Doing the Continental. David Dyment
of the plane clearly without the distorting effects of national pride and issues of sovereignty. Instead, we allowed internal partisan struggles to contribute to fuzzy decision making. In the process, we have created a potent and powerful myth that tells us more about ourselves than it does about the airplane.
The fact that Canadians have this strong response to the Arrow tells us we want to be an independent force in the world. We want to develop the infrastructure and technologies to support leading industries. We want to be able to say to ourselves, “We can do it.” And we can, but we have to be smart about it. We have to recognize that our tight collaboration with the Americans is an association we can use to advance ourselves, although it also threatens to smoother us. We must always find the path that allows us to do the former without succumbing to the latter. To travel this critical route, we must not fall victim to the dangers of a false debate between rejecting and embracing the United States.
We turned down American assistance for the Arrow as unwanted charity. Yet, we had got ourselves into a project that was beyond our national means. We made a choice that lost us tens of thousands of jobs, cutting-edge technology, and an immense pool of talent that other countries — mostly the U.S. — put to use.
We must learn to work with America, understand the reality of our situation, and recognize that its pull — continentalism — is a force of nature. To survive, Canada must harness, temper, control, discipline, and manage this relationship in our interest — not fecklessly succumb to it.
It’s not a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” That’s a cliché that contributes to foolish, unhelpful, polarized debate. We neither should want to beat them nor join them, but rather work with them to advance what we define as our interests.
We’ve got to stop characterizing the U.S., a huge and powerful country, as a villain. Such a conceptualization confounds our ability to figure out who we are and how we sensibly fit into North America and the world. It also confuses our thinking both about what makes sense for us and about what we want.
The Arrow points out a tension between our pride and our capacity. Let’s get it right from now on. The Arrow shows how we got it dramatically wrong.
Part of why the Arrow sticks in our craw is that for one poignant moment we had the ability to be top gun, to be better than our omnipresent and dominant neighbours.
One of the most memorable moments in the made-for-TV CBC movie, The Arrow, comes when the test pilot says to his passenger: “Let’s go and wake up the Yanks over at Niagara Air Force base.” As they shoot past the base, an American in the control tower says: “What the hell was that?” Well “that” for us was the fleeting pleasure of doing something better than the Americans, and doing it first. And “that” has nothing to do with being anti-American. It’s simply about being Canadian and being proud of it. A pro-Canadian moment does not have to be an anti-American one.
Notes
1. The documentary The Plain Truth is described as “an investigation of the real story behind Canada’s most famous aircraft that also explores the debate over its demise.” In the documentary, one of Canada’s leading and most celebrated historians, Professor Jack Granatstein, is interviewed at length. He is asked “Were the Americans the villains?” This is his answer: “To say the Americans killed it is, I think, simply not true. In fact, the Secretary of the Air Force in 1958 told the Canadian ambassador that if Canada wanted the Americans would buy the Arrows and give them to the RCAF. In other words: to try to keep production going the Americans would actually give us some of our own aircraft. The Canadian ambassador, however, thought this was charity and said Canada had never accepted aid and this wouldn’t fly.”
The documentary can be found most readily as a special feature on the DVD of the 1997 made for TV CBC movie The Arrow.
PART II
Continental Dance: Managing the Relationship
3
Basic Steps
There is no big solution in our dealings with the United States. Rather, we need to take basic steps and adopt fundamental principles to guide and manage the relationship. To do this we must appreciate how the U.S. system of government works, and how the relationship with our neighbour functions so that we make decisions based on our interests and not our fears, emotions, feelings, ideologies, and old habits of thinking.
Our discussion about the U.S. relationship is senselessly polarized. Our debate amounts to left-nationalists saying integration is bad, stop it, and right-continentalists saying it’s good, bring it on. It is time for a change, an opportunity for a more constructive debate.
The U.S. is our best friend, whether we like it or not. It cannot be avoided or dispensed with and it’s not a kind of enemy. The real issue is what our interests are. We can’t avoid the U.S., yet we have to be mindful that one does not integrate with the U.S. but into the U.S. Ours is a relationship of two nations, and of the interdependence of two economies. By necessity our friendship with the U.S. needs to be a wary one, as we are a separate country benignly under siege. As a culture, English Canada is somewhat fragile — it’s the only OECD country that doesn’t have a home-grown drama among its ten most popular TV programs.[1]
We must not be shy about giving our government a mandate to advance our interests. We are a medium-sized country bordering the world’s hegemonic power. Our leading industries have been dropping like flies to American and other companies. It makes sense to give our foreign investment review authorities a mandate to consider whether some of these sales are perhaps not in our interest. The Americans, despite their very public adherence to the free market, do not hesitate to disallow and otherwise discourage the sale of American companies when they feel it is not in their national interest.
The credo upon the launching of the CBC is one for Canadians to remember: “The State or the United States.” I’m not arguing for or against left or right ideology, I’m simply saying we have a government and in our situation with the U.S. we need to use it.
When we mindlessly reject things as American, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We can’t have a rational debate about health care because it is shut down by the phrase “American-style health care.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a system of health care that wastes billions of dollars on unnecessary administration and leaves millions uninsured. But I do think we would be well served by a reasonable debate. Right now we can’t benchmark our health care system against ones in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the U.K. because some elements of these are described as “American-style.” It is a weakness for Canada to be caught in this polarized anti-America–pro-America dichotomy. It’s hard for Canada to win when our debate is ill-framed.
We need to outgrow our habit of fighting for or against an imperial connection, first with the British and now the Americans. It is an old way of thinking, and a paradigm that allows us to miss what makes sense for Canada. The question that needs to be foremost in our mind is “What makes Canada as strong as possible?”
We must creatively mix points of view to arrive at policy prescriptions that respond to our needs, not to our ideologies. We let ideology interfere with what makes sense for Canada. Canada objectively has interests: let’s advance them. We must take the best of the nationalist school, its counsel of caution in our relations with the U.S., and the best of the integrationist school in its appreciation that some of our national interests are served by our relations with the U.S.
As I’ve said, I’ve done some of the research for this book by going to what seems like every conference on the subject. I can tell you it is very different going to a lefty conference than to a right-wing conference on this issue. The former is full of serious indignation and the latter serious purpose. At a right-wing conference American speakers are, if not stars, important and listened to carefully.
At a lefty conference, the American speaker has to pass a litmus test. They have, after all, been invited so they’ve generally passed this, and within about three minutes also pass the test with the general audience. They are then treated respectfully, and always with a large dose of consideration that the guest has also solicited — consideration that it’s