Canada's opposition to war strains relations with US

By GREG ANSLEY

At a meeting in London after the Queen Mother's death last year, the old Anglo-Saxon club began to part at the seams as it became clear its titanic offspring, the United States, was planning war on Iraq.

Prime Minister Helen Clark and Canadian counterpart Jean Chretien shrank from the prospect; Australia's John Howard and Britain's Tony Blair, already committed to American primacy, were far more inclined toward invasion.

A year down the track, the divisions are even more marked. Australia and Britain are fighting with the US in Iraq. New Zealand has burned yet another bridge with America and is treading on diplomatic eggshells to avoid offending Canberra while Australian troops are in the Gulf.

Canada, more significantly, has eyeballed its immensely more powerful neighbour and told it to go to hell, incurring the wrath of President George W. Bush, transmitted through a sharp diplomatic rebuke by Ambassador Paul Cellucci with full, public, White House approval.

"There is no security threat to Canada that the US would not be ready, willing and able to help with," Cellucci, a former Republican Governor of Massachusetts and long-time Bush loyalist, told a business audience in Toronto.

"There would be no debate, there would be no hesitation. We would be there for Canada as part of our family, and that is why so many in the US are disappointed and upset that Canada is not fully supporting us now."

White House spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed the following day: "Ambassador Cellucci's remarks were an accurate reflection of our disappointment at recent Canadian actions, particularly the decision not to support the coalition to liberate Iraq."

If not blackballed, New Zealand and Canada are at least confined to the scullery of the English-speaking club. Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives and now a member of Bush's defence policy advisory committee, delivered the message to Australia last year.

The Bulletin reported this week that at a private function in Melbourne, Gingrich told senior political and business leaders, "Don't go down the Canadian and New Zealand route - they're working themselves into a state of irrelevance".

Wellington is used to this kind of language, with its ban on nuclear ship visits, exclusion from the Anzus pact, and Australian carping over the size and direction of its military.

Canada, so tightly tied to the US through continental defence and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, has never really experienced such a tongue-lashing and is feeling deep concern at the prospects of possible retribution.

Some years ago Australian social scientist Geoffrey McNicoll advanced the theory that history had helped to form New World national characters: the US and Australia settled by more radical, Whiggish Britons, New Zealand and Canada by Tories and Empire loyalists.

Whatever the truth of this, relations between large and small partners at opposite ends of the Pacific show remarkable parallels, from the rhetoric of intimacy to sibling resentments.

Just as Australia and New Zealand routinely exchange avowals of kinship, so the US and Canada declare their relationship to be "perhaps the closest and most extensive in the world".

As across the Tasman, the North Americans are among each other's largest and most important trading partners; three-quarters of Canadians oppose political union with the US, as do New Zealanders with Australia.

As in New Zealand, most Canadians think a common currency would be good; as in Australia, most Americans never give it a thought.

And as in New Zealand, it does not take much for Canadian resentment against their larger neighbour to bubble to the surface: in Montreal, Canadian hockey fans booed the US anthem, while on the ice players subjected their rivals to insults and jibes that "America sucks".

But Canada and the US are welded at the hip. More than 200 million people cross the border each year. With the equivalent of US$1.4 billion of goods flowing between the countries every day, the bilateral trading relationship is the world's largest, eclipsing America's trade with the European Union and Japan, and making Canada the main export market for 35 of 50 US states.

Since the North American Free Trade Area came into force in 1994, two-way merchandise trade has soared by more than 140 per cent.

The US is Canada's biggest agricultural and timber market; Canada is America's third-largest supplier of oil, provides 14 per cent of its natural gas, and is fielding US requests for new pipelines for gas and water. The US is Canada's biggest foreign investor, and Canada America's third-largest.

For Canada, bucking the US on Iraq is no small matter. There have been disagreements before - Cuba, Vietnam, and Ronald Reagan's crusade against the Soviet "evil empire" - and conflicts still exist over the International Criminal Court, landmines, timber, farm subsidies, Arctic waters and arts and culture.

But many Canadians, particularly in the nation's boardrooms, fear that this time Ottawa may have gone too far. Ontario Premier Ernie Eves defied popular outcry and catcalls of "toady" to write to Ambassador Cellucci criticising Canada's stand and offering his support for the US position on Iraq.

The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association expressed alarm at signs of growing American anger, including a poll by Toronto-based communications company GPC International showing that almost half of US consumers were likely to boycott Canadian goods.

Chretien has already cancelled a planned visit to Washington to receive an American conservation award, citing sensitivities over the war, and Bush may dump his first state visit to Ottawa, planned for next month.

Toronto Star analyst Richard Gwyn warned that the schism over Iraq would not pass quickly. "This disagreement has about it the quality of a fight within the family [and] divisions within the family aren't healed just by the passage of time."

Added Vancouver Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe: "Taking a stand independent of the US can't have been easy and, based on US Ambassador Paul Cellucci's remarks, may cost the country dearly."

At the other end of the Pacific, Australia-US relations are on a steep upward curve, with glowing praise for Howard from Bush this week and negotiators hard at work in Canberra on a new free trade agreement.

On the surface, there should have been little divergence between Canada and Australia, marked as they are by deep similarities in history, culture, size, wealth and influence.

Canada is larger, but the differences are of scale: Canada has 31 million people, Australia 20 million; Canada covers 9.8 million sq km, Australia 7.7 million; Canada's gross domestic product is US$700 billion, Australia's US$350 billion.

Both are enriched by vast plains of agriculture and minerals. Their two largest cities - Toronto and Montreal in Canada, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia - are about the same size. Both count the US as their most important military, economic and diplomatic partner.

America has more defence arrangements with Canada than any other country and is tied to continental defence through the electronic bases and military hardware of the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

Australia's alliance with the US is a key spoke of Washington's Pacific strategy, given even greater significance through the massive Pine Gap spy base and its key role in America's global security network.

While ambivalent on a final commitment, Canada is involved in research for the fraught "Star Wars" missile defence shield; Australia has just signed up.

Their military forces are equivalent, but Canada's is heavy in armour and other battlefield equipment designed for its earlier Nato role against a Soviet attack on western Europe.

Like Australia, Canada was heavily involved in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, with a larger force of soldiers on the ground - four were killed by US "friendly fire" - and a naval force of up to five warships that is still, like HMNZS Te Mana, patrolling the Gulf.

There is also an irony in Ottawa's decision to stay out of the Iraq war. Canadian war planners attached to US Central Command for the war on terrorism have moved with the command to Qatar, the headquarters for Iraq. Its frigates defend and report to US Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, who runs Enduring Freedom and the Fifth fleet, launching attacks on Iraq.

About 30 Canadians are in Iraq on exchange with US forces, others are flying in the airborne early warning and control aircraft that control the air battle, and Canada has allowed overflights and refuelling for US aircraft en route to war in the Gulf.

Cellucci noted that despite its stand, and with the exception of Britain and Australia, Canada was providing more support for the war than any of the 46 members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing.

But there the divergences begin. Australia's security strategy is increasingly focused on warfighting capabilities, Canada's leans more towards peace operations.

Canberra places its trust in Washington; Ottawa pursues multilateralism as a collective counterweight to protect its interests against US economic and diplomatic might.

Howard has a warm partnership with Bush; Chretien dislikes Bush, which is returned in full from Washington. Bush did not call Chretien after the Canadian's re-election last November, but the following day he phoned to congratulate Vicente Fox, the new President of Mexico.

Chretien also had strong domestic motives to refuse to join the US in Iraq: strident Canadian nationalism, the unique opposition to war by the French population of Quebec, a broader rejection of involvement by a majority of Canadians, and a wider debate on defence under-funding.

Ottawa also had the knowledge that while there may be problems in gaining new concessions from Washington on a number of issues, the US has always put business first - and business with Canada is big.

Many US states could not run without Canadian electricity, nor could American car-makers survive without Canadian parts and assembly lines. Above all, Ottawa knows that if it came to the crunch, the US would defend Canada to defend itself.

Canberra, on the other hand, has none of these luxuries. Australia is only as important to the US as it can make itself. In a world in which it feels vulnerable and isolated, and in which America is the only friend with the ability to keep potential foes at bay, Canberra wants to make sure Washington is well and truly on side.

Herald Feature: Iraq war