1963 Fredericton Encaenia
Graduation Address
Delivered by: Fulbright, James William
Content
"The North American Partnership" (16 May 1963). (UA Case 67, Box 2)
When asked what he things about Canadians, the average American is likely to hesitate a moment and then reply: "Canadians? Why, they’re just like us."
This attitude, I am told, is not one which is widely appreciated in Canada. It is the source of a basic, and legitimate, grievance of Canadians toward their southern neighbor: the carelessness, and at time callousness, of a very large nation in its relations with a smaller one. At the same time, the failure of many Americans to appreciate the special and separate Canadian identity is partially the result of a long history of our relations been one of conflict rather than cooperation, of alienation rather than confidence in each other’s motives and purposes. In fact, the assumption that Canadians "are just like us" is a great compliment when one remembers the high regard in which most Americans hold themselves.
Indeed, to a very considerable extent, we are alike. We communicate with ease, if not always without recrimination, and we are regarded by the world overseas, for better or worse, with similar attitudes and prejudices. When Rupert Brooke visited North America shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he summed up the residents of Toronto in much the same words that an educated Englishman would apply to Memphis or Milwaukee: "They are," he said, "healthily and simply, the most fitting products of a not perfect environment; good sports; normal, but not too normal; distinctly themselves, but not distinguished. They support civilization. You can trust them in anything, if your demand be for nothing extremely intelligent or absurdly altruistic…"1
If Canadians and Americans are to cope realistically with their differences and problems, it is important that these be seen in a realistic perspective. Our differences are neither trivial and irrelevant, as some of my own countrymen seem to believe, nor, on the other hand, are they profound and lasting conflicts of interest. While there is little useful purpose in the repetition of tiresome sentimentalities about our unfortified frontier, there is serious mischief in the magnification of our problems beyond the limited, concrete issues that they actually involve. Our differences are the normal irritations of a close and lasting partnership. They are important but they are far less important than the common problems of our two countries in relation to the outside world. The dominant fact in Canadian-American relations is the partnership of North America, a partnership for the security and freedom of this continent in a world in which these are more gravely challenged than at any time since the first English and French settlers landed on our shores.
With this perspective in mind I should like to comment on some of the problems of our two countries, of which the most fundamental, I believe, is the inherent imbalance – political, economic, and cultural – between a small society which wishes to maintain its sovereign identity and a very large society which does not always understand its own impact on its friends and neighbors.
At its worst American insensitivity has taken the form of aggrieved surprise that our neighbors might have had misgivings about our pretensions to a "Manifest Destiny." Few Americans recall that ringing calls for the annexation of Canada have been recurrent in our history. As early as 1776 John Adams proclaimed: "The unanimous voice of this continent is that Canada must be ours." In 1812, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The annexation of Canada this year…will be a mere matter of marching." As Canadians may recall, the march was attempted in that year, with results that fell short of American expectations.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the annexation movement took on comic opera qualities – although Canadians may not have seen the humor of it at the time. In 1869, for example, Senator Charles Sumner, the Chairman of the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, magnanimously offered to accept the cession of Canada in full settlement of the Alabama claims controversy. In 1911, Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, managed single-handedly to defeat a tariff reciprocity bill and the generate a major crisis in Canada by declaring his support for the bill in these words: "I am for it because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of British North American possessions clear to the North Pole." The annexation movement came to a suitable anticlimax when in 1953 an American Congressman (Representative Timothy Sheehan of Illinois) proposed that a committee be established to consider a union of Canada and the United States. The response in both countries was less than overwhelming.
At the risk of presumptuousness in guessing the future, I think I can assure you that the annexation movement is at an end – unless Canada should contemplate the annexation of the United States. This, of course, is a matter for Canadians to consider, but if the matter of annexation should ever come up I suggest that you consider carefully what you might be bargaining for. Frankly, I would not advise it.
In recent years there have been regrettable and unnecessary instances of American insensitivity toward Canada. The tragic death of a Canadian diplomat (E. Herbert Norman, Ambassador to Egypt) in 1957 may very well have been connected with the irresponsible airing of accusations against him by a United States Senate subcommittee. It does not seem appropriate at this time to comment in detail on the public recriminations about defense policy which were exchanged earlier this year between the United States Department of State and the Canadian Government, except to observe that the ill feeling engendered by that exchange could have been avoided by greater patience and restraint on both sides. The agreements reached last week at Hyannisport between Prime Minister Pearson and President Kennedy are not only valid in substance; the manner in whish they were reached – through intimate and informal discussion – is a true expression of the North American partnership, of the easy familiarity between tow peoples who know and understand each other, whose differences are of small account compared to their shared interests and values.
Perhaps the occasional lapses of understanding between Canada and the United States have something to do with the very different ways in which the two countries won their freedom and independence. So deeply rooted in American thought is the heritage of the Revolution of 1776 that we have tended to discount the evolutionary road to freedom. We have in some respects misunderstood our own Revolution, which far from being a profound upheaval like the French and Russian Revolutions, was a conservative revolution aimed at recovering liberties which had already been won and were only momentarily being infringed. The important point is that, rightly or wrongly, we Americans have thought of ourselves as a revolutionary nation and have not fully understood that it was possible for a nation to win full independence by the evolutionary practice of self-government. Equating empire with tyranny, we found it difficult to understand that Canada neither felt exploited nor desired to rebel against the British Empire. With this outlook Americans were slow to accept the fact of Canadian nationhood and to appreciate the fact that Canada had attained an undiluted national identity within a Commonwealth of Nations.
The traditional American attitude toward Canada’s national evolution was one of disbelief and puzzlement. Many Americans simply could not understand why a freedom-loving people did not rebel against British rule and apply for membership in the American union. We were puzzled by the apparent unresponsiveness of Canadians to our "benevolent" continentalism, even more by period outbursts of anti-Americanism as expressed in such slogans as "No Truck or Trade with the Yankees."
We Americans, it has been said, are "a people of the covenant," imbued with a certain sense of mission derived from the ideas of our Declaration of Independence and our written Constitution. This strand of American thought has been an obstacle to understanding Canada, for Canada, as a contemporary historian has put it, "is not the creation of a covenant, or a social compact embodied in a Declaration of Independence and written constitution. It is the product of treaty and statute, the dry legal instruments of the diplomat and the legislator. It is the pragmatic achievement of the little regarded labors of clerks in the Colonial Office and obscure provincial politicians, still unknown to the world."2 This, of course, was written before Mr. Pearson became your Prime Minister.
The high degree of mutual respect and admiration that is now the controlling factor in Canadian-America relations is largely the result of growing maturity in both countries and their coming of age in the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the United States on the one side of Canada and Great Britain on the other developed techniques for the peaceful settlement of disputes which remain models for the world. The arbitration of the controversy over fur seals in the Bering Sea in 1892, the Alaskan boundary arbitration of 1903, and the settlement of the historic North America fisheries question by the Hague Tribunal in 1909 not only solved these issues of Canadian-American relations but became models for the techniques of peaceful settlement which were incorporated into the League of Nations Covenant and the United Nations Charter.
In recent years Canada and the United States have undertaken cooperative enterprises that have contributed to the prosperity and security of both countries. Perhaps the most impressive of these is the St. Lawrence Seaway, which despite its slow start, has opened the heart of the North American continent to seagoing vessels. I am hopeful, and confident, that existing difficulties regarding the development of the Columbia River will soon be removed, opening the way to important economic benefits for both Canada and the United States. In the field of defense, Canadian-American partnership has been a vital factor in the security of our two countries since the establishment of the Permanent Joint Board of Defense under the Ogdensburg agreement of August 1940.
During and since World War II Canada and the United States have come to regard the defense of the North American continent as a single indivisible enterprise. More perhaps than we have shown, we Americans value the assurance which was given by the Governor-General in an address to the United States Congress on May 4, 1954. "In the far North," he said, "we are working with you to strengthen the defenses of this continent on our territory and on yours…You may depend on us as faithful friends and comrades."3
Since the outbreak of the World War I Canada has been prompt and unstinting n its acceptance of responsibility toward the defense of the entire free world. In the First World War Canada took up arms in August 1914 while the United States waited until 1917 and in the Second World War Canada entered the conflict at its outset in 1939 while the United States remained neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Citing these dates is not a mere historical exercise; they serve to remind both Canadians and their free world partners that Canada has never regarded freedom as a casual gift, that she has been prepared to defend it as soon as it has been threatened without seeking an illusory security in isolation or neutrality.
Now, more than ever, the role of Canada is a vital one for the defense of North America and of the entire free world. The warning and tracking devices emplaced on Canadian soil provide the vital warning time essential for the American nuclear strike force to be activated in the even of Soviet attack. In no sense foes the United States regard Canada as a potential "decoy" for Soviet missiles or bombers, despite any unfortunate statements which may have suggested this. The importance of the early warning system is to protect the nuclear retaliatory capacity of the United States, which represents the ultimate and indispensable deterrent against an attack on Canada or the United States or any country of the free world. The establishment of NORAD (The North American Air Defense Command) was based on the recognition by the governments in Ottawa and Washington that the defense of the free world is indivisible and that, for the time being at least, the foundation of free world defense is the nuclear retaliatory capacity of the United States.
Since 1949 Canada has contributed to free world defense in many different ways. The most important of these by far is the early warning function which Canada alone can perform. Recent controversies on defense within the Western Alliance have been based on the faulty premise that individual members of the Alliance were being asked to sacrifice a part of their own security for the benefit of one or another of their partners. This assumption is false precisely because of the indivisibility of free world defense. The real problem of Western defense is to devise the most efficient possible division of labor among the Allies for the security of all of them, with each partner making a contribution appropriate to its resources and its geographical position.
It goes without saying that each member of the Alliance must make the ultimate decisions regarding its contribution to free world defense. It is to be hoped, however, that these decisions will be made in realistic terms, in terms, that is, of the collective defense of the free world as a whole. If this involves the sacrifice of unfettered national sovereignty by the members of the Alliance – as indeed it does – we can perhaps derive some consolation from the fact that this sacrifice is required of all of the Western partners, including the largest and most powerful, because the substantial reduction of some measures of sovereign rights it the minimum price of survival in a world of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.
The special burden of North American and free world partnership for Canada is its accentuation of the overall problems of preserving the identity of a small society living in close proximity to a very large one. Canadians are quite properly concerned with the extensive, and not entirely solicited, involvement of the United States in Canadian life, not only in defense matters but in the economic and cultural life of the Canadian people. This is primarily the result of the fact that the United States is so big. The United States, of course, cannot help its size, and I think it a fair assessment of American policy toward Canada in this century that while the United States has been at times clumsy and insensitive, it has never been demanding, overbearing, or threatening.
It is nonetheless exceedingly difficult under these circumstances for the Canadian people to maintain undiluted the special characteristic and the "national style" which have enabled Canada to play an important and valuable role in the world. In the moderate and balanced view of the Massey Commission Report of 1951: "Every intelligent Canadian acknowledges his debt to the United States for excellent films, radio programs and periodicals. But the price may be excessive… our national radio which carries the Sunday symphony from New York also carries the soap opera…we receive many admirable American journals but also a flood of others much less admirable which is threatening to submerge completely our national product…It cannot be denied that a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort…"4
Americans can and should show greater understanding of this problem than they have shown in the past. At the same time the problem, by its very nature, is one which only Canadians can solve. Expressions of resentment against the United States for its social and cultural impact are, in my opinion, both unfair and irrelevant. No one compels Canada, or any other country, to read American magazines, view American television and movies, or, indeed, to accept American investment. These are the result of proximity and preference, and if Canadians wish to modify their impact, it is only they who can do so.
In world politics, it seems to me, Canada has maintained a distinct identity. In the years since World War II Canada has playing a more constructive and effective role in world affairs than many larger nations. Canadians have made a major contribution to work peace through their strong support of the United Nations and in many other ways. The world is indebted to Canada for her leadership and for the creative initiative of Lester Pearson in the settlement of the Suez Crisis of 1956. As a member of the International Control Commission for Indo-Chine, Canada has helped to sustain the tenuous neutrality of Laos and to prevent the worsening of the intermittent conflict over that country.
If I may say so, I believe that Canada can and should play an even more positive role in world affairs in the years to come. I for one would very much like to see Canadian initiatives in such fields as United Nations finance, the control of nuclear weapons, and problems of defense and trade in the Atlantic Alliance.
As I suggested earlier in these remarks, the most important problems faced by Canada and the United States are not those which divide us but those which are common to us in our relations with the outside world. Besides defense, the most important of these, in my opinion, is the need for a liberal free world trading community.
Both Canada and the United States are confronted with mounting competition for world markets from the resurgent industrial economies of Europe and Japan. At the same time the Canadian and American economies are suffering from general sluggishness and high unemployment. The formation and great success of the Common Market pose for our two countries the danger which has been intensified by the exclusion of Great Britain from the European Community and mounting indications that the Community is heading toward a protectionist agricultural policy.
It is manifestly in the interests of Canada, Great Britain, the United States and other countries to concert their efforts for a general worldwide reduction of tariffs. Under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 the United States is well equipped to mount such an effort and it is our hope that Canada and other countries will join with us in an organized effort to reduce barriers to trade. In a rapidly industrializing world no country, especially a small country, can hope to sustain a high and rising standard of living except by concentrating on those products which it can produce most efficiently, and by maintaining sufficient flexibility to be able to develop new competitive lines of production as the need may arise.
For this purpose a general reduction of world trade barriers is essential. The spur of competition and the general expansion of world trade could have the effect of stimulating more rapid economic growth in Canada and the United States and of substantially alleviating our present unemployment problem.
The challenge of trade is of course part of the broader problem of shaping a durable partnership of the North Atlantic and the entire free world. In the building of such a partnership the interests of Canada and the United States are not identical in every detail but they are as near to being identical as the interests of two separate sovereign nations can be. Our hope for security and prosperity and for the preservation of free institutions in North America bind us together in the common enterprise of forging a worldwide concert of free nations. It is this common task, rather than specific bilateral issues, that constitutes the vital core of Canadian-American relations. Our prospects for success in this task are powerfully enhanced by what Arnold Heeney (Chairman of the Canadian section of the Canadian-American International Joint Commission) has called the "desirable sanity and permanence in our relations."
1From Letters from America (1916). Quoted in Joseph Barber, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1958), p. 17.
2W.L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 85.
3Quoted in Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 4th ed., (New York: Hewey Holt & Co., 1955) p. 802.
4Quoted in Barber, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, p. 74.
When asked what he things about Canadians, the average American is likely to hesitate a moment and then reply: "Canadians? Why, they’re just like us."
This attitude, I am told, is not one which is widely appreciated in Canada. It is the source of a basic, and legitimate, grievance of Canadians toward their southern neighbor: the carelessness, and at time callousness, of a very large nation in its relations with a smaller one. At the same time, the failure of many Americans to appreciate the special and separate Canadian identity is partially the result of a long history of our relations been one of conflict rather than cooperation, of alienation rather than confidence in each other’s motives and purposes. In fact, the assumption that Canadians "are just like us" is a great compliment when one remembers the high regard in which most Americans hold themselves.
Indeed, to a very considerable extent, we are alike. We communicate with ease, if not always without recrimination, and we are regarded by the world overseas, for better or worse, with similar attitudes and prejudices. When Rupert Brooke visited North America shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he summed up the residents of Toronto in much the same words that an educated Englishman would apply to Memphis or Milwaukee: "They are," he said, "healthily and simply, the most fitting products of a not perfect environment; good sports; normal, but not too normal; distinctly themselves, but not distinguished. They support civilization. You can trust them in anything, if your demand be for nothing extremely intelligent or absurdly altruistic…"1
If Canadians and Americans are to cope realistically with their differences and problems, it is important that these be seen in a realistic perspective. Our differences are neither trivial and irrelevant, as some of my own countrymen seem to believe, nor, on the other hand, are they profound and lasting conflicts of interest. While there is little useful purpose in the repetition of tiresome sentimentalities about our unfortified frontier, there is serious mischief in the magnification of our problems beyond the limited, concrete issues that they actually involve. Our differences are the normal irritations of a close and lasting partnership. They are important but they are far less important than the common problems of our two countries in relation to the outside world. The dominant fact in Canadian-American relations is the partnership of North America, a partnership for the security and freedom of this continent in a world in which these are more gravely challenged than at any time since the first English and French settlers landed on our shores.
With this perspective in mind I should like to comment on some of the problems of our two countries, of which the most fundamental, I believe, is the inherent imbalance – political, economic, and cultural – between a small society which wishes to maintain its sovereign identity and a very large society which does not always understand its own impact on its friends and neighbors.
At its worst American insensitivity has taken the form of aggrieved surprise that our neighbors might have had misgivings about our pretensions to a "Manifest Destiny." Few Americans recall that ringing calls for the annexation of Canada have been recurrent in our history. As early as 1776 John Adams proclaimed: "The unanimous voice of this continent is that Canada must be ours." In 1812, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The annexation of Canada this year…will be a mere matter of marching." As Canadians may recall, the march was attempted in that year, with results that fell short of American expectations.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the annexation movement took on comic opera qualities – although Canadians may not have seen the humor of it at the time. In 1869, for example, Senator Charles Sumner, the Chairman of the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, magnanimously offered to accept the cession of Canada in full settlement of the Alabama claims controversy. In 1911, Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, managed single-handedly to defeat a tariff reciprocity bill and the generate a major crisis in Canada by declaring his support for the bill in these words: "I am for it because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of British North American possessions clear to the North Pole." The annexation movement came to a suitable anticlimax when in 1953 an American Congressman (Representative Timothy Sheehan of Illinois) proposed that a committee be established to consider a union of Canada and the United States. The response in both countries was less than overwhelming.
At the risk of presumptuousness in guessing the future, I think I can assure you that the annexation movement is at an end – unless Canada should contemplate the annexation of the United States. This, of course, is a matter for Canadians to consider, but if the matter of annexation should ever come up I suggest that you consider carefully what you might be bargaining for. Frankly, I would not advise it.
In recent years there have been regrettable and unnecessary instances of American insensitivity toward Canada. The tragic death of a Canadian diplomat (E. Herbert Norman, Ambassador to Egypt) in 1957 may very well have been connected with the irresponsible airing of accusations against him by a United States Senate subcommittee. It does not seem appropriate at this time to comment in detail on the public recriminations about defense policy which were exchanged earlier this year between the United States Department of State and the Canadian Government, except to observe that the ill feeling engendered by that exchange could have been avoided by greater patience and restraint on both sides. The agreements reached last week at Hyannisport between Prime Minister Pearson and President Kennedy are not only valid in substance; the manner in whish they were reached – through intimate and informal discussion – is a true expression of the North American partnership, of the easy familiarity between tow peoples who know and understand each other, whose differences are of small account compared to their shared interests and values.
Perhaps the occasional lapses of understanding between Canada and the United States have something to do with the very different ways in which the two countries won their freedom and independence. So deeply rooted in American thought is the heritage of the Revolution of 1776 that we have tended to discount the evolutionary road to freedom. We have in some respects misunderstood our own Revolution, which far from being a profound upheaval like the French and Russian Revolutions, was a conservative revolution aimed at recovering liberties which had already been won and were only momentarily being infringed. The important point is that, rightly or wrongly, we Americans have thought of ourselves as a revolutionary nation and have not fully understood that it was possible for a nation to win full independence by the evolutionary practice of self-government. Equating empire with tyranny, we found it difficult to understand that Canada neither felt exploited nor desired to rebel against the British Empire. With this outlook Americans were slow to accept the fact of Canadian nationhood and to appreciate the fact that Canada had attained an undiluted national identity within a Commonwealth of Nations.
The traditional American attitude toward Canada’s national evolution was one of disbelief and puzzlement. Many Americans simply could not understand why a freedom-loving people did not rebel against British rule and apply for membership in the American union. We were puzzled by the apparent unresponsiveness of Canadians to our "benevolent" continentalism, even more by period outbursts of anti-Americanism as expressed in such slogans as "No Truck or Trade with the Yankees."
We Americans, it has been said, are "a people of the covenant," imbued with a certain sense of mission derived from the ideas of our Declaration of Independence and our written Constitution. This strand of American thought has been an obstacle to understanding Canada, for Canada, as a contemporary historian has put it, "is not the creation of a covenant, or a social compact embodied in a Declaration of Independence and written constitution. It is the product of treaty and statute, the dry legal instruments of the diplomat and the legislator. It is the pragmatic achievement of the little regarded labors of clerks in the Colonial Office and obscure provincial politicians, still unknown to the world."2 This, of course, was written before Mr. Pearson became your Prime Minister.
The high degree of mutual respect and admiration that is now the controlling factor in Canadian-America relations is largely the result of growing maturity in both countries and their coming of age in the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the United States on the one side of Canada and Great Britain on the other developed techniques for the peaceful settlement of disputes which remain models for the world. The arbitration of the controversy over fur seals in the Bering Sea in 1892, the Alaskan boundary arbitration of 1903, and the settlement of the historic North America fisheries question by the Hague Tribunal in 1909 not only solved these issues of Canadian-American relations but became models for the techniques of peaceful settlement which were incorporated into the League of Nations Covenant and the United Nations Charter.
In recent years Canada and the United States have undertaken cooperative enterprises that have contributed to the prosperity and security of both countries. Perhaps the most impressive of these is the St. Lawrence Seaway, which despite its slow start, has opened the heart of the North American continent to seagoing vessels. I am hopeful, and confident, that existing difficulties regarding the development of the Columbia River will soon be removed, opening the way to important economic benefits for both Canada and the United States. In the field of defense, Canadian-American partnership has been a vital factor in the security of our two countries since the establishment of the Permanent Joint Board of Defense under the Ogdensburg agreement of August 1940.
During and since World War II Canada and the United States have come to regard the defense of the North American continent as a single indivisible enterprise. More perhaps than we have shown, we Americans value the assurance which was given by the Governor-General in an address to the United States Congress on May 4, 1954. "In the far North," he said, "we are working with you to strengthen the defenses of this continent on our territory and on yours…You may depend on us as faithful friends and comrades."3
Since the outbreak of the World War I Canada has been prompt and unstinting n its acceptance of responsibility toward the defense of the entire free world. In the First World War Canada took up arms in August 1914 while the United States waited until 1917 and in the Second World War Canada entered the conflict at its outset in 1939 while the United States remained neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Citing these dates is not a mere historical exercise; they serve to remind both Canadians and their free world partners that Canada has never regarded freedom as a casual gift, that she has been prepared to defend it as soon as it has been threatened without seeking an illusory security in isolation or neutrality.
Now, more than ever, the role of Canada is a vital one for the defense of North America and of the entire free world. The warning and tracking devices emplaced on Canadian soil provide the vital warning time essential for the American nuclear strike force to be activated in the even of Soviet attack. In no sense foes the United States regard Canada as a potential "decoy" for Soviet missiles or bombers, despite any unfortunate statements which may have suggested this. The importance of the early warning system is to protect the nuclear retaliatory capacity of the United States, which represents the ultimate and indispensable deterrent against an attack on Canada or the United States or any country of the free world. The establishment of NORAD (The North American Air Defense Command) was based on the recognition by the governments in Ottawa and Washington that the defense of the free world is indivisible and that, for the time being at least, the foundation of free world defense is the nuclear retaliatory capacity of the United States.
Since 1949 Canada has contributed to free world defense in many different ways. The most important of these by far is the early warning function which Canada alone can perform. Recent controversies on defense within the Western Alliance have been based on the faulty premise that individual members of the Alliance were being asked to sacrifice a part of their own security for the benefit of one or another of their partners. This assumption is false precisely because of the indivisibility of free world defense. The real problem of Western defense is to devise the most efficient possible division of labor among the Allies for the security of all of them, with each partner making a contribution appropriate to its resources and its geographical position.
It goes without saying that each member of the Alliance must make the ultimate decisions regarding its contribution to free world defense. It is to be hoped, however, that these decisions will be made in realistic terms, in terms, that is, of the collective defense of the free world as a whole. If this involves the sacrifice of unfettered national sovereignty by the members of the Alliance – as indeed it does – we can perhaps derive some consolation from the fact that this sacrifice is required of all of the Western partners, including the largest and most powerful, because the substantial reduction of some measures of sovereign rights it the minimum price of survival in a world of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.
The special burden of North American and free world partnership for Canada is its accentuation of the overall problems of preserving the identity of a small society living in close proximity to a very large one. Canadians are quite properly concerned with the extensive, and not entirely solicited, involvement of the United States in Canadian life, not only in defense matters but in the economic and cultural life of the Canadian people. This is primarily the result of the fact that the United States is so big. The United States, of course, cannot help its size, and I think it a fair assessment of American policy toward Canada in this century that while the United States has been at times clumsy and insensitive, it has never been demanding, overbearing, or threatening.
It is nonetheless exceedingly difficult under these circumstances for the Canadian people to maintain undiluted the special characteristic and the "national style" which have enabled Canada to play an important and valuable role in the world. In the moderate and balanced view of the Massey Commission Report of 1951: "Every intelligent Canadian acknowledges his debt to the United States for excellent films, radio programs and periodicals. But the price may be excessive… our national radio which carries the Sunday symphony from New York also carries the soap opera…we receive many admirable American journals but also a flood of others much less admirable which is threatening to submerge completely our national product…It cannot be denied that a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort…"4
Americans can and should show greater understanding of this problem than they have shown in the past. At the same time the problem, by its very nature, is one which only Canadians can solve. Expressions of resentment against the United States for its social and cultural impact are, in my opinion, both unfair and irrelevant. No one compels Canada, or any other country, to read American magazines, view American television and movies, or, indeed, to accept American investment. These are the result of proximity and preference, and if Canadians wish to modify their impact, it is only they who can do so.
In world politics, it seems to me, Canada has maintained a distinct identity. In the years since World War II Canada has playing a more constructive and effective role in world affairs than many larger nations. Canadians have made a major contribution to work peace through their strong support of the United Nations and in many other ways. The world is indebted to Canada for her leadership and for the creative initiative of Lester Pearson in the settlement of the Suez Crisis of 1956. As a member of the International Control Commission for Indo-Chine, Canada has helped to sustain the tenuous neutrality of Laos and to prevent the worsening of the intermittent conflict over that country.
If I may say so, I believe that Canada can and should play an even more positive role in world affairs in the years to come. I for one would very much like to see Canadian initiatives in such fields as United Nations finance, the control of nuclear weapons, and problems of defense and trade in the Atlantic Alliance.
As I suggested earlier in these remarks, the most important problems faced by Canada and the United States are not those which divide us but those which are common to us in our relations with the outside world. Besides defense, the most important of these, in my opinion, is the need for a liberal free world trading community.
Both Canada and the United States are confronted with mounting competition for world markets from the resurgent industrial economies of Europe and Japan. At the same time the Canadian and American economies are suffering from general sluggishness and high unemployment. The formation and great success of the Common Market pose for our two countries the danger which has been intensified by the exclusion of Great Britain from the European Community and mounting indications that the Community is heading toward a protectionist agricultural policy.
It is manifestly in the interests of Canada, Great Britain, the United States and other countries to concert their efforts for a general worldwide reduction of tariffs. Under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 the United States is well equipped to mount such an effort and it is our hope that Canada and other countries will join with us in an organized effort to reduce barriers to trade. In a rapidly industrializing world no country, especially a small country, can hope to sustain a high and rising standard of living except by concentrating on those products which it can produce most efficiently, and by maintaining sufficient flexibility to be able to develop new competitive lines of production as the need may arise.
For this purpose a general reduction of world trade barriers is essential. The spur of competition and the general expansion of world trade could have the effect of stimulating more rapid economic growth in Canada and the United States and of substantially alleviating our present unemployment problem.
The challenge of trade is of course part of the broader problem of shaping a durable partnership of the North Atlantic and the entire free world. In the building of such a partnership the interests of Canada and the United States are not identical in every detail but they are as near to being identical as the interests of two separate sovereign nations can be. Our hope for security and prosperity and for the preservation of free institutions in North America bind us together in the common enterprise of forging a worldwide concert of free nations. It is this common task, rather than specific bilateral issues, that constitutes the vital core of Canadian-American relations. Our prospects for success in this task are powerfully enhanced by what Arnold Heeney (Chairman of the Canadian section of the Canadian-American International Joint Commission) has called the "desirable sanity and permanence in our relations."
1From Letters from America (1916). Quoted in Joseph Barber, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1958), p. 17.
2W.L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 85.
3Quoted in Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 4th ed., (New York: Hewey Holt & Co., 1955) p. 802.
4Quoted in Barber, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, p. 74.
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