Discussion: International Impact of Homeland Security Policy

North American Cooperation in an Era of Homeland Security

by David G. Haglund

David Haglund ([email protected]) is the Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University. He is grateful to the Queen’s University Faculty of Arts and Science, the Security and Defence Forum of the Canadian Department of National Defence, and the National Defence College of Sweden for their support for the research and writing of this article, and also to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy for assistance in producing the manuscript.

T he suggestion that Canada figures somehow as part of America’s current security woes may surprise some. To Canadians, unused as they are to being objects of suspicion—or at least were, until their

government aligned itself with those countries unwilling to support military action against Iraq absent UN Security Council approval—it may seem to put matters backwards.1

It has long been an article of faith in Canada that the quality of American foreign policy–making leaves something to be desired. This has especially been so when Liberal governments in Ottawa have had to deal with Republican governments in Washington, for as Lawrence Martin observes, ‘‘[t]here’s an abiding problem in Canada-U.S. relations. Republicans and Liberals never seem to fit on the same dance floor . . . Canadians don’t generally take well to red-meat Republicans.’’2 And yet Canadians remain withal among the least anti-American people on earth. In a late 2002 global survey of attitudes toward America conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Canadian res- pondents went against the trend in most of the other 43 foreign countries

� 2003 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.

1 Even in the Iraq case, Canadian policy was differentiated from that of countries such as France and Germany, in that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien stated that the U.S. had the ‘‘right’’ to take military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; moreover, the prime minister announced he had no intention of recalling Canadian military personnel who were serving as exchange officers with British and American units.

2 Lawrence Martin, ‘‘Snarl-Spangled Banter,’’ Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 4, 2002.

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polled, with 72 percent of Canadians professing a favorable view of the United States.3

Nevertheless, Canadians like to contrast their spirit of moderation with an American tendency to rush to judgment and act erratically, even if in pursuit of worthwhile objectives.4 What Alastair Buchan observed a generation ago about the Anglo-American relationship applies today to the Canadian-American one: the smaller power finds it hard to resist the temptation to cast itself in the role of provider of wise counsel to its larger partner, playing the sagacious Greeks to the latter’s sometimes obtuse Romans.5 Couple this temptation with a fairly widespread sentiment in Canada of its being the ‘‘morally superior’’ North American country and you can understand why former U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson should have labelled Canada the ‘‘stern daughter of the voice of God.’’6

The ‘‘Undefended Border’’

There is also a deep-seated conviction that the northern part of the North American continent could not in any meaningful sense be regarded as a security problem. Generations of Canadian, and some American, school- children have been formed in the conviction that the Canadian-American border is the world’s ‘‘longest undefended frontier.’’7 It was undefended because neither country posed a prospect of aggression against or menaced the physical security of the other. The Canada-U.S. tandem was the world’s original, and by many reckonings sturdiest, ‘‘security community,’’ within which the use of force or even the threat to use force had been banished as a means of resolving disputes between the members.8

There had always been a good deal of cant associated with the border’s condition of geopolitical grace for Americans and Canadians.

3 Barrie McKenna, ‘‘Friendly Canadians Buck Anti-U.S. Trend,’’ Globe and Mail, Dec. 5, 2002; Brian Knowlton, ‘‘A Rising Anti-American Tide,’’ International Herald Tribune, Dec. 5, 2002.

4 Clifford Krauss, ‘‘Canada at Loggerheads with Ally to the South,’’ International Herald Tribune, Nov. 29, 2002.

5 Alastair Buchan, ‘‘Mothers and Daughters (or Greeks and Romans),’’ Foreign Affairs, April 1976, pp. 645–69; Alex Danchev, ‘‘On Specialness,’’ International Affairs, Oct. 1996, pp. 737–50.

6 Dean Acheson, ‘‘Canada: Stern Daughter of the Voice of God,’’ in Livingston Merchant, ed., Neighbors Taken for Granted: Canada and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 134. See also S. F. Wise and Robert Craig Brown, Canada Views the United States: Nineteenth-Century Political Attitudes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967); and Jeffrey Simpson, ‘‘If Only Moral Superiority Counted as Foreign Aid,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 21, 2003.

7 See Edgar W. McInnis, The Unguarded Frontier: A History of American-Canadian Relations (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1942); C. P. Stacey, ‘‘The Myth of the Unguarded Frontier, 1815–1871,’’ American Historical Review, Oct. 1950, pp. 1–18; and Richard A. Preston, The Defence of the Undefended Border: Planning for War in North America, 1867–1939 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977).

8 See Emanuel Adler, ‘‘Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations,’’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 26:2 (1997), pp. 249–77.

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Anyone who was used to crossing international boundaries in Western Europe might have found odd the sustained panegyric for the Canadian-American border. For compared with frontiers in Western Europe, the Canadian- American border was anything but the porous membrane suggested by its rhapsodists. Since 9/11, however, in some respects the line separating Canada from the United States has begun to resemble that separating the United States from Mexico.9 Under the U.S. Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, scheduled to take effect in 2005, American authorities will be required to keep records of everyone entering and leaving the United States. In the unlikely event that Canadians are not exempted from this, Ottawa fears that with 200 million crossings a year, the Canadian-American border could turn into the world’s biggest parking lot. In a globalizing world in which borders are allegedly losing their relevance, this was not supposed to happen. Instead of the anticipated ‘‘Canadianization’’ of America’s southern border,10 we have witnessed the partial ‘‘Mexicanization’’ of its northern border.

The effectiveness of the new security measures is not easily gauged. Stories of illegal border crossings with potentially ominous security implications routinely make headlines in North American newspapers.11

Though these stories routinely turn out to be false, it remains hard for some Americans to shake the thought that their northern border must be a source of anxiety to them. Take the case of a recent false alarm, one that had five potential Islamic terrorists making their way southward from Canada on Christmas Eve of 2002. New York’s junior senator, Hillary Clinton, responding to a demand from Canada’s immigration minister, Denis Coderre, that she apologize for scare-mongering about this, said that because Americans had become so anxious about border security, even false alarms were becoming ‘‘all too believable. I take very seriously my responsibility to speak out about the U.S. government’s responsibility to allocate increased resources to the protection of our northern border, and I will continue to do so.’’12

The 60 Minutes Version

Senator Clinton is far from being the only American political figure to be concerned about the country’s northern border. Those Americans

9 Paul Koring and Steven Chase, ‘‘Canada Seeks U.S. Exemption in Border Crackdown,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 31, 2003.

10 See Anthony De Palma, Here: A Biography of the New American Continent (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), and Thomas J. Courchene and Donald J. Savoie, eds., The Art of the State: Governance in a World Without Frontiers (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2003).

11 See e.g. ‘‘Akwesasne Reserve Linked to FBI Manhunt,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 2, 2003; ‘‘Search Expands to 19 in Possible Illegal US Entry,’’ Boston Globe, Jan. 3, 2003; James Gordon Meek, ‘‘Report: Iraqi Spies in the U.S.,’’ New York Daily News, Jan. 30, 2003.

12 Quoted in ‘‘Coderre Calls for Apology from Hillary Clinton,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 9, 2003.

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(and Canadians, for that matter) who are convinced that Canada has become a safe haven for terrorism were certainly not comforted by an April 2002 60 Minutes broadcast featuring interviews with two retired Canadian intelligence and immigration officials, David Harris and James Bissett. Harris and Bissett depicted Ottawa as running a refugee and immigration system so loosely supervised that even the dimmest terrorist would find it child’s play to set up shop there.13 Indeed, many Canadians have felt in recent years that the country’s refugee policy was ‘‘racked by dysfunction, waste, and corruption’’ and could stand reform.14

Many Americans seem to have believed, and some apparently still do, that at least a few of the 9/11 terrorists entered the United States via Canada.15

One member of Congress declared two weeks after the 9/11 attacks that ‘‘the two planes that struck the World Trade Center, those individuals came through Canada.’’16 In fact, none of the hijackers had entered the United States from Canada.

Try as they may to dispel the notion, Canadian officials could not convince Americans that the border was secure in the weeks and months following 9/11. Part of Americans’ inability to take solace from these assurances is due to their realization that their own border authorities had been incapable of preventing terrorists from entering the United States directly from overseas. If the sprawling U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the vaunted American intelligence services could not have prevented the establishment of Al Qaeda sleeper cells in America, how could the relatively ‘‘laid-back’’ Canada, with its propensity to underspend on defense and minimize the gravity of threats? Canada might not be a target for terrorists, but it would be attractive as a staging area and support base for operations against American targets.

Americans also recalled the saga of the ‘‘millennium bomber,’’ whose New Year’s Eve plans for 2000 called for the detonation of a powerful explosive at the Los Angeles airport. The planner, an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam, was apprehended on December 14, 1999, before he could carry out this plan. The INS caught him trying to enter Washington state by ferry from Vancouver Island, with a bomb hidden in the trunk of his rented car. Assuming that Canadian and American intelligence had not been trailing him

13 Colin Freeze, ‘‘Canada Tarred Again as Haven for Terrorists,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 26, 2002. The segment was broadcast on April 28.

14 Stephen Gallagher, ‘‘Canada’s Dysfunctional Refugee Policy: A Realist Case for Reform,’’ Behind the Headlines, Summer 2001, p. 1. See also Colin Freeze, ‘‘Paris Embassy Official Bribed for Visas,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 5, 2002; and ‘‘Corrupt Immigration Consultants Denounced,’’ ibid., Sept. 6, 2002.

15 Jeff Sallot, Andrew Mitrovica, and Tu Thanh Ha, ‘‘Canadian Connection Suspected in Hijackings,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 13, 2001.

16 James Traficant, quoted in John Ibbitson, ‘‘U.S. Points the Finger Due North,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 27, 2001.

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all along,17 it was a very close call. The circumstances surrounding his presence in North America were just as disturbing, as indicated in a hard- hitting documentary produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘‘Trail of a Terrorist,’’ which recounts details that came out during Ressam’s trial in spring 2000.

The trail depicted in the documentary, which aired in Canada in September 2001 and in the United States the next month, is an amazing one, suggesting extraordinary degrees of bureaucratic ineptitude. Ressam had left Algeria in 1992 for France, where he spent two years before heading to Canada, travelling on a false French passport, the slipshod appearance of which resulted in his being taken aside for questioning by Canadian immigration officials at Montreal’s airport. There he said the magic word, ‘‘refugee,’’ and was released into society pending his hearing, a normal practice of Canadian officials at the time.18

For the next four years, Ressam lived in a Montreal apartment later deemed to have lodged a cell linked to Al Qaeda and to Ressam’s own alma mater, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Ressam supported himself with Canadian welfare benefits, supplemented by petty crimes (e.g., stealing credit cards and robbing tourists) that were intermittently interrupted by arrests. Because he missed his asylum hearing in June 1995, his application for refugee status was denied and he was ordered to leave Canada. He did depart, some three years later, under a new name (Benni Antoine Noris) and with a genuine Canadian passport he had been able to ‘‘trade up’’ to thanks to a forged baptismal record purloined from a church in Québec, supported by a Université de Montréal student identity card.19 He travelled to Afghanistan, where he matriculated at Osama bin Laden’s camps and devised his plan to bomb Los Angeles’s airport.

All of these details were known to American officials who were monitoring the spring 2000 trial, which resulted in Ressam’s conviction on a

17 Canadian reporters were told on December 3, 2001, by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft that Canada had not bungled the Ressam affair, but had instead provided the U.S. with invaluable information. The attorney general, who was in Ottawa to sign a border agreement with Canada, lauded the ‘‘outstanding cooperation of Canadian authorities’’ in the matter. Daniel Leblanc, ‘‘Canada Praised for Tip to U.S. on Ressam,’’ Globe and Mail, Dec. 4, 2001.

18 Surveys indicate that at least 50 percent of the public wants undocumented refugee claimants arriving in Canada to be sent back immediately whence they had come, and another 42 percent that they be detained at least until a decision had been made on their application. Until recently, the practice had been to release nearly every undocumented asylum seeker into society, pending his or her hearing. See Margaret Wente, ‘‘How the Refugee System Got Undermined,’’ Globe and Mail, Nov. 5, 2001; and Colin Freeze, ‘‘Refugee Claimants Vanish,’’ Globe and Mail, Nov. 7, 2001.

19 Canadian passport-application procedures have subsequently been tightened up considerably, with one of the changes being the inadmissibility of baptismal records as proof of birth in Canada.

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variety of counts. (He is now serving a 130-year prison term, which may be reduced given his willingness to provide information to the authorities.)

Then, during the days and weeks following 9/11, Canadian leaders woke up to the prospect of the country’s refugee and immigration policies’ becoming the object of unwonted U.S. scrutiny. Worried that an overt ‘‘harmonization’’ of practices with those of the United States would generate opposition both from politically significant ethnic lobbies and from nationalists on the qui vive for any sell-out of the country’s sovereignty, they began to speak up. Some officials, including Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan, appeared to deny there was a problem; others, including Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, insisted that Canada would continue to exercise sovereign control over its refugee and immigration policies.20

Surprisingly, given the Liberals’ penchant for tracking public opinion, it appears that the government’s stern rhetoric about Canadian sovereignty was out of sync with the Canadian public’s greater concern with security, which in the immediate wake of 9/11 decisively trumped worries about America’s infringing upon Canada’s decision-making autonomy. By late September 2001, polls showed that a very large percentage of Canadians would willingly swap some sovereignty if it would make them more secure.21

No Thanks

It can only be assumed that the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues understood only too well that some adjustments were indeed going to have to be made if the border was to be kept reasonably open to Canadian travellers and goods. But Ottawa’s assertion of sovereignty not only did little to comfort Canadians, it also annoyed Americans. The government was clearly caught wrong-footed on this issue.22

On the evening of September 20, 2001, the very day Canadian papers were carrying front-page news of Ottawa’s ‘‘thumping its chest that nobody will be allowed to dictate terms to Canada,’’23 President George W. Bush brought his message about the war on terror before a joint session of Congress. In his speech, the president lavished praise on all those countries that had been supporting America in its time of tribulation. He mentioned several by name,

20 Shawn McCarthy and Campbell Clark, ‘‘Canada Will Make Its Own Laws, PM Vows,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 20, 2001; and Campbell Clark, ‘‘Refugee Flow Won’t Be Cut, Caplan Vows,’’ Globe and Mail, Oct. 18, 2001.

21 André Picard, ‘‘Most Want PM to Cede Sovereignty over Border,’’ Globe and Mail, Oct. 1, 2001.

22 Edward Greenspon, ‘‘Seizing the Day on Canada-U.S. Border Flows,’’ Globe and Mail, Nov. 15, 2001.

23 Edward Greenspon, ‘‘Debunking the Myths about Post-Sept. 11 Canada,’’ Globe and Mail, Oct. 2, 2001.

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starting with Britain, but excluded the Canadians, notwithstanding their displays of solidarity from the outset of the crisis.24

It is possible that the president’s omission was merely an oversight. At a meeting a few days later with Prime Minister Chrétien, the president went out of his way to deflate stories that he had intended by his non-reference to Canada to send a message to Ottawa. Not so, said the president. ‘‘I didn’t necessarily think it was important to praise a brother. After all, we’re talking about family.’’25

Against this view stands another interpretation, which had the president taking a page from the book of a predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, by practicing the politics of ‘‘maximum plausible deniability.’’ On the one hand, Washington intended to signal upset with what it thought it was hearing from Liberal officials on the border security issue. On the other hand, speaking out overtly could possibly backfire, as even Canadians who worried about their prime minister’s judgment might be bothered even more about American arm-twisting. According to this interpretation, the omission constituted just the right signal, one that could be felt, but also denied, and even expiated by gracious words about family ties.26

Whichever version is closer to reality, we can be sure Canadian leaders no longer needed convincing that their American counterparts were extremely sensitive about border security. Canada’s refugee policy has been much more lenient than America’s, meaning that travellers, especially undocumented ones, who arrived in Canada stood a very good chance of escaping detention until the time of their hearing, if they requested asylum, or of escaping detention altogether should they simply choose to skip the formalities altogether and stay in the country clandestinely.

It was not just refugee processing that disconcerted Americans. Canadian immigration policy also drew attention. Canada, which used to have one of the West’s highest birth rates, now is one of the West’s least fertile spots, with a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman of child-bearing age.27 Canadian leaders, worried about the slowing population growth rate and fearful about the welfare and pension system’s ability to withstand the strain of an aging population, have indicated that the country would not only remain open to immigrants, but would actively be seeking more, with the

24 Jeffrey Simpson, ‘‘And Nary a Mention of Canada,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 22, 2001. 25 Barrie McKenna, ‘‘No Need to Praise ‘a Brother,’ Bush Says,’’ Globe and Mail, Sept. 25,

2001. 26 There is a third possibility, that the speech ‘‘merely confirmed the fact that Canada does

not rank very high among America’s foreign policy concerns. It is not seen as a particularly influential country.’’ Roy Rempel, The Chatter Box: An Insider’s Account of the Irrelevance of Parliament in the Making of Canadian Foreign and Defence Policy (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2002), p. 30. I would discount this possibility, given Canada’s relevance to American homeland security.

27 Jane Armstrong, ‘‘Canada Is 30 Million, but Will that Last?’’ Globe and Mail, Mar. 13, 2002.

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federal government setting an annual intake target of about 1 percent of the country’s population, or some 300,000 immigrants.28

When one considers that the 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States through regular, legal, U.S. immigration channels, it is hardly surprising that U.S. officials should look beyond Canada’s refugee policy and towards its immigration one as well. In some ways, Canadian intake patterns mirror American patterns, as both countries have for some time been drawing most of their immigrants from developing countries.29 The major difference is that the United States takes in many more Latin Americans than does Canada, which has been drawing upon parts of the world where anti-Americanism— especially the radical Islamic variant—runs high. While it strains credulity to imagine any cross-border, armed incursions being launched from Canada, it is natural to expect some immigrants to be influenced by anti-American causes they experienced prior to arriving in Canada. It is understandable, then, for American officials to believe that more Ressams might be at work in Canada now or in the future.

‘‘An Inescapable Duty To Collaborate’’

If to a growing number of Americans Canada has become part of the problem, to many more it figures as part of the solution to America’s homeland security challenges. It has to, for what option does it possess other than ‘‘an inescapable duty to collaborate’’ with the United States in the continental aspects of the post-9/11 struggle against terrorism?30 So to answer the question whether America can trust Canada, we must start by examining the sources of Canadian solidarity with America in the weeks and months following the attacks.

Canada felt the impact of 9/11 more intensely than any country other than the United States itself, for many reasons. First, no other foreign country is as close to ground zero as Canada, and indeed a greater percentage of its population than of America’s own population lives within a 500-mile radius of New York City. The attack on the United States literally hit home for Canadians.

Second, Canadians tend to identify with Americans. It might be going too far to endow this sentiment with the attributes of ‘‘collective identity,’’ which concept is much disputed in international relations, where states and

28 In the past few years, actual intake has been between 210,000 and 235,000 a year. See Campbell Clark, ‘‘PM Wants Canada to Open Its Doors,’’ Globe and Mail, July 17, 2002.

29 See Campbell Clark, ‘‘Attempts to Stem Refugee Flow Bogged Down,’’ Globe and Mail, Nov. 2, 2001. See also Harold Troper, ‘‘Canada’s Immigration Policy Since 1945,’’ International Journal, Spring 1993, pp. 255–81; and Richard Gwyn, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995).

30 William Leiss, of the Royal Society of Canada, speaking at a symposium on ‘‘Research and Security’’ organized by the Royal Society of Canada, Ottawa, May 9, 2002.

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borders are said to be able to vitiate any lasting, transnational sense of empathy.31 Nevertheless, there did take place in Canada in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a strong rallying to America’s side that displayed the hallmarks of in-group solidarity. For notwithstanding the myriad of policy disputes in which the two countries are routinely embroiled, most Canadians felt that the attack on American institutions and values was an attack on theirs, as well. John Manley, then Canada’s minister of foreign affairs and soon to become deputy prime minister, captured the mood of the Canadian public in mid-September 2001:

Let’s make no mistake about it. Canada does not have a history as a pacifist or

neutralist country. Canada has soldiers that are buried all over Europe because we

fought in defence of liberty. And we’re not about to back away from a challenge now

because we think somebody might get hurt.32

The third reason for the differential impact on Canada had to do with economics and the desire not only to keep vital trade links as open as possible under the circumstances, but also to ensure that Canada remained attractive to offshore foreign investment. On an average day, some C$2 billion worth of trade crosses the Canadian-American border in both directions, most of it carried by trucks.33 Canada is especially sensitive to anything that could slow down the volume of traffic southward, as happened just after the attacks and again at the start of the war with Iraq. The sensitivity also applies to northward flows of people, as was evidenced by the reaction of Canadian officials who objected to the World Health Organization’s issuance of a travel advisory to Toronto in the wake of that city’s outbreak of SARS cases in April 2003.

Canadian exports go mainly to the United States, the market for more than 87 percent of Canada’s foreign sales. Because Canada’s economy is much more trade-dependent than America’s, nearly 40 percent of the country’s GDP is accounted for by exports to the United States.34 And while the relative importance of its Canadian trade is much less, the United States too has a major economic interest in keeping commerce flowing smoothly with Canada, its largest trading partner. Not only is Canada the leading market for 38 American states, but Ontario on its own would rank as America’s fourth-largest trading partner, trailing only Canada itself, Japan, and Mexico.

There is also a fourth, more strategic reason for Canada’s inescapable duty to collaborate: the longstanding ‘‘norm’’ of bilateral cooperation that

31 See Jonathan Mercer, ‘‘Identity and Anarchy,’’ International Organization, Spring 1995, pp. 229–52.

32 Impromptu remarks made outside the House of Commons on Sept. 17, 2001; quoted in Randy Boswell, ‘‘A Life’s Journey,’’ Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 2, 2002.

33 As of May 2003, the Canadian dollar was worth nearly 70 U.S. cents, up about a nickel from the value it had at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

34 Andrew Shea, Border Choices: Balancing the Need for Security and Trade (Ottawa: Conference Board of Canada, 2001), p. 1.

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entails a reciprocal U.S.-Canadian obligation to be attentive to each other’s legitimate physical security interests. Though some date this strategic-cultural norm back to the early twentieth century,35 it really only took shape during the crisis atmosphere of the late 1930s, when a war in Europe was looming and it seemed that American security might be imperiled by Canadian involvement. It was in this context that John MacCormac, a Canadian-born journalist working in the United States, could refer to Canada as ‘‘America’s problem.’’36

This norm can be labelled the ‘‘Kingston dispensation,’’ as it was first articulated in an address delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, during the August 1938 Sudetenland crisis. The president told his audience that America would ‘‘not stand idly by’’ were the physical security of Canada threatened by a European adversary as a consequence of the country’s participation in a European war. For his part, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, speaking a few days later, pledged that Canada would do nothing that would jeopardize the United States’ physical security. Taken together, the two leaders’ remarks constitute the normative core of the Canada-U.S. security relationship: each country understood itself to have a neighborly obligation to demonstrate nearly as much solicitude for the other’s physical security needs as for its own.37

The Kingston dispensation was not quite an alliance, but two years later a bilateral alliance was forged in North America, one that remains America’s longest-running bilateral security pact. For more than sixty years, the Kingston dispensation has constituted the conceptual pillar of Canadian- American defense and security cooperation. What is at stake in contempor- ary discussions of whether Canada continues to pass the ‘‘loyalty test’’38 is really the survivability of this norm—a norm that does not, it should be noted, require Canada to support every military initiative the United States undertakes.39

35 R. J. Sutherland, ‘‘Canada’s Long Term Strategic Situation,’’ International Journal, Summer 1962, pp. 199–201.

36 John MacCormac, Canada: America’s Problem (New York: Viking, 1940). 37 See Michel Fortmann and David G. Haglund, ‘‘Canada and the Issue of Homeland

Security: Does the ‘Kingston Dispensation’ Still Hold?’’ Canadian Military Journal, Spring 2002, pp. 17–22.

38 For this terminology in the bilateral context, see Stéphane Roussel, ‘‘Pearl Harbor et le World Trade Center: Le Canada face aux États-Unis en période de crise,’’ Études internationales, Dec. 2002, pp. 667–95, citation at p. 685.

39 In late January 2003, with allied unity fracturing over the Iraq issue, President Bush sought but failed to obtain Canadian support for war against Iraq. While, at the time, 15% of Canadians would have preferred no Canadian involvement in a war with Iraq under any conditions and another 15% would go to war even without UN blessing, nearly 70% would support the war only if the Security Council authorized it. See Jeff Sallot, ‘‘PM to Bush: Hold Off on War,’’ Globe and Mail, 24 Jan. 2003. Once the war started, and especially after the fall of Baghdad, the Canadian mood shifted, with a majority of the public expressing the view that Ottawa had erred in not going to war alongside traditional allies such as the U.S. and UK.

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So will the norm survive intact the current crisis in global security and tensions in the bilateral relationship stemming from the Iraqi war? To answer that requires turning to the recent record of U.S.-Canadian military cooperation, since one standard for gauging degrees of trust between countries is the quality of their military cooperation; indeed, it might be the best ‘‘confidence-building’’ measure available to states.

Canadian-American Military Cooperation After 9/11

Military cooperation as a means of building or preserving trust is generally thought valuable when it occurs between countries that not too long ago were adversaries. But it is as relevant to the Canadian-American relationship. One often hears references in official Ottawa to the immunity military cooperation provides against American ‘‘help.’’ ‘‘Defense against help’’40 refers to the prospect of the United States’ undertaking unilaterally within Canada such military measures as may be needed for its own defense. That the United States may have no intention of so acting is beside the point, for the asymmetries of power are so large in North America as to lead some Canadians to argue that protection of Canada’s sovereignty requires close military cooperation with the United States. Mirroring the way many Americans cannot shake the suspicion that Canadians are too lax when it comes to letting terrorists into their country, quite a few Canadians have difficulty believing that Americans would not intervene militarily in Canada if they felt like doing so.

Admittedly, some Canadians will worry that too much defense cooperation can lead to the same end that ‘‘defense against help’’ was supposed to avoid, namely loss of sovereignty.41 The point is simply that in Canada, unlike in the United States, ‘‘security’’ is rarely invoked without an accompanying reference to ‘‘sovereignty,’’42 so that it can never be entirely clear which value determines which.

The recent Iraq war notwithstanding, the Canadian public likes institutional arrangements that bind the country militarily to the United States, so long as Canada can expect a sufficient voice in collective decision-making and abstain from certain overseas U.S. military undertakings. NATO is popular,

40 See Nils Ørvik, ‘‘Canadian Security and ‘Defence Against Help’,’’ Survival, Jan.–Feb. 1984, pp. 26–31.

41 For a highly critical analysis of the trend toward greater military cooperation with the U.S., see Michael Byers, ‘‘Canadian Armed Forces Under US Command,’’ a report commissioned by the Simons Centre for Peace and Disarmament Studies, Vancouver, British Columbia, April 2002. For an equally critical analysis of this report, cf. J. L. Granatstein, ‘‘Axworthy Paper Full of Holes,’’ National Post (Toronto), May 1, 2002.

42 See, e.g., ‘‘Sovereignty, Defence, and Global Security: Defending Canada’s Interests in the 21st Century,’’ On Track, Dec. 20, 2002. This is the journal of the Ottawa-based Conference of Defence Associations Institute, a leading pro-defense interest group.

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and the North American Aerospace Defence command (NORAD) even more so. And despite having earned a reputation as a military that had been primarily structured for UN peacekeeping missions, the Canadian Forces (CF) were largely focused throughout the Cold War on the collective defense of Europe and North America.

After the Cold War, Canada’s military came to play important roles in conflict-management and even peacemaking operations. Joel Sokolsky has referred to this as the ‘‘greening’’ of Canadian military activity, referring to NATO’s green helmets, which increasingly took precedence over the UN’s blue berets.43

The country’s overall strategic doctrine has emphasized the need to retain capability for combat and not just peacekeeping. It is well known that, with only about 1.2 percent of its GDP allocated to defense, Canada’s defense spending has regularly ranked it among NATO’s cellar-dwellers in relative terms (though in absolute amounts, Canada will actually place in the top quartile of the newly expanded, post-Prague alliance, at more than C$12 billion a year). Ironically, one legacy of the persistent underfunding of the country’s military is that it forced planners to seek, through interoperability with the United States and other allies, a deus ex machina for the preservation of at least some combat capability. This trend was given expression as well as impetus with the issuance in June 1999 of a Department of National Defence document known as ‘‘Strategy 2020.’’ Two defense analysts who have studied this document remark of it that ‘‘Canadian defence planners have been moving toward greater interoperability with the United States in a manner that is far more comprehensive and rapidly paced than most Canadians realize.’’44

It was only logical that Ottawa should have decided to take part militarily in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In fact, Canada was one of the first six countries to sign up for military action after the United States began the air war there on October 6, 2001.45 Canada’s forward deployment initially took shape as a mainly naval commitment, though there had already been, after 9/11, an intensification of air-defense efforts within NORAD, which greatly increased the number of planes patrolling airspace over New York City and Washington.

On October 8, 2002, Ottawa launched Operation Apollo, the country’s most ambitious joint deployment since the 1991 Gulf War. In all,

43 Joel J. Sokolsky, ‘‘Over There With Uncle Sam: Peacekeeping, the ‘Trans-European Bargain,’ and the Canadian Forces,’’ in What NATO for Canada?, Martello Papers 23, ed. David G. Haglund (Kingston, Ont.: Queen’s University Centre for International Relations, 2000), pp. 15–36.

44 ‘‘Shaping the Future of Canadian Defence: A Strategy for 2020’’ (Ottawa: Department of National Defence, June 1999). Quote from Danford W. Middlemiss and Denis Stairs, ‘‘The Canadian Forces and the Doctrine of Interoperability: The Issues,’’ Policy Matters, June 2002, p. 26.

45 Steven Chase, ‘‘PM Puts Military on Alert,’’ Globe and Mail, Oct. 8, 2001.

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some 2,000 personnel, including a small number of ground forces with the country’s elite counterterrorism Joint Task Force 2, were sent overseas. Although there was a small air force component involved, at the time it was fundamentally a naval effort, with one destroyer and three Halifax-class frigates being sent, along with a sustainment ship, to the Arabian Sea.46

By the end of 2001, a new front opened in the war on terror that would lead to the first planned involvement of Canadian infantry in combat since the Korean War.47 Initially, Ottawa had thought that the CF would be serving with the Europeans deployed to Kabul under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), but problems arose, first from the Northern Alliance and then from the British officials responsible for the peacekeeping contingent, who wanted fewer personnel than Canada wished to send, just 200 or so ‘‘airfield engineers.’’ Ottawa dismissed this request as infra dignitatum, tantamount to kitchen and laundry help.48

When the United States indicated in January 2002 that a battalion from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) would be a welcome complement to American units posted in Kandahar, Ottawa rejoiced. The Liberal government could not only thumb their noses at the Europeans, who they felt had demeaned Canada’s ability to make a military contribution, but also score points against the opposition in Parliament, which had been accusing it of having so run down the CF as to render them unfit for combat duty. As the Liberals saw it, if the Pentagon wanted Canadians fighting alongside U.S. troops, what further proof could anyone need that the CF were able to fight?

The deployment of the PPCLI represented both the high and low points in post-9/11 Canadian-American military cooperation. The heights were reached in mid-March 2002, with Operation Anaconda (Operation Harpoon in Canada) in the Shahi Kot region in eastern Afghanistan. The A, B, and C companies of the PPCLI, alongside 120 assault troops of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, undertook the task of flushing out caves on the 11,500-foot mountain known as Tergul Ghar, or the Whale’s Back. The mission was a success, and the Canadian leader of the operation told his soldiers that President Bush had said they ‘‘performed brilliantly, and for that we are grateful.’’49 But on April 17, an American F-16 dropped a bomb on a Canadian night-time, live-fire training exercise outside of Kandahar, killing

46 Jeff Sallot, ‘‘Canadians Head Off to War,’’ Globe and Mail, Oct. 9, 2001. 47 In fact, there had been (unplanned) combat involving the CF during the UNPROFOR

peacekeeping effort in the former Yugoslavia, as Canadian troops found themselves engaged in battle with Croatian units, in the Medak pocket. See Dawn Hewitt, From Ottawa to Sarajevo: Canadian Peacekeepers in the Balkans, Martello Papers 18 (Kingston, Ont.: Queen’s University Centre for International Relations, 1998).

48 Brian Laghi, ‘‘Eggleton Plays Down Combat Role for Troops,’’ Globe and Mail, Nov. 16, 2001; Alan Freeman, ‘‘Canada Shuns Minor Peace Role,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 4, 2002.

49 Stephen Thorne, ‘‘Finishing the Job on the Whale’s Back,’’ National Post, Mar. 18, 2002.

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four members of Alpha Company who had recently been involved in the fighting on Tergul Ghar and seriously wounding several others. That news was bad enough, but Canadians were especially dismayed with the seeming lack of interest shown by the president. If Canadians really were ‘‘family,’’ as he had said back in September, why did he not take advantage of any of his four public appearances the next day to express his and America’s sorrow, as he had done in December 2001 when a friendly-fire mistake led to the killing of three Americans and five Afghans?50

The most troubling criticism came from the country’s normally pro- American elements. John Manley, widely seen to be the Liberal party’s closest thing to Tony Blair, remarked on April 19 that an expression of sympathy on the part of the president would have been helpful. Two hours later, one was made, at an impromptu news conference held at a Secret Service training facility that Bush was visiting that day. The president stated: ‘‘I want to say publicly what I told Jean Chrétien the other day about how sorry I am that Canadian soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan. It was a terrible accident. The parents and loved ones have my most heartfelt sympathy.’’51

It took some time, but the wounds opened by the friendly-fire tragedy began to close. The process began with the president’s belated condolences, which warranted banner headlines across Canada, and continued with the investigations mounted by both the Canadian and the American militaries into the events leading to the tragedy. The United States named a Canadian as co-chair of its investigation, resolving any doubts in Canada that the country might be denied access to full information about the bombing. Both countries’ boards of inquiry returned findings of pilot error, and following a U.S. Air Force hearing, it is being determined how the pilots involved in the bombing should be disciplined; one of the pilots has elected court martial instead.52

Canada’s ground effort in Afghanistan came to an end late in summer 2002, but apparently only temporarily, as the Liberal government, sensing a war with Iraq was in the offing and wishing to avoid having to deploy troops to a conflict there lacking UN approval, announced in early 2003 that it would be recommitting ground forces to Afghan peacekeeping efforts—a decision welcomed by the Bush administration.

50 John Ibbitson, ‘‘Deaths Don’t Merit a Mention from Bush,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 19, 2002. Murray Campbell, ‘‘Nation’s Grief Turns to Anger,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 19, 2002.

51 Margaret Wente, ‘‘A PR Nightmare on the Home Front,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 19, 2002; John Ibbitson and Shawn McCarthy, ‘‘Bush Apologizes to Canadians: ‘I Wish We Could Bring Them Back’,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 20, 2002.

52 Daniel Leblanc, ‘‘Canadian General Will Help Run U.S. Probe of Bombing Debacle, in a ‘Show of Trust between Neighbours’,’’ Globe and Mail, Apr. 24, 2002; Clifford Krauss, ‘‘Canada’s Link to U.S. Tested by the Deaths of 4 Soldiers,’’ International Herald Tribune, Feb. 10, 2003.

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Conclusions

Militarily, there can be no doubt that Canada remains a trustworthy ally for the United States, even if not in the same category as Britain and Australia. Though the American military might and does wish the CF were better funded, it is probably the most well disposed of any U.S. sector toward Canadians. As for the American public, to the extent it pays attention to Canada, there is evidence of growing irritation as a result of war-related tensions, particularly at moments when Canadians enjoy waxing compara- tively about the ethical merits of the two countries.53

American officials noticed certain ill-considered and quickly retracted insults launched by a few heedless Liberal members of parliament during the run-up to the Iraqi war. It is safe to predict there will be no lamenting in the Bush administration when the prime minister of Canada retires, as he has indicated he will do by February 2004. The Canadian public may think less highly of President Bush than it does of America itself, but at least until the outbreak of the war with Iraq, he remained more popular among Canadians (about 30 percent of whom said they supported him) than he did among almost any other foreign public, and his Canadian approval ratings prior to March 2003 compared favorably with those of the country’s own prime minister.

As for those in American politics with a special interest in Canada, the story is more complicated. The case of Senator Clinton demonstrates that the ongoing unease over border security can take bipartisan form and is likely to endure. As Michael Den Tandt it, ‘‘Hillary Clinton . . . did not take up Canada- bashing in a vacuum. She reflects a certain constituency.’’54 That said, there is another constituency which understands that Canada’s heretofore relatively untrammelled access to America is in America’s own interest and should be preserved to the fullest extent compatible with the needs of U.S. homeland security.

What, then, can be done by Washington to enhance homeland security and sustain healthy cooperation with Canada? First, the president might put in a good word from time to time for America’s neighbor, even if he cannot do the same for that neighbor’s governing party (at least until 2004, when it is assumed that former finance minister Paul Martin will assume the prime ministership).

53 See Richard Gwynn, ‘‘Americans Fire Back at Column,’’ Toronto Star, Dec. 17, 2002; Joel J. Sokolsky, ‘‘Between ‘Pulpit Diplomacy’ and the ‘Bully Pulpit’: The Axworthy Doctrine, Neo- Wilsonianism, and Canada-US Relations,’’ in David G. Haglund, ed., Over Here and Over There: Canada- US Defence Cooperation in an Era of Interoperability (Kingston, Ont.: Queen’s Quarterly, in cooperation with the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, 2001), pp. 49– 72; and Norman Spector, ‘‘Insults Are Our Chief Export,’’ Globe and Mail, Feb. 4, 2003.

54 Michael Den Tandt, ‘‘U.S. Needs Us as Much as We Need Them,’’ Globe and Mail, Jan. 30, 2003.

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Second, Washington should tone down its preaching on defense ‘‘burden-sharing.’’ This recommendation might seem at first blush counter- intuitive: Canada’s ambassador to France (and formerly the United States), Raymond Chrétien, has remarked that America must be the ‘‘only country on earth that actually wishes its neighbors had a stronger military.’’55 But most Canadian analysts understand the military to be underfunded and sense that too much overt American insistence that Canada spend more on defense could well have the opposite effect from what is needed. Besides, per-capita GDP allocated to defense is not a completely accurate means of depicting what countries actually do militarily. Whether one hefts one’s share of the burden cannot be known from gross indicators alone. If it were so easy to make this connection, then during the 1999 war against Serbia, Canada should have been among the least engaged of the coalition’s combatants, instead of having been one of the most active participants in Operation Allied Force.56

Third and finally, the United States should concentrate on what it really needs from Canada, which is obviously not military assistance overseas but assurance that the 1938 dispensation still holds. In this respect, military spending levels are less significant than budgetary allocations made to other departments and agencies with a more immediate role in homeland security. For while the proportions spent by each country on the military are massively lopsided in favor of the United States, the same cannot be said, for instance, of amounts allocated to intelligence and counterterrorism activities. Obviously, the United States will still be spending much more in absolute amounts than Canada, but the proportional difference between the two countries’ outlays is much more closely balanced, meaning that while on the military the United States spends more than 50 times what Canada does, when it comes to security domains such as intelligence, the difference is closer to the norm of 10:1 that would be predicted by the respective size of the two countries.57 Moreover, cross-border intelligence cooperation func- tions more smoothly than did cooperation between the United States’ FBI and CIA prior to 9/11 and perhaps even since.58

55 Chrétien address, ‘‘Les relations Canada-États-Unis-Europe,’’ Institut d’Études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, France, Feb. 6, 2003.

56 See Samuel J. Walker, ‘‘Interoperability at the Speed of Sound: Modernizing the CF-18 Hornet,’’ in Over Here and Over There, pp. 249–79; and David G. Haglund and Allen Sens, ‘‘Kosovo and the Case of the (Not So) Free Riders: Portugal, Belgium, Canada, and Spain,’’ in Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2000), pp. 181–200.

57 See Martin Rudner, ‘‘The Globalization of Terrorism: Canada’s Intelligence Response to the Post-September 11 Threat Environment,’’ Canadian Issues, September 2002, pp. 24–29.

58 James Risen and David Stout, ‘‘U.S. Seeks to Overhaul Intelligence Gathering,’’ International Herald Tribune, Dec. 12, 2002; and Dana Priest and DeNeen L. Brown, ‘‘Canada Targets Qaeda’s ‘Sleepers’,’’ International Herald Tribune, Dec. 26, 2002.

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Washington should continue pursuing jointly with Ottawa the dozens of proposals, tentatively agreed to in December 2001 and finalized in June 2002, that were intended to result in a ‘‘smart’’ border.59 Also, though not formally part of the smart-border initiative, an agreement has been reached between Washington and Ottawa that would allow troops from either country to cross the border in the event of a terrorist attack on the continent, as long as they operate under the host country’s national command.60

Most important, American officials should resist the temptation to conceptualize matters in terms of a security ‘‘perimeter’’ around the North American continent. It is not that keeping harm far away from the continent is a bad idea, but that the perimeter metaphor is less descriptive than certain other metaphors (e.g., picket) might be. More to the point, if taken seriously, a ‘‘perimeter’’ would likely lead to more difficulties than it would resolve, and in the event of mishap could result in a loss of the very trust it was supposed to preserve. A perimeter around the continent (at least north of the Rio Grande) would logically imply the erasing of the current Canadian-American border, for practical security purposes. This would have sovereignty implications for Canada, while it would hardly be a wise thing to do from the perspective of U.S. homeland security. Nor would it be good for Canada’s own interests if North American territory were safeguarded in such a way as to make Canada the last line of defense for the United States against terrorist attack. America’s own borders must remain that line.

To conclude, the border should become as ‘‘smart’’ as possible, with the use of the most advanced technology, including making identity cards with biometric capacities available to residents of either country. The goal must be to expedite the innocent passage of people and goods while improving the ability to stop unwanted transit between the countries.

The poet Robert Frost said it best: ‘‘Good fences make good neighbors.’’ But a good fence between neighbors who do trust each other must be one with efficient gates as well as effective barriers.

59 Campbell Clark, ‘‘Canada Reaches Border Deal with U.S.,’’ Globe and Mail, Dec. 1, 2001; Oliver Moore, ‘‘Manley, Ridge Laud Smart Border Program,’’ Globe and Mail, Dec. 6, 2002.

60 DeNeen L. Brown, ‘‘U.S., Canada Reach Agreement to Let Troops Cross Border,’’ Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2002.

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