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8. The Ambivalent Ally, 1968-1984
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228 8 The Ambivalent Ally, 1968–1984 Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister of Canada longer than any other save Sir John A. Macdonald and William Lyon Mackenzie King. With Trudeau as its leader, the Liberal Party held power in Ottawa for fifteen years, broken only by the brief Conservative interregnum of Joe Clark in 1979–80. The parliamentary system permits longer political careers; after Franklin Roosevelt successfully defied the two-term tradition, a constitutional amendment limited U.S. presidents to eight years in office. Trudeau served opposite five presidents : Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. None of them liked him very much except Carter. The relative stability in leadership on the Canadian side from the late 1960s through the early 1980s contrasted sharply with the instability on the U.S. side and made the bilateral relationship more uncertain. Canadians discovered that it was much less fulfilling to be America’s junior partner than it had been to be Britain’s, and that the “bonds of sentiment and loyalty” were missing on both sides. Partnership with America offered the material benefits of selling armaments and automobiles to the United States; it brought the spiritual poverty of continued complicity in the U.S. war in Vietnam. A strident new Canadian nationalism demanded that Trudeau’s government act to stop the “Americanization” of Canada by controlling U.S. investment and blocking American popular culture. When Trudeau retired and Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term in 1984, the “special relationship ” had become something only for historians to ponder.1 Distinct Societies At no time in the twentieth century did Canada and the United States diverge so sharply as when America was “coming apart at 229 The Ambivalent Ally home” over race and Vietnam. Canadians, of course, had always considered their country fundamentally different from the United States, but events of the late 1960s and early 1970s buttressed their national narcissism about small North American differences and their longstanding conviction of moral superiority. U.S. social critics offered confirmation . “Society in the United States is close to disintegration,” a Michigan trade unionist told an Ontario audience in February 1968, “because of its failure to deal with the problems of poverty and urban life.” Events of the next few months bore him out, as violence swept the United States in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The Washington correspondents for Canadian newspapers reported in detail both the rioting and looting by “gangs of Negro youths . . . within a few blocks of the White House” and the brutal treatment meted out to them if “policemen wearing riot helmets equipped with plastic visors , waving rifles, shotguns and pistols” arrived to stop them. Canadian editors poured out their preconceptions: “The American people claim to be the most democratic in the world,” wrote Montreal’s Le Devoir, “but this great military and economic power is a sick nation [that] tolerates systematic injustice, hatred, [and] poverty.” The United States “has never reached that state of civilization in which its people were prepared to commit their security to the rule of law,” observed the Toronto Globe and Mail. Canadian editors tendered lofty condescension . “The writing has been on the wall for many years,” the Winnipeg Free Press offered; “Congress must not procrastinate any longer either on civil rights or . . . strict controls on the sale of firearms.” The only chance for Americans to escape “the smoldering hell they have built with racial prejudice,” contributed the Globe and Mail, was to “spend billions . . . and end the Vietnam war to make the spending possible.” “America has, since its beginnings, been characterized by a unique tradition of violence,” wrote journalist Claude Ryan after an assassin claimed Robert Kennedy two months later. “We thought this tradition was over. The events of recent years have proved unfortunately that is not the case.” The Canadian rock group The Guess Who howled its critique of the Republic: “I don’t need your war machine, I don’t need your ghetto scene—American woman, stay away from me.”2 [3.237.51.235] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:21 GMT) 230 canada and the united states Some Americans felt the same way. The Guess Who’s song reached number one on the U.S. pop charts, and for the first time since the early nineteenth century, Americans migrating to Canada outnumbered Canadians moving to the United States. Since the end of World War II, prosperity in Canada had combined...