It’s the Border, Stupid

Extract of a speech by Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff last week at the University of Alberta

I want to start with Canada/US relations because it’s so much the centre of any foreign policy. I want to talk to you about security, economic issues, military issues, diplomatic issues and finally some political issues.

Let me start with the US/Canada relationship. I had a funny thing happen to me in politics. I sat down with a very wealthy Canadian who shall remain nameless (you can probably guess who he might have been). I said to him, “sir,” in my earnest way, “what is the biggest issue you confront as a billionaire businessman?”

He looked at me in the way that businessmen sometimes do to politicians, like “where do I start with this guy?”, with this look in his eyes and said, “It’s the border, stupid.”

He has businesses that cross the border. Maintaining a strong border, defending our border, investing in the capabilities to defend our border, equally to defending our sovereignty.

We have to enhance our border infrastructure. You can’t go to Windsor, you can’t go to many of our border crossings without being concerned that the border’s going to become a choke chain.

We don’t want a choke chain.

We’re just to be proud of having the longest undefended border in the world. It’s become stickier, and stickier and stickier since 9/11. But the thing we have to do is be a competent, capable, credible security partner with the United States while maintaining an absolute control over our sovereignty and our border. That’s a very, very difficult trick and important that we have to get right.

But our border is not just on the 49th. We now have an enormous sense of the salience of the arctic frontier. Our arctic border, and the immense importance of protecting and investing in our sovereignty as climate change literally changes the geographical dimensions of our country.

I’m a strong defender of investment in sovereignty and our border. But I’ll make another point: we have to invest in international law here. There is a lot that is unclear and obscure in who owns what and who does what there. You can’t fix this stuff just with icebreakers and overflights and patrols, although they’re enhancements I support. You have to sit down with our partners and work out a stable long-term legal framework for the development of the north for those who live there and for developing those resources. The last thing we want is a sovereignty complex up there.

I want you all to go out and study arctic law, the law of the sea, and who owns the undershelf stuff and all of that. That’s a challenge for you. Someone needs to become Canada’s expert on arctic international law.

It’s crucial to our future as a country. So those are a few thoughts about our security relationship across the border with the United States.

Let me say a little bit about our economic relations.

One of the things that I see happening is that NAFTA has been very good for our country. But I see it creating an Atlantic Canadian economy, a central Canadian economy and a western economy.

One of the questions we’ve not been asking, I think, as clearly as we should, is whether we’re still maintaining a national economy, from coast to coast to coast.

The north-south linkages in our economic system, I think, are now stronger than our east-west ones. When I was in Edmonton recently someone showed me a map of the pipelines and the natural gas pipelines. Much stronger north-south than east-west. No problem with north-south, that’s our chief market.

My concern is to strengthen the east-west spine of our country. Energy cooridors. Pipelines. The national economic space is not as unified as it should be. BC and Alberta have set a good model for the rest of the country by sitting down and working to reduce the friction in the labour markets between Alberta and British Columbia. This is good.

We need federal leadership to strengthen the ties that bind. What’s what the federal government of Canada for? It’s to maintain common economic space and common citizenship.

The north-south pull fostered by the post-NAFTA world is great, provided that we don’t splinter and fragment into increasingly separate economic spaces. That, it seems to me, to be the challenge that is at the center of Canadian economic policy.

It’s also one of the biggest puzzles in our relationship with the Americans. I’m not an economist. What is the nature of the linkage between our economy and theirs?

In the old days we used to say “they get a cold, we get pneumonia.” Right now, they’ve got a cold. They’ve got a nice, big bronchial infection right now.

And nobody rejoices over their unhappiness, least of all me. One of the themes of our economy, we’re unclear about that. We need to have much better economic analysis right now, but all I know that we can do is keep our fiscal fundamentals sound.

Sound fiscal discipline. No deficits. Management of our economy. Those fundamentals are thing we can do do maintain our economic sovereignty.

But the other thing we have to do in this context is understand the tremendous importance of investing in you. The future of our country is in this room. We have to bet the store in investing in training in education in science and technology. If we continue to be an economy based on hewers of wood and drawers of water, exporters of untreated natural resources, increasingly integrated into the American economy, I don’t like what I see for you in 25-30 years, because I don’t think our economy the gets the value out of the high-end of the economy. We get the untreated, raw end of the economy, not the high-value end.

So invest, invest, invest and invest in what? Invest in you.

The other thing I feel very strongly about and I know we’ve been saying it for 30 years: diversify, diversify, diversify. 86% of our economy is integrated with the Americans. That’s a good thing. It’s natural. It’s the market, it’s close. We’re the largest investor in the United States by a considerable margin.

But I would hope in the next generation, it’s China, it’s India. We start putting our eggs in a bunch of baskets. My instinct tells me that builds a stronger and safer economic foundation for your future.