Canada-U.S. relations have never been cooler, says longtime diplomat

March 2, 2015

The elder statesman among all former Canadian ambassadors to the United States says he’s never seen the relationship between the two governments quite this cool.

When it comes to Canada-U.S. relations, Allan Gotlieb has a unique vantage point.

It’s not just that his tenure in Washington goes farther back than any other living U.S. ambassador. It’s that his own time in D.C. straddled two distinct eras: the depth of the Trudeau-Reagan relationship to the height of the Mulroney-Reagan-Bush bond that culminated in a free-trade pact.

What he sees now is a relationship that’s more distant...

In past disagreements, Gotlieb said there was hostility against the neighbour’s policies. As an example, he said Trudeau’s National Energy Program infuriated the U.S. administration. In his time there were also disputes about cross-border TV ads, softwood lumber and acid rain.

But in those days, he said, American presidents paid special attention to Canada-U.S. issues. Ronald Reagan even campaigned on the idea of a North American Accord in 1980.

Obama, meanwhile, hasn’t made a bilateral visit to Canada since his first month in office. Gotlieb lays much of the blame on the president, not the prime minister. “The Keystone project has been handled with considerable insensitivity. Our history has been characterized by … a sensitivity to each other’s interests,” he said.

“And I think some of that is intrinsic in the style of Obama. He sees his legacy, maybe, as standing up to big oil, and Canada’s interests are secondary to the much bigger primary interest of Obama to go down in history as the man that stopped carbon from heating up our planet.”

Don’t get him wrong, he’s not declaring doom and gloom.

Canada and the U.S. remain each other’s top trading partner, with $2 billion in goods and services swapped each day; there’s military co-operation in the Middle East; federal departments deal directly with one another on scores of different initiatives; the governments are working on harmonizing industrial regulations across a range of sectors; and the historic reopening of U.S. relations with Cuba began in Canada, a fact Obama acknowledged and expressed gratitude for...

This has been excerpted from 26 February 2015 article by The Canadian Press.


Topic(s): 
Canadian Economy & Politics
Information Source: 
Canadian News Channel
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