Reinforcing U.S.-Canada relations is crucial

Reinforcing Canada-U.S. relations is essential, says

After a year of COVID-19, vaccine delays and Donald Trump, today will be a very good day for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

And the good feelings that will be felt around official Ottawa arrive courtesy of the new U.S. president.

Joe Biden's gesture in making Trudeau the first foreign leader he sees privately sends an important message that will be noticed in many capitals around the globe.

No less an authority than former prime minister Brian Mulroney, viewed by most experts as the most successful prime minister in managing Canada-U.S. relations in decades, would agree. (Full disclosure: I served as his memoirs' assistant).

“It wasn't lost on observers that the first foreign visit that the new president made was for talks with Canada,” Mulroney recalled in his memoirs, describing the positive impact for Canada's reputation worldwide when president George H.W. Bush chose him as the first leader he met in 1989. “There's nothing more closely followed in foreign capitals — then and today — than the movements and statements of the president of the United States.”

Mulroney scored another major coup for Canada when a different rookie American president, Bill Clinton, chose Canada, with our prime minister as host, as the site of his first summit meeting with then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1993.

“If in the business world today cash is king,” the 18th prime minister concluded, “in the world of the Canada-U.S. relationship, access is worth its weight in gold. It is a privilege that Canada should never squander or surrender.”

Another prime minister who maximized Canada's clout effectively, bilaterally and internationally, due to his close relationship with an American president was Mackenzie King. King, who arguably knew America best — having lived in Chicago and Boston and earned a Harvard degree — formed an exceptionally close friendship with president Franklin Roosevelt.

“Shattering the traditions of (U.S.) detachment he saw King nineteen separate times,” wrote Canadian journalist Lawrence Martin in his seminal 1982 volume, The Presidents and the Prime Ministers. “Roosevelt ushered in the good-neighbour era of Canada-U.S. relations, a period which … lasted roughly from 1933 to 1959.”

As the dark clouds of an impending war gathered over Europe in 1938, Roosevelt even defied a large portion of U.S. public opinion and pledged to defend Canada should a foreign power ever attack our nation.

“The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire,” FDR told thousands of cheering Canadians gathered at Kingston's Queen's University on Aug. 18, 1938. “I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if the domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.”

That pledge by Roosevelt remains a pillar of Canadian-American security policy to this day.

Of course, today's meeting with Biden doesn't mean that Trudeau won't have more work to do. Far from it. In this regard, another figure from our history, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States, also has some advice for Trudeau and his government as the Biden era plays out.

“We should exhibit a sympathetic understanding of the heavy burden of international responsibility borne by the United States, not of her own imperial choosing but caused in part by the withdrawal of other states from certain of these responsibilities, or, if you prefer, from imperial power and privilege,” Lester B. Pearson once wrote. “Above all, as American difficulties increase, we should resist any temptation to become smug and superior, `You are bigger but we are better.'”

Wise words. And understanding them is another key to success for a prime minister in navigating Canada-U.S. relations.

Over to you, Prime Minister Trudeau.

Arthur Milnes is the in-house historian at the 175-year-old Frontenac Club Hotel in Kingston, Ont. One of his most recent books is the Canadian-American Business Council's With Faith and Goodwill: 150 Years of Canada-U.S. Friendship, published by Dundurn. He is also editor of In Roosevelt's Bright Shadow: Presidential Addresses About Canada From Taft to Obama.