The following is an excerpt from John Ibbitson’s new book “Open & Shut: Why America Has Barack Obama, and Canada Has Stephen Harper”. It appeared in the 2 May 2009 edition of “globeandmail.com”. The author, a member of The Globe and Mail’s Washington bureau, invites readers to join a discussion of politics in Canada and the United States at www.globeandmail.com/open&shut.
Just as free trade in the 1980s and 1990s did nothing to lessen Canadian sovereignty or independence, so, too, a bilateral, continental security perimeter would make the continent safer for both Canadians and Americans without betraying our independence.
The way to get the Americans to trust the border is to give them confidence that both countries have the will and ability to protect it.
The security leg of this agreement, then, would include common rules for accepting refugees, joint inspection of containers leaving international destinations en route to either country, and an integrated terrorist watch list. Most important, it would expand NORAD, the joint command that protects the continent’s airspace, to include land and water.
This would lead to the presence of American forces on Canadian soil and within Canadian coastal waters. It would also lead to the presence of our forces on their territory.
There’s no reason to assume that either country’s sovereignty would be compromised in the process.
Offering to move from co-operation to integration on security would afford Canada the opportunity to ask for the same on the economy. As the final tranche of this comprehensive continental agreement, Canada should propose a customs union.
This would be the biggest, boldest move Canada could make: a joint tariff, based on bilateral consent, that would allow both countries to erase the border completely, permitting the free flow of goods, services and people between our two countries, no passport or work visa required — a freedom those in the European Union already enjoy. As part of the union, both countries would drop all remaining protections in agriculture, cultural industries and financial services. After all, our supply management boards are anachronisms, promoting inefficient farming and expensive milk in the nostalgic desire to preserve family farms that mostly no longer exist.
Our artists are globally competitive — how would Americans laugh without our comedians, and where would bad popular music be without our Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and Shania Twain? — and in a world where information flows in every direction via the Internet, protecting such antiquities as television broadcasters and book, magazine or newspaper publishers is as nonsensical as protecting the family farm.
A customs union won’t cost us our identity, whatever that is; it will produce the opposite. Just as NAFTA spurred Canadian business entrepreneurship, so, too, will dropping cultural protections encourage Canada’s artistic entrepreneurs. The worst that will happen is that we may have to adopt American spelling.
And no, this won’t give Americans control over our immigration policy. For one thing, if they had any say over who we let in and how many, we would have some say over who and how many they let in. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing: America’s immigration system is littered with confusing categories and places too little emphasis on bringing in skilled workers. Instead, millions of Mexicans and other Latinos flood the country, providing labour for jobs Americans aren’t willing to do themselves. The Yanks could do worse than imitating us on immigration.
But that’s beside the point. What matters is that both countries would want to retain full control over their immigration policies, but that under the agreement each would welcome the other’s citizens into its labour market. Canada would have to take steps to ensure that illegal immigrants don’t move into Canadian jobs, but legality is already easy to verify.
But there’s a caveat: If I’m wrong, if the Americans would not agree to any further substantial easing of the border without significant restrictions on Canadian immigration, then Canada should walk away from the discussions. The only thing more important than promoting increased access to American markets is preserving Canada’s robust multicultural identity. That identity is based on the world’s most enlightened immigration policy, which encourages more people to move to our country, per capita, than any other nation, and which ensures that they come from all parts of the world, preventing the emergence of a race-based underclass such as the United States already created through slavery and is recreating through Latino immigration and which Europe is duplicating by allowing the vast majority of its immigrants to come from former colonies, which in many cases means northern Africa and the Middle East. Immigration is who we are. It is our future. It is the one thing we must never bargain away.
For the foreseeable future, any conversations we have with the United States over the border should not include Mexico. In this respect, NAFTA may actually have harmed the Canada-U.S. relationship. Every time Canada brings a border proposal to the United States, the Americans shake their head. “We’d be interested,” they say, “but if we did it for you, we’d have to do it for the Mexicans.” The truth is, Canada and the United States are developed nations, winners in the global lottery of wealth. Mexico, sadly, is not.
As the frightening violence surrounding the drug cartels illustrates, the country is still far distant from becoming a modern, liberal democracy with a developed economy and adherence to the rule of law. Canada and the United States need to talk about the problems at our border.
The Mexicans and the Americans can talk about their border on their own. That’s why our border should be subject to a new treaty, not to NAFTA.
We live in the real world. Politically, a full environmental, security and economic union is a proposal too far. But Stephen Harper should start with this level of proposed integration and then remove each item that is politically impossible until he reaches a package that he believes he can sell to his caucus, Parliament and the Canadian public. And he should invite Michael Ignatieff to 24 Sussex for dinner, to explain that package. After all, the Opposition Leader spent a considerable portion of his adulthood in the United States. If anyone understands the importance of improving the state of Canada-U.S. relations, it’s Ignatieff. Let the opposition to the initiative align behind the Bloc, the NDP and the Greens. Let’s have an open debate on the proposal.
Heck, let’s have an election on it. We’re having them all the time anyway. Why not fight one on something that actually matters?
And let us take this proposal to U.S. President Barack Obama and tell him that in a postglobal world, this is what the relationship between Canada and the United States should be: two sovereign nations trading freely together, their citizens travelling back and forth between each other’s countries, watching each other’s backs, and working together to heal and protect the planet. This is what North America should be. This is what the world should be.
