you can be excused, since leaked documents obtained by several Canadian media outlets indicate that the Harper government has been
deliberately keeping the plan quiet in order to avoid a public backlash.
Canada-US integration plans of any sort tend to be received quite poorly among significant chunks of the Canadian populace, especially among entrenched nationalistic lobby groups, who are experts at voicing paranoid outrage at any talk of bringing the two countries closer together. Fears of American "takeovers" and "conquests" of fair Canada loom large in the press releases of anti-trade interest groups like the ever-shrill
Council of Canadians, who pretty much view every prime ministerial-presidential handshake as evidence of some frightening new annexation conspiracy.
Crazed, suspicious, and irrational anti-American sentiment is the great Frankenstein's monster of modern Canadian politics. On the one hand, it can be a powerful ally when politicians need to scare up some votes or cobble together some lazy, chauvinistic justification for this-or-that spending priority, but that same public sentiment can just as easily prove to be an impossible obstacle when Canada actually needs to pursue meaningful engagement with the United States in order to better our own self-interest.
Harper's Conservatives have been disturbingly eager to play this double-game as much as possible, trying to simultaneously cast themselves as the party that can pursue the most meaningful and beneficial relationship with the United States, while also out anti-Americaning the Liberal Party, in order to win the votes of a skeptical public.
One of the most insidious aspects of anti-Americanism is that it makes the Canadian public ignore, or outright deny, the tight correlation between close economic integration with the United States and the opulent standard of living Canadians enjoy. Free Trade with the States, for instance, has been the cornerstone upon which most of this country's last three decades of growth and prosperity have been based, yet it was also viciously opposed by virtually every "patriotic" lobby group in the country at the time of its proposal, and indeed, never even enjoyed majority support from the public at large.
I'm not sure if the strength of anti-American sentiment in the country is significantly better or worse than it was during the Free Trade election of 1988, but considering the nearly unanimous voices of support from economists and business leaders that a new phase of economic integration is needed, it's very irresponsible for Harper to be playing with fire at such a critical time.
CKA Uber 
CKA Elite 
Active Member 
