Relations between the two countries are so broad and deep that the current structures of their management do not reflect the reality of the situation. As Canada’s economic space is increasingly becoming more integrated with America’s, the Canadian political space is infused from the U.S. Therefore, there is a steady pressure to find new ways of engaging and interacting with the United States.
To reflect and better capture what’s happening, we are increasingly moving beyond the normal models within which nation states interact, and increasingly organizing some of our systems of government to align with, and engage, the Americans’. The federal government, in both Canada and the U.S., is reorganizing and expanding initiatives to engage the Americans. In the U.S. we are opening more offices: a massive increase of thirteen offices to forty-one. Author and columnist Jeffery Simpson captures the logic:
The Congress and the administration represent the basket, where points are scored. The whole country is the basketball court, where plays develop and strategies unfold that eventually lead to something happening around the basket. There are no lay-ups or slam dunks or 15-foot jumpers without playing well over the whole court.[1]
In Washington we have set up a new branch in our embassy to focus on Congress. Our embassy representatives visit Congress daily to lobby members and their staffs on how their districts are affected by Canada. Through a new database, they point out how many jobs amongst their constituents are dependent on Canadian employers.
While former Canadian ambassador to Washington, Allan Gotlieb, claims to be the inventor of lobbying Congress, he didn’t so much invent it as respond in the mid-1980s to the failure of an east coast fisheries agreement in which two U.S. senators reacted to pressure from a few hundred scallop fisherman and derailed a treaty that had been negotiated and signed by the two governments.
The move to put more gears, and oil, into the U.S. system means we are becoming more a part of that system. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin created a committee on our relations with the U.S. in our federal cabinet. And some, such as former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley and former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, are advocating that our ambassador to the U.S. should be a member of cabinet, so, as Manley says, “He would have real clout in D.C.”
The launch in March 2005 of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) was part of this process of striving for closer cooperation. It represents an understanding between the leaders of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico to enhance coordination of their economic and security relations. For Canada’s purposes, it is about more fully harmonizing our procedures and regulations with the U.S. The SPP recognizes that three can talk, but two can do. Both Canada and Mexico are largely engaged in separate discussions with the U.S. on many issues. This is consistent with the findings, in a later chapter, about how Mexico should sensibly fit into our relations with the U.S.
These initiatives that involve reorganizing government capacity and procedures — be they special committees of cabinet or the processes of the SPP — are measures of our growing integration. This is a process whose ultimate logic, if we are not mindful of the dangers, is direct Canadian representation in the U.S. Congress.
As we have seen, both sides of the debate over our relations with the U.S. frame it as a problem. Right-continentalists tell us they have a big solution to the problem. A problem with these big solutions is they put us in huge asymmetries of size and power. Take one of their favourite proposals, a monetary union. At best, Canada would become the thirteenth regional Federal Reserve bank, joining the twelve that currently shape U.S. monetary policy.
There is, however, one notable anomaly to this problem of asymmetry: the International Joint Commission (IJC). Formed in 1909, the IJC manages environmental issues along the border. Each country has three commissioners, and all decisions require a majority vote. It’s a system for making decisions, which, apparently, the U.S. doesn’t like and can’t believe it’s saddled with; it is not the way the U.S. is used to operating around the world. It exists as a special case, perhaps because it was signed with Great Britain near the height of its power, and because it is about managing a border that is done most effectively jointly. It is understood as a “narrow gauge” organization, not transferable to other areas of the management of our relationship with our neighbour.
What about that biggest of big solutions — formally joining the United States, becoming part of the Union? Surely that is the most decisive way to have influence in Washington.
If part of the premise is that there is a problem to be solved — the biggest of big solutions would not solve the problem either. We would have less power than California. That state, the largest in the union, has a population of over 36 million. It has fifty-three of 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Even with so many seats, California’s voice is never decisive. Canada’s population of 33 million would give us perhaps forty-eight seats. We would, however, do better than California in Senate seats. That state, like all others, has two seats. Canada could be expected to come to the Union as at least five states — perhaps as British Columbia, the rest of the West, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic. Still, that’s only ten Senate seats out of 110. Clearly, formal integration into the Union is not a solution.
With NAFTA we have a dispute settlement mechanism, and now the continentalist right would have us contemplate a NAFTA-Plus to further stabilize our relationship with the U.S. There is an irony that the more deals we do with the U.S., to bring our relationship within special norms, the more we become subject to U.S. practices, to the point that we become a part of U.S. practices.
It’s easy to see how this can and, perhaps in the fullness of time, will happen. Here’s what then-Maryland Senator Joseph Biden said of Prime Minister Martin after they met in April 2004:
He got it right away. I could have just as easily been speaking to the president of the U.S., or governor of a state, or one of my colleagues in the U.S. Senate. It didn’t need any translation. It’s one of those incredible things about the relationship. You don’t have to explain. You sort of finish each other’s sentences. Canada and the U.S., it’s like ham and eggs. It’s kind of hard to separate them whether we like it or not.[2]
“Getting it” is a precursor to “getting together.” You’ve got to wonder if union, despite its shortcomings, isn’t in our future.
One can also imagine scenarios where further integration with the U.S. might happen suddenly. This could happen, for example, if there was a simultaneous terrorist attack on Canada and the U.S. Imagine also that the president was more in the mould of John Kerry — from a northern liberal state, played hockey, and spoke French — and saw the role of the U.S. not in unilateralist terms but in a multilateralist sense. Add to this a president who took a personal interest in Canada and was well disposed to Canada and the Canadian prime minister. Like Ronald Regan was toward Brian Mulroney, and who suggested a Canadian attend meetings of the U.S. cabinet. A president who might advance a joint currency when the Canadian dollar was 25 percent lower than the U.S. dollar, yet still propose that the Canadian dollar be merged at par.
The ball, as they say, is very much in our court. It’s up to us to decide how involved we want to be in this process of integration. Where is our centre of gravity in our relations with the United States? Will it someday be said, “It started with a Canadian cabinet committee on the U.S., and ended with a Canadian in the U.S. cabinet?”
Our Segmented Neighbour
One of the big mistakes we make in dealing with the U.S., in fact the biggest mistake, is that we don’t properly understand how the U.S. political system works.
We imagine that because we are exposed to the U.S. every day that we have a pretty good idea of how things work south of the border. That is a conceit that hurts us. The U.S. is a much more regional country than we realize, and the U.S. political system arrives at decisions in a way that is so foreign to our own that we don’t get it. As a result we misunderstand the U.S. and make wrong decisions.
In our system, the prime