A Coldly Realistic View From South of the 49th Parallel

Arnold Beichman writes:

It takes two to initiate and carry on a cold war. In North America, there is a rather unusual cold war under way, unusual because there is only one antagonist, Canada.

Ouch. That's a low blow. It's true, but it's still a low blow. But then he clarifies his meaning:

Or rather I should say the single antagonist is Canada's Liberal Party government. The Liberal Party cold war began in 1968 when the ultra-left Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister. Trudeau openly admired Fidel Castro. As between the U.S. and the Soviet Union he was "neutral" against the U.S. Trudeau's foreign policy was fairly simple. Anything the United States was for, Canada was against.

And a fair assessment would say that this has been the consistent policy of the Liberal Party down to today. Trudeau was not the source of anti-Americanism, but he made it acceptable to most Canadians and encouraged it to flourish here.

The same cold war anti-American attitude was more evident during the seven years of the Liberal government headed by Jean Chretien. He truly hated the U.S., so much so that while the rest of the democratic world expressed its sympathy in various ways on September 11, 2001, Mr. Chretien failed to offer a genuine, heartfelt word of solace to the American people in their hour of grief. For some strange reason, Mr. Chretien could never understand why he was never invited by President Bush to the Texas ranch or to Camp David, as was British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And that is, in a nutshell, the essence of the Canadian problem with the US: we want to be seen (by Americans and the rest of the world) as being different from the US, but we also still want to be treated well even when we whine, carp, and complain about them. No wonder so many American writers, if they're aware of Canada at all, view us as the international equivalent of the under-achieving wastrel little brother or bitter ex-wife. Our public representatives rarely rise above those unflattering portrayals: the Canadian voter does not reward them for doing so, and might well punish them for trying.

We love the idea of being a mover and shaker on the world stage, but we're totally unwilling to pay the price of doing so. We still think of ourselves as peacekeepers, even though tiny dots in the Pacific contribute more to actual peacekeeping than Canada does.

We still somehow cling to the notion that the United Nations means something and does good work . . . somewhere. We're mad for the idea of "soft power", even when the real world has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that to wield real power (of any kind) you must have some to start with.

Canada was once, and still might yet be again, a world leader. But not now. Not without effort, will, or plan.

Beichman continues:

Some years ago, I debated at a Canadian summer retreat a leading Canadian intellectual, Gerald Caplan, whose attack on the U.S. could have run in what was once the leading Soviet journal, Pravda. For Mr. Caplan, an NDP leader, America was a bloodsucking multinational corporation. For him, America, not the former Soviet Union, was the evil empire. He warned that if the NDP ever came to power in Canada, the U.S. would invade Canada because it would not allow socialism north of the border.

This reflects the fact that Canadians have a totally distorted view of their own system: the US is already tolerating socialism up here — and has done so for decades. You could even make a case for them using us as an experiment, to see how long it takes for socialism to paralyze a formerly healthy nation.

Far more startling is today's news: Al-Jazeera, the anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist Arabic-language news network, has been approved by special dispensation of a Canadian government agency for distribution in Canada, while Fox News channel and the Italian state channel RAI have been barred, according to Daniel Pipes. (Statistical note: there are, 470,000 Italian-speaking Canadians compared with 200,000 Arab-speaking Canadians.)

Ah, the other part of the experiment: how long does it take for rampant political correctness to eviscerate the very idea of equal treatment under the law. You see, those Italian-speaking Canadians are less disadvantaged than the Arabic-speaking Canadians, so their greater degree of victimhood overrides the greater numbers of victimized Italian-Canadians. The calculus of political correctness writ very explicitly.

The great paradox of Canada's anti-U.S. cold war is the United States is Canada's biggest trading partner, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiated by the Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1989. Something like $1.2 billion dollars a day in goods and services now flows bilaterally across the 49th Parallel. According to a Standard & Poor's study, Canada's exports to the U.S. have risen from 71 percent in 1990 of total Canadian exports to 80 percent today. The more profitable to Canada the bilateral trade relationship, the greater the Canadian Liberal government's hostility.

The same study, published in the Toronto National Post, showed Canada purchases more U.S. goods than the rest of the Western hemisphere combined, that U.S.-owned firms employ more than 1 million Canadians and produce about 10 percent of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP).

It beggars the imagination that Canadian official ingratitude is so clear-cut and explicit, even when the entire Canadian economy depends on good relations with the US. Even if the Liberals or the NDP could somehow manage to abrogate the NAFTA agreements, the US might suffer a mild recession but the Canadian economy would look like a trainwreck: there is no upside for Canada if NAFTA went away. None. You might as well stick a fork in us at that point: we'd be done.