Thompson on the Asymetry of American-Canadian Relations

The Wilson Centre for Cana­dian His­tory was priv­ileged to have John H Thompson speak today on “Man­aging in the Bush Leagues: The Canada-US Rela­tion­ship since 2001.” Thompson’s lively talk was marked by his per­sonal reflec­tions on what it’s like to be an advising Cana­dian, one who has moved per­man­ently to the US and on his per­spect­ive as a stu­dent of United States — Cana­dian rela­tions from one liv­ing in the heart of the beast.
His pithy present­a­tion was enfra­granced with a num­ber of well chosen edit­or­ial car­toons from both Cana­dian and Amer­ican papers and by a couple of rather loaded quo­ta­tions. His talk was loosely framed by an explor­a­tion of the rela­tion­ship between coun­tries dur­ing the pres­id­ency of George W Bush, and intro­duced by a short ret­ro­spect­ive of rela­tions between Cana­dian Prime Min­is­ters and Pres­id­ents from Mack­en­zie King.

Thompson high­lights the asym­metry of the rela­tion­ship summed up in Jef­frey Simpson’s Septem­ber 2001 obser­va­tion that “Amer­ic­ans know and care the square root of squat about Canada.” This is not to poke fun at Amer­ican ignor­ance in the vein of Rick Mercer’s ‘Talk­ing to Amer­ic­ans,” but rather to state the obvi­ous, that there are very few reas­ons that would actu­ally motiv­ate Amer­ic­ans to have any greater regard for their neigh­bour to the North. Resource and mil­it­ary factors aside, he states “Amer­ic­ans and bene­vol­ently ignor­ant of Canada. Cana­dians are malevol­ently well informed about the US.” And this pretty much sums it up. We may well be joined at the hip geo­graph­ic­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally, but on the Amer­ican radar, we simply don’t fig­ure more prom­in­ently than an annoy­ing gnat at times and or a dip­lo­matic afterthought.

To sup­port his argu­ment, Thompson cited the num­ber of occa­sions in the Amer­ican press that slights rated high in the Cana­dian national con­scious­ness went unmen­tioned. Whether it was ref­er­ences to the Cana­dian pres­id­ent by sit­ting pres­id­ents or even presidential-hopefuls such as Barak Obama, what makes head­lines in Canada infre­quently war­rants men­tion in the US. To sup­port the con­ten­tion that we frame our iden­tity through our anim­os­ity towards Amer­ic­ans, he demon­strated that Cana­dian edit­or­ial car­toons rarely present Amer­ic­ans and par­tic­u­larly Amer­ican pres­id­ents a in a pos­it­ive light.
This is not to say that rela­tions, as demon­strated by the court of pub­lic per­cep­tion, have been static. FDR for example was more widely seen as a heroic and pos­it­ive leader in the Cana­dian press, and at times rela­tions between the lead­ers of our two coun­tries have verged on the cor­dial (Carter and Trudeau for example). How­ever, Thompson asserts that pos­sibly the most effect­ive rela­tion­ship was that between Jean Chretien and George W Bush based on an estab­lished dis­tance between the coun­tries and didn’t attempt to pre­tend as though there was a bilat­eral respect.

He sum­mar­ized his talk with the advice that there is a great para­dox in the Imper­ial pres­id­ency of George W. Bush: he has made him­self more import­ant to the nature of the rela­tion­ship between his coun­try and Canada (or for that mat­ter any other coun­try in the world), but that the sum­mit dip­lomacy where this would make a dif­fer­ence actu­ally has little or no rel­ev­ance to the world in which we find ourselves today. Addi­tion­ally, (and respond­ing to oth­ers advice) Canada should wake up and real­ize that it can­not seek to man­age its rela­tions with the US and that any Prime Min­is­ter or hope­ful that prom­ises to do such is either mis­guided or men­dacious. Finally he cau­tions that Canada should look out for its national interests and not suf­fer under any delu­sion that nations have any friends.

Respond­ing to ques­tions fol­low­ing the talk, Thompson went to great length to affirm that the US med­ical sys­tem is not super­ior to the Cana­dian and that by being self-critical we play into the hands of con­ser­vat­ive attempts to dis­credit the Cana­dian sys­tem.