Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

Epilogue: "Plus ça change..."

333 Epilogue: “Plus ça change . . .” No other pair of international neighbors can claim as successful and mutually prosperous a relationship as has evolved between the United States and Canada over the past two hundred years. The two countries share not only a continent but also an interwoven cultural, political, and economic heritage. Because it is impossible to depict U.S.-Canadian relations within the framework of a traditional diplomatic narrative, in this fourth edition of Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies—as in the first three editions—we have thus also considered the political, economic, and especially the cultural and social considerations that inform the bilateral relationship. Since the third edition appeared, however, the military and diplomatic dimension of the relationship has come to the fore. Since the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, no one has described the border that it shares with Canada as “undefended.” Politicians now speak of “smart” borders rather than open borders, and the Bush administration’s Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative will require that all entering the United States, including returning Americans , possess and display a passport. This concern with border security is a return to something very old as much as a change to something new. For the first century and a quarter in the bilateral relationship the U.S.-Canadian boundary was anything but undefended. The British used Canada as a base to attack their rebellious American colonists, and the Americans invaded Canada twice, from 1775 to 1776 and again from 1812 to 1814. There has been no subsequent invasion, unless one dignifies the Fenian terrorists, but war seemed likely at other times and imminent at least twice, after the Canadian rebellions and during the U.S. Civil War. As the United States ascended to world might, and Canada became more autonomous from Great Britain, war was relegated to the imaginations of army staff officers. After 1900—probably after 1871—continentalism did not involve overt annexationism among 334 canada and the united states significant groups on either side of the border. With the boundary firmly in place after the Alaska dispute, U.S. ambitions toward Canada were limited to securing strategic advantage, guaranteeing access to natural resources or the security of U.S. investment in Canada, and assuring that Canada did not become a gap in American hemispheric security. U.S. predominance also colors (“colours”, for Canadians) the economic and social dimensions of the relationship. The peoples of the two countries have crossed the shared border in both directions, but nine Canadians have emigrated south for every American who has moved north. In the 1990s, Canadian emigration to the United States reemerged as a significant political issue in Canada; unlike Mexican migration, Americans worried little about arrivals from Canada until 11 September 2001. As an illustration of U.S. apprehension that Canada ’s more gentle immigration and refugee policies allow terrorists to flourish, in the 2006 U.S. feature film The Sentinel, a plot to assassinate the president originates in Toronto! Hollywood’s Canada has come a long way since Mounties and Texas Rangers cooperated across the border to capture villains. These new tensions should not, however, blind us to the extent to which the border has historically been more a symbol than a barrier to the movement of ideas, goods, people, and capital. Since the late nineteenth century, U.S. capital has developed Canadian natural resources, and U.S. manufacturers have built branch plants and sought markets in Canada. Social movements in the United States have often been mirrored in parallel, even dependent, institutional developments in Canada : the North American labor movement, crusades for social reform, scholarly societies and service clubs, professional sports. Since the early twentieth century, American popular culture has rolled across English and French Canada like a tidal wave. Canadian concern about dependence on the United States has constantly shaped Canada’s national policies. Despite the concern of Canadian leaders not to appear to respond to American influences, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien moved right to appropriate the Clinton Democratic administration’s agenda of free trade, balanced 335 Epilogue budgets, and a diminished welfare state. The Stephen Harper Conservative government’s ideological affinity to the George W. Bush administration—both probusiness, socially conservative, cool toward global warming, and hawkish on defense—would seem to bring high politics in Canada and the United States into closer harmony than even during the...