A North American Union

Every so often you come across an article like this in the Globe and Mail:

The Harper government is bracing for a backlash over a border security agreement it is negotiating with the United States, anticipating it will spark worries about eroding sovereignty and privacy rights, a document obtained by The Globe and Mail shows.

Conspiracy theorists in both the U.S. and Canada have long fretted about their leaders' participation in back room dealings to form a North American Union. Interestingly, the idea ruffles the feathers of people all over the political map. American conservatives think there are too many Mexicans in the U.S. already, Canadian liberals oppose the rightward shift in immigration and social policy needed to harmonize Canada with its more dominant neighbor, and conservatives of all countries have nationalistic alarm bells that go off at the thought of any sacrifice of sovereignty to such a union.

And yet, I do think it is inevitable. Events always seem to make more integration, not less, the obvious policy. In this case, hold-ups at the border since 9/11 are seriously affecting cross border trade. Canada and the U.S. have the biggest trade relationship in the world and it's in no one's interest to have it slow down. The only real solution is to harmonize border security. This is, conspiracy theorists will point out, if not part of a master plan, at the very least a step onto a slippery slope. I think they would be absolutely right.

But would that really be such a bad thing? A North American Union, at least in the case of Canada and the U.S, makes a lot more sense than a European Union. For one thing, most people speak the same language and share a common culture. While there might be linguistic and cultural barriers to a worker in Athens relocating to Berlin, the same can't be said about Buffalo and Calgary. For most people, the only real tangible effect of a NAU would be to suddenly find their freedom of movement greatly expanded.

I'm not saying a North American Union is a cause people should go out and fight for, but I do think it's time to start questioning the nationalistic orthodoxy that requires our leaders to sneak around in order make perfectly sensible policy.

Robin and Batman

An interesting part of the fallout from the Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables is the degree to which diplomats are concerned with the petty insecurities of nations. Canadians, for example, “'always carry a chip on their shoulder' in part because of a feeling that their country 'is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’" This strikes me as true enough, though Tony Blair might have disputed who the real Robin is.

Deriving a sense of personal prestige from a sense of national prestige, though irrational, is real and not unique to any nation. People outside of the U.S. think 'American exceptionalism' is ludicrous: We would never fall for such a stupid idea here...we're just exceptional like that.

The fact is that a country as underpopulated as Canada will always have a hard time playing Batman. It reminds me of how rural Canadians resent Toronto for being so dominant. Toronto is dominant because it's where all the people live. Don't live where bears outnumber people if you want to feel a part of a powerful society.

Luckily there is a policy that will solve Canada's national inferiority complex once and for all: open the borders. Canada is vastly underpopulated. There are a lot of people in the world that would jump at the opportunity to move here. Double the population, triple it, quadruple, and suddenly the importance of the country on the international stage will zoom to supersize. Batman? I'm talking the Silver Surfer.

perogies not proroguing

It's old news but I didn't have a blog when it happened, so I'll mention this pic now:



That's April and me on Parliament Hill after the prorogation of parliament, holding our signs in the bitter Ottawa cold. We were unaware of whoever took and posted the photo and we only discovered it after April's sister googled "prorogation" with "perogies."

I got pretty worked up after the governor general made the decision to grant Harper's request to suspend parliament. (My passions have since cooled, which I suppose was Harper's point in doing what he did). We jumped on a bus for Ottawa with the intention of joining whatever protest we could find.

After getting some cardboard from a grocery store and making our anti-Harper signs, we walked to the hill where we found a thousand or so excited protesters. It turned out to be a pro-conservative rally. We spent most of the day in heated debate with a gaggle of conservatives angered by our party-crashing ways (they thought we were audacious when we were really just hapless). At one point a CTV camera crew, who was approaching us for an interview, was trailed by some conservative who was shouting "biased media" and "what are you talking to those lefties for!" But mostly we just argued with the conservatives, which was kind of what I wanted to be doing at the time. There wern't any hard feelings when we all walked away.

I'm still angered by the rhetoric that came from the Conservatives at the time. Phrases that were being thrown around included "coup d'etat" and "undemocratic." The Conservatives were taking advantage of widespread ignorance in how the Canadian system works: a poll showed that a majority of Canadians can't even name the head of state. I imagine most people have a vague feeling that the Canadian political system works like the American. It doesn't. If it did, the actions of the coalition truly would have been "undemocratic," but exploiting that ignorance to accuse the opposition of insurrection, was despicable. With that and with the lashing out at Quebec, as if Harper was a mad dog backed into a corner, I feel like the mask was taken off and we all saw the real Harper.

On the other hand, I've since come to believe a coalition wouldn't have been in the best interest of Canada. While the idea of a coalition is perfectly in keeping with Canadian democracy, conservative voters, especially those in the west, would have been so enraged by a change of government that the country would have polarized in an extreme way. My argument at the time was: "the only issue that matters is that Harper lost the confidence of parliament." That's still true, but polls have been showing majorities against a Liberal/NDP coalition, hinting that if the coalition was offered during the election, the conservatives would have won a majority. In any case, Ignatieff isn't too enthusiastic about the idea so it seems less likely to happen now.