Too Close to the USA

Michael Byers

Canadians make much of something Pierre Trudeau said in a speech to the Washington Press Club in 1969: ‘Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’ Canada shares a continental market, the world’s longest undefended border, a language and increasingly a culture with the US, and seems, in recent decades, to have lost its ability to adopt a critical – or even guarded – view of its neighbour when developing and implementing its own foreign policy. Successive Canadian Governments, charged with managing an asymmetrical relationship from which there is no exit, have chosen to assume that the relationship is one between equals. But what if the decision-makers in Washington see things differently? What if, as far as they’re concerned, respect and equality are not part of the arrangement? What if their sole aim is the advancement of the American national interest, whatever the costs to Canada?