The Relationship

Abstract

I want to talk about shared values, and shared goals, and I also want to talk about the global context of much of what Canada and the United States do together. I am not one of those people who believe these two countries are diverging.The fact of the matter is that there are more differences within each country than there are between our two countries, and we do have fundamental goals that we share in this hemisphere and around the globe and we do share fundamental values. Energy is one thing that we're working closely on. We get more oil from Canada than we get from Saudi Arabia, and we know that the potential in the oil sands is quite vast. Gas is another big export from Canada to the United States, natural gas. And even as we work to get the Alaska Slope gas and the Mackenzie Valley gas, I think we all realize that the demand for gas in North America will probably even outstrip those supplies. What has been a continental market and a continental price will soon become a global price, so what happens in the fields of Nigeria will have an impact on the price of natural gas in North America. We know that from oil: even though Canada is an oil-producing country, the price of that oil is determined by the world market. So we will continue to work together to make sure we have the energy to keep the economies of Canada, the United States, and Mexico growing. We will continue to integrate this North American energy market. We are already integrated quite a bit on the grid. When the lights went out in New York a couple of summers ago, they also went out in Toronto and Ottawa, and many other parts of Ontario. We need to improve and modernize that grid; we need to have mandatory reliability standards and these things our two countries are working on together.Environmental protection is another goal that we share. We have beautiful natural resources in Canada and in the United States. And we are working on a whole number of initiatives to make sure that we can protect the air and the water and the beautiful lands for future generations. We are working together on climate change. I know we have taken different approaches to Kyoto, but despite that fact, we are working together on the international partnership for the hydrogen economy; we are working on the carbon sequestration leadership forum; we are working together on the global earth observation system.The United States is committed to stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. President Bush has indicated that we want to address this problem with sound science and we want to be able to maintain our standard of living at the same time. We have a plan to slow, stop, and ultimately reverse these emissions based on sound science. We believe that this makes sense because economic growth provides the resources for new environmental investment. Just to make the point, because I know this is misunderstood both in the press in Canada and in the United States, we are spending US$5.8 billion per year on this in the United States. That is more money than all of Europe, Japan, and Canada combined, because we are determined to get the science right, so that we can address the problem of global warming and global climate change while maintaining our standard of living and our way of life at the same time. So we will continue to work with Canada as well as other countries because this is another issue that has a global impact. I've been to Paddockwood and to Churchill and I know the impact this warming has already had in London. It affects wildlife activity: the ice freezes later, and that's not good news for the polar bears. They've got to get out on the ice to get the seals. It is affecting the north and the Arctic but there's no question that this will affect the entire globe and we have to work together to get the science right to address it.Another goal that Canada and the United States share is to defeat the terrorist threat, and I can tell you that I often say that in the United States we cannot defend our homeland without the help of Canada. …