(This article was originally written in 2001)
Canada is in danger and not just from terrorists.
While the military effort and Canada’s role in it are front and centre now, we must not lose sight of how the events of the past four weeks could alter our future as a nation, in particular our relationship with our powerful southern neighbour. We need to guard against taking hasty decisions in the heat of the moment whose consequences could be felt long after Osama bin Laden is forgotten.
Since September 11, there has been a concerted effort in important quarters to take advantage of the crisis to undermine this country’s sovereignty, to push us down the road to much closer integration with the United States. A makeshift alliance of opposition politicians, several provincial premiers, important business voices, the U.S. ambassador, former CSIS agents and hawkish pundits has been fanning the flames of anxiety to try to convince Canadians that we are no longer able to provide for our own security.
At times in the past few weeks, Joe Clark and Stockwell Day behaved as though they were desperate to find a Canadian connection to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. They set out to undermine the confidence of Canadians, not only in their own government, but also in the very idea that Canada could follow a course of its own in the present crisis.
No Canadian connection to the attacks of September 11 has been found---the hijackers arrived in the U.S. from Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. But many Canadians, not to mention the geographically challenged writers of the West Wing, have been panicked into believing that Canada is a haven for terrorists. The tale of Ahmed Ressam---who constructed a bomb in Vancouver in 1999 to use against a U.S. target and was caught by U.S. authorities in Washington State---has been constantly recycled. The Ressam case exposed major lapses in Canadian procedures, particularly in the lack of integration among CSIS, immigration authorities and police forces. The Ressam case however, paled beside the lapses in U.S. security that allowed the suicide hijackers to obtain driver’s licences and to train as pilots in Florida and Georgia.
We need to retool our security procedures. We need to ensure that communications between our agencies and those in the United States operate so as to satisfy Washington’s legitimate security concerns. What we do not need is to harmonize our rules with those of the U.S. and to set up a joint system for controlling entry into North America. From a security standpoint, with such a step we would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, arguably increasing the risk of terrorist attacks in Canada.
And such steps would take us further down a road of continental integration whose ultimate destination is the destruction of Canada as a sovereign state.
Now that the Chretien government has aligned itself with the U.S. military effort, there may be a phony peace with the continentalists, but not for long. It is clear, as it was well before September 11, that a concerted minority of business and opinion leading elites will not be satisfied until we are all carrying U.S. passports and electing senators and congressmen. During the free trade election in 1988, a Liberal television ad accused the Mulroney government of wanting to wipe out the Canada-U.S. border. The Tories responded with their own ad in which they firmly drew the border back onto the map. They only wanted free trade not the end of Canada, they replied indignantly.
Today the same forces that brought us free trade want to harmonize our immigration, refugee and visa policies with those of the U.S. with the ultimate goal of eliminating the border. It is easy to see where the agenda goes from there. The next step would be the creation of a North American currency---some want to call it the Amero---or the adoption by Canada of the U.S. dollar. At most we would then get one seat on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, ending our control over our own monetary policy.
By this point, Canada would be little more than a protectorate of the United States, a northern Puerto Rico. We would not be Americans, but we would not be citizens of a real country either. We would be in limbo, somewhere between our national past and a possible American future.
Those who have been pushing the continentalist agenda would then argue that we ought to opt for entry into the American union since the House of Commons was no longer running anything very meaningful. With any luck we might get to become five American states, they would tell us.
But that would not be the end of our limbo. The U.S. Republican Party, well aware that Canadians have a much more liberal voting record than Americans, would recoil in horror from the prospect of millions of new voters who could hand Congress and the presidency to the Democrats for decades. They now oppose statehood for Puerto Rico because it poses a much smaller version of this problem.
Once finally inside the American union, we would be directly involved in all of America’s wars in the coming decades. It would be our sons and daughters who would pay the price.
Pierre Trudeau once said that the destruction of Canada would be a crime against humanity. He was speaking of the threat of Quebec separatism. Now the threat comes from a determined political force operating on both sides of the border.
It’s still not too late for Canadians to wake up and make it clear that we do not intend to allow our country to be a collateral victim of a terrorist attack.
Canada is in danger and not just from terrorists.
While the military effort and Canada’s role in it are front and centre now, we must not lose sight of how the events of the past four weeks could alter our future as a nation, in particular our relationship with our powerful southern neighbour. We need to guard against taking hasty decisions in the heat of the moment whose consequences could be felt long after Osama bin Laden is forgotten.
Since September 11, there has been a concerted effort in important quarters to take advantage of the crisis to undermine this country’s sovereignty, to push us down the road to much closer integration with the United States. A makeshift alliance of opposition politicians, several provincial premiers, important business voices, the U.S. ambassador, former CSIS agents and hawkish pundits has been fanning the flames of anxiety to try to convince Canadians that we are no longer able to provide for our own security.
At times in the past few weeks, Joe Clark and Stockwell Day behaved as though they were desperate to find a Canadian connection to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. They set out to undermine the confidence of Canadians, not only in their own government, but also in the very idea that Canada could follow a course of its own in the present crisis.
No Canadian connection to the attacks of September 11 has been found---the hijackers arrived in the U.S. from Britain, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. But many Canadians, not to mention the geographically challenged writers of the West Wing, have been panicked into believing that Canada is a haven for terrorists. The tale of Ahmed Ressam---who constructed a bomb in Vancouver in 1999 to use against a U.S. target and was caught by U.S. authorities in Washington State---has been constantly recycled. The Ressam case exposed major lapses in Canadian procedures, particularly in the lack of integration among CSIS, immigration authorities and police forces. The Ressam case however, paled beside the lapses in U.S. security that allowed the suicide hijackers to obtain driver’s licences and to train as pilots in Florida and Georgia.
We need to retool our security procedures. We need to ensure that communications between our agencies and those in the United States operate so as to satisfy Washington’s legitimate security concerns. What we do not need is to harmonize our rules with those of the U.S. and to set up a joint system for controlling entry into North America. From a security standpoint, with such a step we would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, arguably increasing the risk of terrorist attacks in Canada.
And such steps would take us further down a road of continental integration whose ultimate destination is the destruction of Canada as a sovereign state.
Now that the Chretien government has aligned itself with the U.S. military effort, there may be a phony peace with the continentalists, but not for long. It is clear, as it was well before September 11, that a concerted minority of business and opinion leading elites will not be satisfied until we are all carrying U.S. passports and electing senators and congressmen. During the free trade election in 1988, a Liberal television ad accused the Mulroney government of wanting to wipe out the Canada-U.S. border. The Tories responded with their own ad in which they firmly drew the border back onto the map. They only wanted free trade not the end of Canada, they replied indignantly.
Today the same forces that brought us free trade want to harmonize our immigration, refugee and visa policies with those of the U.S. with the ultimate goal of eliminating the border. It is easy to see where the agenda goes from there. The next step would be the creation of a North American currency---some want to call it the Amero---or the adoption by Canada of the U.S. dollar. At most we would then get one seat on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, ending our control over our own monetary policy.
By this point, Canada would be little more than a protectorate of the United States, a northern Puerto Rico. We would not be Americans, but we would not be citizens of a real country either. We would be in limbo, somewhere between our national past and a possible American future.
Those who have been pushing the continentalist agenda would then argue that we ought to opt for entry into the American union since the House of Commons was no longer running anything very meaningful. With any luck we might get to become five American states, they would tell us.
But that would not be the end of our limbo. The U.S. Republican Party, well aware that Canadians have a much more liberal voting record than Americans, would recoil in horror from the prospect of millions of new voters who could hand Congress and the presidency to the Democrats for decades. They now oppose statehood for Puerto Rico because it poses a much smaller version of this problem.
Once finally inside the American union, we would be directly involved in all of America’s wars in the coming decades. It would be our sons and daughters who would pay the price.
Pierre Trudeau once said that the destruction of Canada would be a crime against humanity. He was speaking of the threat of Quebec separatism. Now the threat comes from a determined political force operating on both sides of the border.
It’s still not too late for Canadians to wake up and make it clear that we do not intend to allow our country to be a collateral victim of a terrorist attack.
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