Why Canadians Stay Out Of American Wars

At the end of the 19th century, the Spanish-American war propelled U.S. marines into Cuba and the Philippines, and this was soon followed by a truculent U.S. posture in a dispute over the boundary between Alaska and Canada. For Canadians, the U.S. military was becoming associated with occupations of distant lands and even with threats to Canada itself. In 1961, when the Kennedy administration financed and dispatched anti-Castro Cubans to the Bay of Pigs, not a few Canadians, including members of the Diefenbaker government, chuckled discretely when Washington's plot came unstuck.

Given this historical background, it is not surprising that so many English Canadians were resistant from the start to U.S. adventures in Vietnam and Iraq.

For their part, French Canadians have their own distinct anti-war tradition. At times that has put them into sharp conflict with the rest of Canada, but in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq, it put them on them same page as English Canadians who opposed participation in those conflicts.

French Canada's anti-war tradition had the British Empire rather than the United States as its focus. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the British government asked Ottawa for contingents of soldiers to fight in the South African war, French Canadian nationalists under the leadership of Henri Bourassa objected strenuously. It was the job of Britain to defend a colony such as Canada, they argued, not the job of the colony to defend distant parts of the empire.

The First World War was seen through the same lens by most French Canadians, who were not roused by the prospect of fighting in a British imperial war, even one in which they would be fighting to defend France, their long estranged mother country. When Ottawa introduced conscription toward the end of the war, there were riots in Quebec City and even talk of Quebec secession from Canada. The issue of conscription again divided French from English Canada during the Second World War.

Quebec's antagonism to conscription was a major reason why Canada, unlike other major western countries, did not impose compulsory military service during the post war decades. French Canadian opposition to sending troops to fight overseas weighed heavily on the Pearson government during the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson was looking for reinforcements for his war in Vietnam. In keeping with this long tradition, Quebecers were solidly against participation in the recent war in Iraq.

Jean Chretien's shrewd decision not to commit Canada to the Iraq War kept him out of the political morass in which both Tony Blair and George W. Bush now are mired. The decision was more than personal, however. The Prime Minister had behind him long established traditions in both English and French Canada, that are quite unlike those south of the border.

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James Laxer, a professor of political science at York University, is the author of _The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel_.

This original article is posted by request.

Note: James Laxer