Make Canada boring again
Almost 40 years ago, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Flora Lewis wrote a piece titled “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” Upon seeing it, the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley challenged his readers to come up with a more boring headline. And although many have tried, it has been hard to top.
“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” has become a long-running joke, periodically resurrected by journalists in need of ideas. It may have stuck because of an underlying truth: The issues on the U.S.-Canada agenda do not excite Washington’s foreign policy elite. Normally, nothing Canada-related could compete for attention with crises such as those in Ukraine or Gaza.
But President Trump seems determined to break the association of Canada with boredom by wreaking havoc upon one of the world’s most positive bilateral relationships. He started out by sneering at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the mere “governor” of what should be the 51st state, showing contempt for Canada’s very existence as an independent country. That view parallels Vladimir Putin’s stance on Ukraine.
Trump has now gone from words to deeds, imposing 25 percent tariffs against imports from Canada (although the the date of actual implantation has now slipped until April 2), as well as placing tariffs on China and Mexico. Even if one disagrees wholly with Trump’s approach to China, one must accept that it is a competitor for which America must design an effective strategy. And relations with Mexico have always been complex, with tough problems such as immigration and narcotics for which it has always been hard to find solutions.
But Canada? It seems that Trump, the habitual disruptor, is creating a crisis for its own sake. Any serious economist, and indeed anyone who passed Econ 101 in college, can tell you the likely effects of his tariffs — sticker shock at the car dealer, the lumber yard and the supermarket, followed by lines at the unemployment office.
But although economic consequences will be felt soon enough, even more damaging will be the effects on the good will between our two peoples which, while perhaps “boring,” has been the bedrock of our security relationship.
Canadians have fought beside Americans from the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of Afghanistan. Our two countries jointly patrol the skies above our shared continent. Canada has usually been on our side at the U.N. and in other forums, not because it wants to curry favor with us, but because it shares our values of democracy and free markets and mostly sees the world the same way we do.
It seems unthinkable that Trump would want to foment long-term distrust on the part of our Canadian neighbors in his search for an illusory economic advantage, but that is precisely what he is doing. So we can expect when the time comes, as it inevitably will, that America wants Canadian support on matters of importance to us, the answer we hear will be “no.”
On the wall of the atrium of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa are carved words spoken by President John F. Kennedy when he visited Canada in 1961: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. Necessity has made us allies.”
But given the direction Trump is taking us, we may need to chisel those words off the wall. Perhaps we should replace them with ones written by Canadian singer Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
Richard M. Sanders is a global fellow of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest. A former senior foreign service officer, he served as chargé d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa from 2013 to 2016.
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