The Bush administration is the first in decades to appear anxious to pick fights with Canada. Relations frayed in 2002, and the administration, for reasons that defy comprehension, seems intent on making them worse.
As Toronto’s Globe and Mail noted yesterday, the U.S. ambassador to Canada has decided it’s a good idea to meddle in the country’s upcoming election by going after the ruling party.
The United States launched an exceptional mid-campaign rebuke yesterday of the Liberal government’s constant criticism of the Bush administration, bringing the high level of tensions between the world’s two biggest trading partners to the forefront of the Canadian election.
“It may be smart election-year politics to thump your chest and constantly criticize your friend and your No. 1 trading partner. But it is a slippery slope, and all of us should hope that it doesn’t have a long-term impact on the relationship,” the U.S. ambassador to Ottawa, David Wilkins, said in a tough speech to the Canadian Club at the Chateau Laurier.
If that sounded to you like a subtle threat from the ambassador, then we’re on the same page. In response, Prime Minister Paul Martin returned rhetorical fire.
Prime Minister Paul Martin escalated a war of words with the United States on Wednesday, telling Washington not to dictate to him what topics he can raise in the run-up to Canada’s January 23 election. […]
Martin — who has regularly attacked the U.S. stance on a bilateral trade dispute over softwood lumber and also criticized Washington’s approach to climate change — took aim at Wilkins’ warning for a second consecutive day.
“When it comes to defending Canadian values, when it comes to standing up for Canadian interests, I’m going to call it like I see it,” he told reporters in a lumber yard in Richmond, British Columbia. “I am not going to be dictated to as to the subjects I should raise.”
As you’d imagine, all of this is pretty huge news north of the border, where what’s left of our diplomatic standing is slipping even further past its already-low point.
It seems there are three important angles to this story, at least as far as the politics goes.
One, the idea that the United States would interfere with Canadian elections by specifically and publicly criticizing one political party is painfully ridiculous. As Josh Marshall said, “[I]t’s the essence of diplomatic etiquette that foreign ambassadors simply don’t poke their noses into their host country’s election campaigns, especially not to tell them not to criticize his country.”
Two, Ambassador Wilkins may be too tone-deaf to realize it, but by criticizing Canada’s Liberal Party a month before voters go to the polls, he’s inadvertently helping the very people he’s condemning. Wilkins is under the bizarre notion that the United States’ standing is so strong in Canada that his criticisms will necessarily carry weight. He has the entire political dynamic backwards — Liberals will get a boost, which is why the Tories have been awfully quiet during this flap. The sooner the administration realizes that it’s terribly unpopular throughout the world, the less foolish they’ll appear.
And three, it’s the latest in a long line of dust-ups between the Bush administration and Canada. It started poorly in 2000 when Bush didn’t know the prime minister’s name (and didn’t know Canada doesn’t endorse American presidential candidates). Conditions went from bad to worse after the war in Iraq began, reaching a point in which some Canadian lawmakers considered expelling then-Ambassador Paul Cellucci from the country.
Does anyone care to hazard a guess as to how long it will take for American diplomacy to undo the damage done during the Bush years?