I’ve been reading a fair bit of late about a paradox that’s become increasingly evident over the last couple of years:
 
Canadians are resilient people, but Canada has a serious resilience problem.
 
Consider this recent interview by the CDA Institute with Josh Bowen, a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran who now teaches in the Disaster and Emergency Management program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
 
Bowen is rightly concerned that we have come to rely on our military too often in response to natural disasters.
 
The CAF is supposed to be “a force of last resort for when there is no other asset or capability available to address a problem.”
 
Nonetheless, Canada seems to lack any alternative, “civilian” means of dealing with floods, forest fires, and other crises.
 
Bowen’s frustration is palpable. “People do want to volunteer,” he writes. “People want to help.”
 
Laura Mitchell is one of those people.
 
Writing in The Line last week, the self-described “double-Pfizered stay-at-home mom with a reliable vehicle and time on my hands” recounted her frustration with not being able to do more to support Albertans on the front lines of managing the COVID-19 pandemic:
 
“I’m not suggesting I scrub in for a gallbladder removal or march in the doors and substitute in physics. But I refuse to entertain suggestions there isn’t administrative or organizational busy work that can be accomplished by an army of volunteers willing to take the weight off those on the front lines.”
 
Neither Bowen nor Mitchell are the first to make such arguments, nor will they be the last. But I have yet to see evidence that any government – federal or provincial – is interested in Bowen’s solution:
 
All we need, he says, is “a coordinated, federally supported, federally funded model to encourage people.”
 
Having taught strategic decision-making to both senior military personnel and senior civilian public servants at the Canadian Forces College for the last fifteen years, I’ve come to believe that part of government's aversion to such a solution comes from the difference between the way a good number of Canadians venerate our military but disdain our public service.
 
I certainly understand the former.
 
Members of the Canadian Armed Forces agree “to being lawfully ordered into harm’s way under conditions that could lead to the loss of their lives.”
 
This concept of unlimited liability “underpins the professional precept of mission, own troops and self, in that order... It also modifies the notion of service before self, extending its meaning beyond merely enduring inconvenience or great hardship.”
 
I share the overwhelming respect Canadians have for the burden that our troops accept on our behalf, and I agree that our government should spend what it takes to enable the CAF to succeed.
 
But look at how Mitchell describes the public servants involved in our response to COVID-19:
 
“Something that has bothered me since the beginning of this mess is the utter lack of imagination from the bureaucrats in charge of our major institutions about how to engage the rest of us in getting through this.”
 
Perhaps I'm too sensitive, but I suspect that her use of the term “bureaucrat” – rather than public, or civil, servant – comes with the implication that officials are habitually inclined to obsess over procedure at the expense of people’s genuine needs.
 
Mitchell is hardly alone in such thinking (indeed, I suspect that some readers feel the same way), which makes it easy for me to understand why a government would hesitate to replace military personnel with civilians in any capacity.
 
As Bowen concedes, even if Canada were to create a civilian volunteer capability to support the national response to emergencies, there would be organizational and training costs, not to mention a requirement to support the employers of these volunteers while also protecting their jobs during deployments.
 
That would mean we’d need some sort of bureaucracy.
 
Unfortunately, contempt for the public service – fueled in part by elements of the political class itself – has become so ingrained that it's easier for governments to risk burning out our military than it is to stand up the administrative structure necessary to support a cost-efficient, pride-inducing domestic civilian disaster response capacity.
 
Only in Canada could we be so frugal and yet so inefficient at the same time.
 
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On the implications of the increasing role of the CAF in domestic emergencies, see this helpful note by the Library of Parliament’s Marie Dumont, Ariel Shapiro and Anne-Marie Therrien-Tremblay.
 
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Under Erin O’Toole, the Conservative Party has made a deliberate effort to differentiate itself from the governing Liberals on foreign policy.
 
The Conservatives’ 2021 election platform, Canada’s Recovery Plan, dedicated significantly more space to international relations than the Liberals’ Forward, For Everyone. And while I did not agree with every promise, the package as a whole struck me as thoughtful, and serious.
 
In that context, I am particularly disappointed in Mr. O’Toole’s recent foreign policy musings.
 
According to the CBC, just over a week ago, at a virtual meeting with Nova Scotia chambers of commerce, Mr. O’Toole criticized the current government in a manner that was not only over-the-top, but also suggested a profound ignorance of how Canada-US relations work.
 
“We have never seen, in modern Canadian history, Canada-U.S. relations at such a low point,” he said.
 
“We just lost a recent trade battle with respect to supply management – we’ve been losing on agriculture. We’re losing on forestry products. There’s been steel and aluminum tariffs and Buy America that has us losing on manufacturing.”
 
“It’s easy for the U.S. to dominate, easy for the U.S. to win with the current prime minister,” he added.
 
I see two problems with these comments.
 
First, to suggest that Canada’s relations with the United States are the worst in modern history because of a series of ongoing trade disputes is rather silly.
 
Every recent prime minister has struggled to deal with Washington.
 
Check out the late Jim Prentice’s memoir, Triple Crown: Winning Canada’s Energy Future, for a sense of the disdain with which the Obama administration viewed the Harper government.
 
Or recall that, after the combination of the ballistic missile defence fiasco, and the Martin government’s decision to attack the United States’ (superior) environmental record just before the 2006 election, the Bush administration was all but counting down the days until the Liberals were defeated.
 
Going back a bit further, the Americans were flabbergasted by Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program in 1981, and Ottawa was equally taken aback by the Nixon shock in 1971.
 
I could go on…
 
More important, to suggest that Canada-US relations are about “winning” is unbecoming of a leader who surely must know better.
 
The goal in preserving what the Conservatives themselves called an “indispensable alliance” in their election platform is not to win.
 
Rather, to paraphrase Canada’s Recovery Plan, it is to work with our US partners; to share responsibility for the security of North America; and to benefit jointly from our integrated economies.
 
When it comes to the bilateral relationship, Canada does not win when the Americans lose, and vice-versa. Nor can any Canadian government set the priorities of a US administration, or even just prevent Washington from enacting self-defeating protectionist policies.
 
This is not to say that the Liberals’ foreign policy record has been flawless.
 
For an effective critique, take a look at this recent article by Rita Trichur of the Globe and Mail.
 
Trichur has been tracking Ottawa’s disappointing performance on an issue that, ironically, the Conservatives recognized as important in Canada’s Recovery Plan: money laundering.
 
Apparently, the Trudeau government is backsliding on its commitment to make Canada’s forthcoming beneficial ownership registry publicly accessible.
 
The most recent mandate letters issued by the Prime Minister’s Office reiterated a promise to create the registry, but omitted the original guarantee of public accessibility.
 
As Trichur notes, without a commitment to public accessibility, “Canada’s forthcoming beneficial ownership registry will be a guaranteed flop.”
 
The Globe has been following up with Ottawa to see whether the mandate letters’ omission was deliberate, and has thus far been denied a clear response.
 
Trichur is to be commended for her diligence, but a serious opposition party should be all over this. Instead, Canadians have been treated to hyperbole and oversimplifications.
 
Mr. O’Toole and his party can do better.
 
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Perhaps the leader of the opposition just had a bad week. Others have been equally critical of his recent criticism of the Liberals’ domestic policy. And as for those Liberals, I continue to struggle to understand how a government that has been so good at procuring vaccines for, and distributing them to, Canadians is struggling do the same for countries of lesser means. This pandemic won’t end here until it ends everywhere.
 
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Last week, Edward Keenan, the Toronto Star’s excellent Washington correspondent, wrote an end-of-year piece about the state of Canada-US relations under President Joe Biden.
 
Keenan’s observations reflect a degree of pessimism that seems to pervade contemporary analyses:
 
“Has Biden been friendlier? Sure, in his photo-op platitudes. But has that made anything easier for Canada? It’s hard to see how.”
 
The article highlights a series of White House actions, as well as instances of inaction, that demonstrate President Biden’s apparent lack of concern for Canadian interests: cancelling the Keystone Pipeline; increasing tariffs on softwood lumber; proposing new Buy American provisions for electric car manufacturing; failing to offer support during Ottawa’s dispute with Michigan over the Line 5 Pipeline.
 
Biden gets credit for securing the release of the two Michaels from imprisonment in China, and a series of “productive meetings” have taken place among the leadership of the two countries, but Keenan still concludes that “Even when the faces were friendlier, a lot of 2021’s conversations were still very, very hard.”
 
It seems to me that such an assessment risks mistaking the forest for the trees.
 
My reading of the history of Canada-US relations suggests that the day-to-day bilateral differences Keenan has highlighted are all but inevitable, no matter the president.
 
Consider the mid-late 1980s when, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, relations were said to be at their peak.
 
It’s easy to forget that, during this period of “good will and true partnership,” a lengthy shakes and shingles dispute nearly derailed free trade; Reagan stonewalled Mulroney on efforts to curb acid rain and protest South African apartheid; and Canada refused to join Washington’s ballistic missile defence program.
 
Given the disparity in power between the two countries, not to mention America’s global responsibilities, the White House will never give Canadian issues the degree of attention that Ottawa feels they deserve.
 
It follows that if you want to evaluate state of the Canada-US relationship by the degree or intensity of these bilateral differences, you will always see room for significant improvement.
 
I think there is a bigger picture, though.
 
The United States has been the guarantor of a liberal-democratic world order that has served Canadian interests exceptionally well for close to 80 years.
 
Under President Trump, Washington disavowed such global responsibilities.
 
It withdrew from the Paris Agreement, undermining international momentum for collective action on climate change.
 
It planned to leave the World Health Organization, all but guaranteeing an increase in Beijing’s global influence in the midst of the most destructive pandemic in a century.
 
It allowed the World Trade Organization to wilt, opening the door yet further to an international system dominated by states that reject liberal rules and laws.
 
Perhaps most important, President Trump deliberately sowed division among the American people, leaving the state critically weakened and poorly positioned to play a constructive global role under any successor.
 
President Biden has, at the very least, slowed down the decline in America’s influence. However imperfectly, he has recommitted to NATO, and to pursuing multilateral solutions to international problems. He has also made a genuine effort – thus far unsuccessful – to bring Americans together.
 
If you believe, as I do, that one of the gravest threats to Canadian interests today is the dissolution of a US-led liberal international order, then it is hard to see President Biden’s ascent to power in anything but positive terms.
 
The real question, as we head into 2022, is not whether the lives of Canadian representatives in Washington have gotten easier since Biden took office, it’s whether his efforts to bring calm to America and restore US influence in the world will be sufficient to prevent the collapse of a system that is key to Canada’s long-term security and prosperity.  
 
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On Canada-US relations, see Stephen Azzi’s Reconcilable Differences and Robert Bothwell’s Your Country, My Country. The official Canadian government view can be found here. Canada’s current ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, is outstanding. She recently spoke with Politico about the state of Canada-US relations. You can find the interview here.
 
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