The Changing of the Guard

Abstract

When President George W. Bush visited Canada in late 2004, he declined an invitation to address parliament and chose instead to give the major speech of his trip in Halifax before an audience of Atlantic Canadians, including provincial premiers, several mayors, and local officials. Two weeks later, outgoing secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge met with his counterpart, deputy prime minister and minister of public safety and emergency preparedness Anne McLellan in Detroit, where the two met with local stakeholders to discuss border management issues.At roughly the same time, the province of Alberta sent an official representative to Washington, joining Quebec as the second province with its own representation there. In the fall of 2004, Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs expanded its representation in the United States with seven new consulates and offices, raising Ottawa's profile in the southeastern and southwestern United States, in particular.These new initiatives and departures from past practice in the management of the US-Canada relationship reflect a larger transformation underway. The traditional pattern of Canadian relations with the United States is being altered by three powerful dynamics. First, a generational shift has replaced US public officials with memories of the formative period of Canada-US relations after the second World War with a new cohort of younger officials. second, there has been a decentralization of the US management of the relationship, now extended to include state and local governments and being echoed in Canada. Third, these two changes are introducing US-style elite competition into the Canadian political culture. This competition has significant implications for Canadian domestic politics as well as for North American diplomacy.The general tendency in recent years has been to attribute the noticeable changes in US-Canada relations to the after-effects of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on n September 2001. While these events have had an important influence on policymakers in the United States in particular, they have only served to transfigure, rather than trigger, the rise of new actors in bilateral relations whose emergence was the inevitable result of deepening North American integration and the passage of time.GENERATIONAL CHANGEThe current US diplomatic relationship with Canada has relatively recent origins. The two governments exchanged diplomatic representatives for the first time in 1926, and Great Britain granted Canada the right to have an independent foreign policy with the statute of Westminster in 1931. Previously, the United States considered Canadian issues in the context of Anglo-American relations. Early Canadian diplomacy toward the United States was cautious, bearing the hallmarks of Ottawa's relationship with London during the colonial period, a heavy emphasis on cultural kinship and goodwill, and an earnest desire to institutionalize a Canadian voice or role in key policy decisions taken by the larger power.The Great Depression and the Second World War fostered a close collaboration between the governments in Ottawa and Washington as each attempted to cope with the effects of these large, transnational challenges. The New Deal in the United States was echoed years later in a set of social benefit programs instituted in Canada, ushering in an era of large public interventions in the economy in both countries. Canada's entry into the second World War led to close contacts with Washington regarding continental defence and military production even before US entry into the conflict in 1941.In the postwar period, both the US and the Canadian governments expanded in size and scope. The ranks of each country's respective civil services swelled with returning veterans who had traveled abroad for the first time in military service, and among all the foreigners they encountered, they had often found the Canadians to be the most similar to themselves. …