Last week’s North American Leaders’ Summit, which was framed in the Canadian press as key to Ottawa’s ongoing effort to prevent the passage of a buy American incentive for the purchase of electric vehicles in the United States – a provision that could, by all accounts, destroy the Canadian auto industry – has been portrayed in near fatal terms by much of our national media.
 
Brian Lilley of the Toronto Sun was the bluntest: “Trudeau failed in Washington; he waited too long to make a push to support one of Canada’s biggest and most valuable industries and then couldn’t use his supposed connections to get a deal.”
 
John Ivison of the National Post concluded that the American non-response to Canadian pleas to revise or eliminate the provision demonstrated that, rather than taking Canada seriously, President Biden thinks of our country as “an immature, undependable younger sibling.”
 
The CBC's Alexander Panetta suggested that Prime Minister Trudeau’s “failure to persuade Americans to ease up on Canada in a landmark electric-vehicle plan capped a visit that served as a long, loud wake-up call” to “a tough new reality Canadians face.”
 
“Our challenge now,” he continued, “involves living beside a worried superpower that’s distracted by generational challenges in which Canada is at best a bit player.”
 
Campbell Clark of the Globe and Mail was more measured, noting that, as was the case during the NAFTA negotiations, the prime minister was playing the long game by reminding the White House that good relations with Canada were in America’s best interest, and there was never any chance of the president moving on the vehicle subsidy during the summit.
 
Still, he added: “The risk is that the helpful Canadian approach won’t have an impact on a Biden administration fixated on a struggle to get through its domestic agenda.”
 
The Toronto Star’s Edward Keenan was the most optimistic, but even he expressed concern: “the fellow feeling for Canadians is strong in the U.S., but … Canada’s issues barely rate a footnote on the American agenda.”
 
Here’s my take:
 
First, Clark is right. There was never any chance of reaching an agreement last week. For all intents and purposes, the bill is out of President Biden’s hands until the Senate is finished with it.
 
When the president said, “I don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with, quite frankly, when it comes out of legislation. So, we’ll talk about it then,” he was speaking truthfully.
 
The job of the prime minister last week was to keep the issue alive while Canadian negotiators – official and otherwise – furiously lobbied their contacts in Congress.
 
If the provision is not dropped, Ottawa will have laid the groundwork for a Canadian exemption that can be negotiated after-the-fact.
 
There is precedent for such measures and, this time, Canada has leverage. Those American-made electric vehicles are useless without batteries that rely on Canadian critical minerals.
 
According to Ivison, “nobody believes that Trudeau would dare to withhold Canada’s mineral wealth.”
 
I disagree.
 
Recall that when the Trump administration threatened to prevent the delivery of N95 masks to Canada last year, our “ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman, drew up a long list of levers Canada could pull, including Canadians who work in hospitals in Detroit, medical equipment suppliers in Canada, and even the electrical supply for northern Maine, which is dependent on electricity from New Brunswick.”
 
Indeed, what the former defence minister and now president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Perrin Beatty describes as a relationship that has devolved from “special” to “transactional” makes Ottawa’s trade negotiating prowess a benefit, and America’s failure to take it seriously a significant advantage.
 
Moreover, it is far better to be ignored by the United States than to be noticed for consistently shirking on our defence obligations within North America.
 
This is not to say that all is well. Negotiating an exemption will not be easy, and one can only play hardball with the White House so many times, but there are worse things for Canadian national interests than a lack of attention from Washington.
 
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Whenever Canada-US relations get tricky, it is worth going back to a brilliant book by Dalhousie’s Brian Bow, The Politics of Linkage. For a broader historical overview, try Robert Bothwell’s Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada or Stephen Azzi’s Reconcilable Differences: A History of Canada-US Relations. On energy, I continue to follow the work of Monica Gattinger.
 
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​Konrad Yakabuski wrote an article for the Globe and Mail last week that accused the 40,000 participants at the UN’s COP26 climate conference of “playing a game of virtual reality.”
 
The bold declarations on ending deforestation and transitioning to zero emissions vehicles that emerged from the negotiations were replete with caveats and were not endorsed by the states and private sector firms that had the power to make them meaningful.
 
As for the US-China commitment to cooperate “to tackle the climate crisis,” it was “thin gruel, even by UN standards.”
 
“The whole event had a prepackaged feel to it,” Yakabuski concludes, “and more than a whiff of self-indulgence among the participants who live for such gatherings and the networking opportunity they represent.”
 
There was a time when I would have agreed with him, but I have come to believe that to recognize the value of international conferences, you can’t take them literally.
 
The way I see it, international gatherings like COP26 make four significant contributions to efforts to effect global environment reform.
 
First, the institutionalization of an annual meeting all but forces participating member-states to review their environmental positions on a regular basis.
 
In liberal democracies like Canada, this means that environmental policy receives serious attention from Cabinet every year.
 
It is that attention, rather than the details of the policy, that can often make the difference between progress and stagnation.
 
Second, the networking opportunities decried by Yakabuski are in fact terribly important geopolitically, even if their significance cannot be measured in traditional terms.
 
International conferences enable states with shared interests to establish new partnerships, to gather new intelligence, and even to deal with issues that have little to do with the meeting itself.
 
It would be foolish to assume, for example, that Prime Minister Trudeau limited his conversations in Scotland with his fellow heads of state and government to the environment.
 
Third, the outcomes of these conferences serve as signals to the private sector. In doing so, they affect decision-making on the investments in new technologies that will be so critical to reform in the future.
 
I find it hard to believe that India’s adamant refusal to support the phase out of coal as a source of energy will deter speculators from acknowledging that the end of coal as a viable investment is near.
 
Finally, end-of-conference declarations shape international norms.
 
Over time, the global default position on the need for environmental reform has shifted.
 
Whereas delegates used to debate whether the science of climate change was real, now they argue over how urgently they need to respond.
 
National publics that pay little attention to world affairs internalize these shifts, often without even knowing that they have.
 
In this case, the acknowledgement (or validation) of the reality of climate change has led them to demand more of their governments.
 
So, sure, the COP26 conference delegates spent hours debating – perhaps sanctimoniously at times – the inclusion or removal of commas, semicolons, adverbs, and adjectives in statements that the overwhelming majority of us will never notice.
 
And, sure, the resultant conference declaration was aspirational, unenforceable, and is unlikely to be fulfilled.
 
But process matters in diplomacy. It draws attention, strengthens relationships, sends signals to the public and to the private sector, and moves international goalposts.
 
The problem is not events like COP26, it’s our expectations of them.
 
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The best summary I've seen of COP26 thus far is this one by the always thoughtful Adam Radwanski. On the broader subject of environmental politics, look out for Michael Manulak’s forthcoming book, Change in Global Environmental Politics: Temporal Focal Points and the Reform of International Institutions.
 
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Stephanie Carvin, a prolific and thoughtful scholar at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, published a very good essay a couple of weeks ago on the website of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
 
It’s called “Beyond AUKUS: Canada May Not Need Nuclear Subs — but It Is in Dire Need of a Strategy,” and it suggests that while the hype over Canada’s alleged exclusion from the recent Australia-UK-US security pact has been significantly overblown, Ottawa has a lot of work to do on the foreign and security policy front.
 
Most important to Carvin – and what makes the essay original in the context of an analysis of AUKUS – is a significant investment in the modernization of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).
 
Carvin interprets AUKUS as part of a broader American response to the rise of China that calls on US allies to take greater responsibility for their own defence.
 
I don’t disagree with her analysis of American thinking, nor with her policy recommendation per se, but I see the value of NORAD modernization through a different lens.
 
Whereas Carvin, among many others, emphasizes the centrality of the very real Chinese threat to global security, I’m less convinced that the impact of Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posture fundamentally alters Canadian geopolitics.
 
Consider the following statement:
 
“We, too, have our obligations as a good friendly neighbour, and one of them is to see that, at our own insistence, our country is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as we can reasonably be expected to make it, and that, should the occasion ever arise, enemy forces should not be able to pursue their way, either by land, sea or air, to the United States, across Canadian territory.”
 
The comments were first made in 1938, and then reiterated in the House Commons in 1939, by Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
 
King was famous for his aversion to concrete commitments of any sort, but even he recognized that the greatest threat to Canadian interests was a successful attack on the United States that had been planned in, and/or launched from Canada.
 
As much as the global dynamic is changing, it seems to me that King’s words are equally true today: the greatest threat to Canadian national security, political autonomy, and economic prosperity remains the collapse of the Canada-US geopolitical partnership.
 
Canada doesn’t need to commit to NORAD modernization because of increasing threats from China or Russia; it must do so to reassure Washington of its reliability as a responsible defender of North America and, by extension, the US-inspired liberal world order.
 
In that context, I take issue with Carvin’s operational policy prescription.
 
She wants Ottawa to lean forward and articulate an explicit strategy to “signal to our allies what Canada’s priorities are. This would help them identify issues of mutual interest and opportunities for collaboration.”
 
To her, “Ad hoc foreign policy is rarely good foreign policy.”
 
I am inclined to disagree. If, as I see it, the greatest threat to Canadian interests comes from our American ally losing faith in our reliability, then it’s critical that Ottawa understands exactly what Washington wants from it.
 
(For example, it is enough that Huawei technology is never used in Canada’s 5G network – a security issue – or must the company’s involvement be explicitly banned – a diplomatic one.)
 
Leaning too far forward requires the Canadian government to make assumptions about those wants. Inevitably, some of those assumptions will be wrong, and will limit Ottawa’s political flexibility.
 
Better, I think, to build a nimble foreign and defence policy establishment that can to respond to our allies’ shifting security priorities as they are made clear.
 
Doing so forgoes any possibility of national leadership on this particular part of world stage, but that shouldn’t matter.
 
Canada has no business leading the Western response to China. We are too vulnerable, and insufficiently powerful.
 
A genuine “we’re ready to contribute when asked” posture (here Carvin is absolutely right: we aren’t close to there yet) is more realistic, and more responsible.
 
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On NORAD modernization, it’s always worth paying attention to what the University of Manitoba’s Andrea Charron has to say.
 
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