Jan. 1, 2006
 
NEWS ANALYSIS: Canadian Vote Chance to End Bickering with Bush Team
 
By Paul Koring
Toronto Globe and Mail/Scripps Howard News Service
 
Canada watchers say they believe the Bush administration is hoping for an end to frosty relations with Ottawa, whatever government emerges from the chilly winter election campaign.
 
Officially, President Bush and his inner circle have voiced no view about their preference in the campaign. But no one would be surprised if the congratulatory telephone call will be warmer and more enthusiastic if Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals lose.
 
The divide isn't just ideological; Bush-bashing sometimes seems a Liberal vote-getter.
 
Yet serious, unresolved issues bedevil the complex relationship and a poisoning "petty rancor has seeped to the surface," said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. What the Bush administration really wants is "to have open lines of communication and be dealt with fairly and honestly" no matter who is prime minister.
 
Others echo that theme; that the rancor is less a result of policy differences than of a perception of deliberate delay and duplicity by successive Liberal prime ministers.
 
"More civility, more dignity, . . .. not what's occurred under Chritien and Martin," said Joseph Jockel, director of Canadian Studies at St. Lawrence University in Rochester, N.Y.
 
In the Bush administration, "there's no goodwill left towards Canada," he said.
 
"The United States can easily accept a 'no' if it is handled differently," he added, noting that deep bitterness lingers in the Bush administration over the manner, not the substance, of the Liberal government's rejection of White House entreaties to participate in the Iraq war and continental missile defense.
 
But another Liberal government headed by Martin isn't Washington's worst-case scenario.
 
"The thing they least want to see is another minority government," said Charles Doran, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.
 
If there is a silver lining to the dark clouds over the relationship, it is "that things are so bad, it should be easy to make modest changes for the better" once the election is over, Doran added. Pragmatism, rather than Bush-bashing, is what's needed if Martin remains prime minister.
 
Chris Sands, senior associate in the Canada Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "Whoever leads the next Canadian government is still going to have to deal with Bush for the next three years," adding that "the hot rhetoric" and the Liberal tendency to "run against Bush" needs to end.
 
"We have to hope we come through the election in a position to take some of the disputes off the table," he said.
 
Meanwhile, the Bush administration sees Canada as "one big blue state" -- the color Americans use to depict Democrat-voting areas. "And they see a blue state governor (Martin) campaigning against a red-state president," Jockel said.
 
Against that backdrop marches a long column of lingering disputes, headed by the seemingly interminable and intractable squabble over softwood lumber. But new and emerging problems threaten to add to the troubles. Among them: NORAD is up for renewal this spring. The North American Aerospace Defence treaty is both the linchpin of more than half a century of close Canadian-U.S. military cooperation and an outdated Cold War relic.
 
Bush believes the threat has morphed again from Soviet bombers and exchanges of thousands of nuclear warheads to the more modest but still-devastating possibility of a handful of intercontinental missiles fired by a rogue state like North Korea.
 
No one predicts NORAD will collapse, at least not this spring, but its future as a joint military command of equals seems increasingly shaky. (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)