Clean bilateral slate for Canada, U.S.
Now that the Canada-U.S. slate has been wiped clean, what will Justin Trudeau do with it?
U.S. President Barack Obama did the new Canadian prime minister a huge favour late last week by killing the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, removing an elephant in the bilateral room that had sucked most of the oxygen out the cross-border relationship.
In a phone call made shortly after the election, Trudeau told Obama he would be ending the Canadian air combat component to the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition.
Both the Keystone decision and Trudeau’s campaign promise had been telegraphed for ages, so neither side could have possibly been surprised when such decisions were formalized.
In reality, neither the Canadian fighter jet contribution, which will likely continue until a current mandate runs out next March, nor Obama’s meandering path to killing Keystone were anything more than two leaders taking domestic decisions for internal political reasons that only tangentially touched the other capital.
On this side of the border, the life of Keystone meant a parade of Canadian politicians heading to Washington to make a case so loud and persistent that it became an irritant, a prime minister who publicly told Obama he wouldn’t take “No” for an answer, a petty freeze-out of the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa and baseless predictions that a rejection would do major harm to the bilateral relationship. That is now over. The bad news in the Obama-Trudeau relationship is that the U.S. president will soon be deep in his lame-duck phase and he has shown precious little interest in his northern neighbour since taking office.
The good news, however, is that Obama appears intent on using his final days to burnish an environmental legacy and that combined with a new Canadian prime minister vowing to transform our tarnished global image on climate change delivers a perfect opportunity for real continental action.
Both countries, as well, now have foreign ministers, John Kerry and Stéphane Dion, with strong environmental credentials.
Trudeau and Obama can expect to get along better than Stephen Harper and Obama for a simple, and obvious reason: ideology. Over the past half-century or so, it is a rule that Republicans and Conservatives work well together, as do Liberals and Democrats.
The friction usually occurs when political ideologies are crossed, with perhaps the most notable exception being the infamous dressing down Democrat Lyndon Johnson delivered to Liberal Lester Pearson.
Canada had refused to send troops to Vietnam, then Pearson, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, delivered a speech critical of the war at Philadelphia’s Temple University.
“You p----d on my rug,” Johnson is said to have told Pearson at the Camp David presidential retreat, grabbing him by the lapels.
Republican Richard Nixon viewed Liberal Pierre Trudeau with suspicion and called him “an a-----e” in his private tapes. To that, a bemused Trudeau responded, “I’ve been called worse things by better people.”
Conservative Brian Mulroney had no shortage of critics who felt he was too close to Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, at one point singing, “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” with Reagan in Quebec City, but Mulroney used those close personal relationship to get major bilateral action on free trade and acid rain.
Jean Chrétien boasted of his time spent with Democrat Bill Clinton on the golf course, but his relationship with Republican George W. Bush soured badly after Chrétien refused to join the Bush coalition in Iraq and one of his top aides was overheard referring to Bush as “a moron.” Bush cancelled a planned visit to Canada in the aftermath.
Bush was much closer to Harper, at one point referring to him as “Steve,” and there were even rumours of a burgeoning romance between Peter MacKay and Condoleezza Rice, the foreign ministers for their respective countries. But Harper and Obama never warmed to each other, particularly after the Canadian leader called a decision supporting Keystone a “no-brainer.”
It has been seven years since Ottawa and Washington had leaders who could be expected to be on the same ideological page.
Trudeau begins his global travels as prime minister this week with the G-20 meeting in Turkey. He will get noticed and he will get face time with other leaders, but it is his appearance at the Paris climate change summit, accompanied by provincial premiers, where he can make an early mark.
Expectations will be high, but they should be. From the ashes of a dead pipeline project rise hopes that a new chapter in energy and environment will, for once, transcend words. Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1