The Elephant Speaks To The Mouse

Cellucci quotes prime minister Jean Chrétien remarking after the towers fell that "the world has changed." Chrétien was correct. From Sept. 11 on, the world's only superpower elevated the matter of its own security, the safety of its citizens at home and abroad, to be the absolute fundamental of its foreign policy. Everything was subordinate to that objective. Cellucci's task was to translate the imperatives of that elevation in the particular arena of relations between his country and ours. Even in normal times -- if, in a busy, chaotic world, "normal times" is a sustainable concept -- the position of U.S. ambassador to Canada calls for formidable delicacy, nuance and sensitivity. We are friends and neighbours, have fought together in the two great wars of the last century, and the United States has been, up until a bare two weeks ago, Canada's largest trading partner. (China now owns that distinction.) Canadians are immensely aware of the economic and cultural giant on our doorstep. We are grateful she is pacific toward us; 1812 is a buried memory. But we are acutely aware that the sheer cultural and economic mass of the United States almost inevitably impacts on our way of life, and we therefore examine every interaction between our two countries with great self-consciousness and rigour, lest some portion of our statehood, our way of life and identity, be diminished, obscured or even obliterated. We are on a jealous watch up here. The spectrum of our sensitivity is a broad one. There is the blind contempt and overt disdain for all things American, from its president to its pop culture, of pure and visceral anti-Americanism, which fuels the passion of the hard Canadian left, and of which Carolyn Parrish's occasional spiteful outbursts ("Damn Americans. I hate those bastards") are such obnoxious examples. Then, too, in polar reverse, is the worship of high capitalism and reverence for the great heroes of American republicanism, which warms the dreams of the hard Canadian right and has as its fitful vehicle the Conservative Party. In the middle, there is the sane appreciation of the Americans as neighbours and allies, and a reasonable admiration for their undeniable achievements and goodwill. This is coupled with a cautious recoil from the excesses of their sometimes unhinged and shameless culture, even as we mimic its more vapid splendours (witness Canadian Idol or the "Canadian" edition of Entertainment Tonight) or even export a few of that culture's grossest Canadian exponents: Céline Dion, Tom Green. Whatever the Americans do, and sometimes whatever they do not do, as it refers to us, is put to a scrutiny and analysis of rabbinical finesse. They haunt us continually. What Pat Buchanan thinks, or what The Wall Street Journal on any given day may say, does not alter the temperature of the universe, and whether we are mocked or praised on blog or pundit panel should by now be a matter of the greatest indifference to us. But of course it isn't. It was into this chamber of heightened cultural and political sensitivity that Cellucci wandered when he accepted the post of U.S. ambassador to Canada, a sensitivity amplified on both sides of the exchange by the great horrors of Sept. 11. After that day, from the Americans' point of view, there were some messages that had to be delivered raw. There was neither time nor inclination for the more serpentine volubility of a traditional diplomatic approach. Which is probably why Cellucci gives his memoir the title Unquiet Diplomacy. His mission to us was the very plain one of making sure that we understood how serious, post-9/11, the Americans were. That, regardless of our long tradition of neighbourliness and the historic casualness of our cross-border relationship, there was nothing that would be allowed to impede or interfere with the Americans' redrawing of their national priorities http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050924/BKDIPL24/TPEntertainment/Books

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