Was Canada Really Expecting a Scolding from Biden?
Canada’s problem is not any ignorance or hostility on the part of the Biden administration, but its own reluctance to put more effort into its end of the bilateral relationship
Prime Minister Trudeau, you were my first meeting with a foreign leader, just one month after my presidency during the hardest days of COVID-19. We had to make the visit virtual, but since then, we’ve been all over the world, talking to some — taking on some of the toughest issues our nations have faced in a very long time. I want to thank you for your partnership and for your personal friendship. – President Biden
Canada doesn’t deserve our attention. As long as Canada isn’t slipping toward tyranny, disaster, or war, there’s no particularly good reason to turn our attention to our neighbor to the north. But that doesn’t mean Canada couldn’t create both a more positive reason to pay attention to it by helping solve some of the “world policeman” conundrum. – Virginia Phillips (2016)
Joe Biden will make his first trip to Ottawa as U.S. President on Thursday, and the Prime Minister’s Office is reportedly putting the economy, migration, climate change and other bilateral issues at the top of the agenda. But Mr. Biden is certain to have his eyes elsewhere: on the security file. – Vincent Rigby
When American presidents visit Canada, there's a recurring pattern to their oratory. They deliver spoonfuls of sugar — sweet, syrupy odes to one of the happier nation-to-nation relationships in a troubled world. Then comes the dose of medicine — a shot of tough love along with the sucrose in the form of a request for Canada to do more in the world. – Alexander Panetta
It took slightly more than two years for U.S. President Joseph Biden to make an official visit to Canada. The delay was not consequential. – Christopher Sands
Many Canadian commentators seemed to be dreading President Biden’s recent visit to Ottawa, assuming that tensions that had been growing over the last several years were about to culminate in a major dust-up between Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau.. On what was this fear based? It seemed to be two broad things. First, relations were rather sour between Ottawa and Washington during the four years of the Trump administration, but this was the case between the United States and multiple NATO allies. Trump never visited Ottawa while president, but Canada was able to tend to major interests with the United States, including the successful neglation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement. Second, President Biden only visited Ottawa for the first time during his third year in office. Canadians assumed that Biden was sending a specific message by waiting that long, since American presidents traditionally visited Ottawa for a day during their first month in office. The SARS-CoV2 pandemic still raged in January 2021, and the vaccine was only starting to be distributed. Trudeau and Biden held a lengthy virtual summit in late February 2021, and the joint statement explicitly cited the pandemic as the only reason they did not meet in person. Biden reiterated this point in public remarks while in Ottawa.
Joe Biden has been on the American political scene for a long time, for the most part as a senator from Delaware. His formative political years were during the Cold War, and his conception of Canada is as a NATO and NORAD partner and ally. He was an important foreign policy expert in the Senate at the peak of the special relationship. There are few Washington politicians who have developed such warm feelings for Canada over such a length of time. Biden’s appearances set out to make an effusive display of affection for Canada, and he was obviously enjoying himself on a personal level during the visit. Any “shot of tough love” was delivered in private, to the extent that one could wonder if Biden was ensuring he did nothing to damage Trudeau’s political prospects. On a policy level, Canada seemed to achieve its major objectives. It secured changes to the Safe Third Country Agreement that would close the unofficial Roxham Road border crossing (the United States decided long ago, it seems, to agree to Canada’s requests on this), and Biden made no public fuss over Canadian reluctance to send forces to Haiti.
So why are Canadians bothered over the state of the bilateral relationship? As we noted above, there is a “Trump hangover” that will not go away as long as Trump is a competitive candidate in the 2024 American presidential election. There is also a perception that the Republican Party as a whole is hostile to Canada, evidenced by support for the 2021 Ottawa convoy protests by U.S. conservatives, as well as bellicose rhetoric about irregular crossings from Canada into the United States by legislators such as Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In reality, the train of thought begins this alleged hostility can be found in the tension between the Jacksonian tradition in American political thought and the Laurentian Consensus in Canada, which will be the subject of our next newsletter.
Another issue that troubles many Canadians is that Canada is disproportionately affected by domestic political decisions that it struggles to influence. This is a long-standing concern, reflected in the adage from the twentieth century that when the United States sneezes, Canada catches a cold. It was a feeling of vulnerability to the vagaries of American domestic politics (specifically the proclivity of the United States to levy countervailing duties on imports from Canada) that led the Mulroney government to negotiate the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement during the late 1980s. Canada exports around a third of its GDP, and the United States is the chief market. Maintaining access to that market is vital, but it is threatened by protectionist measures in the United States, measures that respond to domestic political imperatives, many of which are local and not driven by presidential electoral politics. In other words, Canada needs to exert influence with the bureaucracy and with Congress (something that goes beyond traditional diplomacy), but unlike domestic political constituencies, Canadian interests cannot vote, nor can they legally donate to American political candidates. The need to negotiate carve-outs for Canada under “Buy American” measures, for example on tax credits for electric vehicles or on conditions imposed under the Inflation Reduction Act, grow tiring. The only true solution would be an economic union as extensive as the European Union, under which the United States would only be able to impose “Buy North American Community” restrictions. Such an arrangement would raise intolerable questions about sovereignty for both Canada and the United States. Europeans chafe at the European Union rules that would inspire such a model.
The other Canadian fear is that Canada’s lack of presence in international affairs irritates the United States. Washington would surely welcome a greater Canadian global presence, but it is not clear that Washington, Trumpist rhetoric aside, feels any imperative to punish Canada economically for not spending enough on defense (this is not a Richard Rohmer novel). Canada has interests of its own that ae advanced by a greater international presence, and Canada should not think of expanding this presence as something it would only do to placate Washington Canada’s concern here would be to avoid exclusion from military initiatives such as the cooperation on submarines with Britain and Australia, or exclusion from international agencies like the United National Security Council. Expensing defense and foreign affairs budgets would advance Canada’s own interests, and a positive American reaction would be a pleasant secondary effect. Canada has persistently underfunded its diplomacy and military for decades, and a concrete result is the embarrassment Canada felt when American jets from Elmendorf AFB in Alaska responded to the spy/weather balloon over Yukon because the nearest Canadian aircraft were at CFB Cold Lake in Alberta. NORAD ensured that the object was dealt with–having a greater Canadian military presence in the North is a Canadian issue.
In early 2021, there was real fear in Ottawa that Canada and the United States were growing apart, but those fears, in retrospect, had their roots in ephemeral issues like the uneven way that the border reopened after its coronavirus closure. In this respect, there has been some normalization of the relationship that the presidential visit to Ottawa made clear. It is also clear that Canada’s problem is not any ignorance or hostility on the part of the Biden administration, but Canada’s own reluctance to put more effort into its end of the bilateral relationship even if there is not a short term electoral payoff for the Trudeau government.
References:
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trudeau-canada-us-china-russia-76217975054043bd84f0b0302b11b90c
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canada-border-hearing-congress-1.6793361
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/biden-trudeau-haiti-military-critical-minerals-1.6786290
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-23/coronavirus-nixes-pomp-biden-trudeau-meeting
https://mynbc15.com/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-forces-biden-to-forgo-pomp-for-us-canada-meeting
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/us/politics/biden-trudeau-meeting.html
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2023/biden-visit-us-canada-relations/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/23/biden-trudeau-thorny-issues-niceties-00088448
https://seasonedwriting.com/canada-doesnt-deserve-attention/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-what-justin-trudeau-needs-to-tell-joe-biden/