US Anti-Canadianism Didn’t Start with Trump: John Stewart Guest Blog

John Stewart, director of policy and research at the Canadian Nuclear Association, spent twenty years as an economist and manager inside the US embassy in Ottawa. His latest book, Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad, describes the apogee and decline of Canada’s relationship with the US—along with the apogee and decline of American power. The book combines an insider’s knowledge, a mole’s perspective, and a historian’s consciousness to explain how two countries that spent the twentieth century building a world order together drifted so quickly apart in the early years of the twenty-first – and how that world order began its current shift. In his guest blog below, Stewart demonstrates why no one should be surprised by the current state of Canada-US trade negotiations.

Where have Canadians who are “shocked” at US trade “betrayal” been living for the past twenty years? Certainly the current White House shatters norms with abandon. But on the congressional side of the US government, protectionist impulses that hurt allies have been business as usual for a long time (just ask softwood lumber producers).

Moreover, as my book Strangers with Memories recounts in detail, our relations with the US have been deteriorating since the early 2000s, if not longer, and Canadians have been doing their share to degrade them.

How many Canadians expressed shock (instead of nodding their approval) in 2002, when a senior aide to a prime minister called the US president a “moron” at an international meeting? In 2003, when our government signalled it would join the invasion of Iraq and then didn’t show up? When a cabinet minister said the US president had “let down the world by not being a statesman”?

At least some Canadians were a little disapproving in 2003 when a member of Parliament said to the media, “Damn Americans, I hate those bastards” – enough to draw an apology from the MP.

But how about when Canada wasted years of the Pentagon’s time talking about ballistic missile defence for North America and then didn’t join in? Or how about in 2005, when our prime minister singled out the US delegation for his hypocritical finger-wagging on climate change – as part of his own re-election campaign – in front of a huge multilateral crowd he was hosting in Montreal?

Do Canadians recall with any objectivity how our government responded to US plans to require passports at the border? Not by getting on board with an ally’s perfectly legal and reasonable security requirement. No: rather, with years of outrage, whining, and delay.

Do Canadians express shock when they hear casual expressions of vicious anti-American prejudice? Or crude slurs against Americans, excused as comedy, in Canadian media, including on the government-owned broadcaster?

As US ambassador David Wilkins said in 2005, “What if one of your best friends criticized you directly and indirectly almost relentlessly? What if that friend’s agenda was to highlight your perceived flaws while avoiding mentioning your successes? What if that friend demanded respect but offered little in return? Wouldn’t that begin to sow the seeds of doubt in your mind about the strength of your friendship?”

Wilkins’s frustrated appeal to Canadians to do better in this relationship was expressed eleven years before the US demanded renegotiation of NAFTA. It was even longer before the announcement of the tariffs on steel and aluminum from which Canadians somehow expected to be exempt.

Read more on Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad >