Northern Fidelity

...Or to Dr...

...Sensing that the Clinton administration itself didn't much believe in many of its own policies—and was temperamentally and ideologically incapable of going to the mat for U.S...

...Sheritt International, one of Canada's largest private firms, has purchased rights to exploit a nickel concession seized from an American company in 1960 and is expanding its activities to cobalt, petroleum exploration and processing, and resort hotels—representing a total of about $1.4 billion...

...For more than 15o years Canada was the most important dominion of the British Empire, and rightly proud of its connection with that vast and impressive undertaking...

...Both countries are remnant states of vanished empires...

...As if that were not enough, Canada lacks a distinctive and identifiable culture of its own...

...And a good thing, too...

...Canada is now the island's leading source of foreign tourists, throwing Castro's police state a lifeline of foreign exchange amounting to several hundred million dollars a year...

...in some areas, trade across the southern border exceeds that with other Canadian regions...

...The controversy is currently at a standoff, with the Clinton administration temporarily postponing application of some of the law's more stringent sanctions...

...Canada's state-owned television network is a major outlet for Cuban-produced propaganda films on the glories of life in Castro's gulag...

...Nor is Canada's commitment to "constructive engagement" in Cuba symbolic of a broader libertarian approach to foreign policy, systematically opposing the use of sanctions everywhere and always...

...policy and humiliate a regime for which Ottawa's elites feel so much affinity...

...The anxiety to underscore what Canada is not explains the disproportionate (and unmerited) pride with which Canadians point to their gun control laws, their system of socialized medicine, their generous public subsidies to "the arts," their toy army perennially mucking about the backwaters of the Third World—and their support for Castro's Cuba...

...When I was growing up in Europe," Eric Margolis has written, "Canadians used to be known as no-nonsense, tough customers...

...The other reason for emphatically disagreeing with the U.S...

...However profitable Sheritt's operations, and however crucial Canadian investment to Castro's survival, it would be wrong to assume that the principal motivation of Canadian policy towards Cuba is economic...

...In Cuba there are no independent labor unions, pesky environmental groups, or meddlesome journalists to raise questions about their operations...

...Axworthy later claimed that during his visit he accomplished more in five hours of talks with the Cuban dictator than the Americans had achieved with thirty years of isolation and embargo...

...Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien has made it known that he favors inviting Fidel Castro to participate in the next summit of Western hemisphere leaders, to be held somewhere in Canada in 2000 or 2001...

...Canadians have not had a single election since 1945 (unlike 1940 or 1980 or 1988 in the United States) in which national security issues were at stake...

...Of course, this eventuality is extremely unlikely, and the Canadians know it, which is precisely why they are so vociferous in demanding something they do not really want...

...Of late there has been a mysterious and troubling increase in the incidence of respiratory ailments on the part of children who live in the area...

...National consciousness is so poorly developed that the nine-year-old daughter of the deputy prime minister (whose wife is the minister for national heritage) recently told her schoolteacher that when she grew up she wanted to be President of the United States...

...It would also make scores of Canadian politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals look like the fools they have been and are...

...Desi Mendoza, a Cuban doctor who has been in prison for over a year, his only crime having been to criticize Castro's handling of an epidemic of dengue fever...

...Castro himself described his three-hour lunch with Axworthy as an encounter "among friends...

...The first is that as a G-8 country with an economy, social structure and geopolitical situation roughly congruent with that of the United States, Canada inevitably shares many, perhaps even most of the global interests of its southern neighbor...

...and have consoled themselves for their failure by rejecting the model they cannot replicate...

...The problem is not of jollying Castro into being nicer to his people, but of profound (even—horror of horrors...

...This is particularly remarkable given that Canada (unlike Mexico, which also favors Cuba's reinstatement) has long insisted on a political test for other Latin American countries to enter or remain in this organization...

...Eighteen months later, they are still in prison, though formal charges against them have never been filed...

...Some have suggested that Chretien's pilgrimage to Cuba is related to these draconian measures, as an ideological feint to the left...

...Simply having an election doesn't give you democracy...

...Canadian embassies abroad have never been bombed...

...One example of this ideological agnosticism is Chretien's description of Castro as "a very communist person...

...He refused to meet with Elizardo Sanchez, the island's most prominent dissident...

...Quite the contrary, in fact...

...Or the dozens who have been detained on a regular basis every month since then...

...Since its passage, the Canadian media and political class have worked themselves up into a veritable paroxysm of stylized rage, wallowing in the relatively rare opportunity to demonstrate their independence from Washington...

...Here are just a few startling facts: • Canadian trade with Cuba has doubled or in some areas even tripled in the last two or three years...

...As alternative versions of the collectivist utopia, both face a doubtful future as independent economies...

...The Chretien visit 1 At a NATO summit in Madrid in July 1997, an inadvertently open microphone captured some priceless remarks by Chretien in conversation with the prime ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg about his relations with President Bill Clinton...

...No one knows this better than Elizardo Sanchez, who explains that "repression always [has] its ups and downs," and even under circumstances of temporary improvement, "the current situation can change tomorrow because we have no guarantee of human rights here...

...After all, the disappearance of the Cuban issue —a cost-free stick with which to beat the United States over the head—apart from abolishing overnight Canada's non-competitive advantage on the island, would be the ideological equivalent of a neutron bomb, inflicting an even greater seismic shock to Canadian identity than the secession of Quebec...

...To be sure, not all Canadian politicians feel obliged to split the difference between their real feelings and the obligations of diplomatic form...

...And he added in a telling coda that, in contrast to the United States and indeed some other countries, Cuba's relations with Canada were suffused with "mutual respect...

...That would certainly be news to three prominent dissidents who were arrested during Axworthy's visit...

...At Moa Bay sulfur compounds are poured into the air, producing a kind of acid rain that locals say burns the skin on contact...

...For his part, Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina went out of his way to thank the Canadian delegation "for seeking to understand Cuba rather than simply condemn a situation they had not studied...

...The Americans, Axworthy told the press after his recent visit, favor "a total disruption of the regime...

...hile Canadian support for Castro has grown exponentially since the disappearance of his Soviet sponsor, it is not entirely new...

...Canadian anti-Americanism, just as the country's French-English duality, has for two centuries been the central buttress of our national identity...

...Canadians, both official and unofficial, frequently speak of Communism in Cuba as if it were a preference for an exotic flavor of ice cream —a propensity one personally doesn't share but which is merely a matter of someone else's taste—rather than a repressive political and irrational economic system...

...The decision of the Tories to remain loyal to the British crown after the American revolution was a definite political statement...

...Two years after Trudeau's visit another Canadian government, somewhat surprisingly, canceled its modest aid program to Cuba to protest Castro's interventions in Africa...

...This insouciance meshes nicely with a cultural predisposition towards moralistic posturing—coming together on such things as the international campaign against land mines, which is nothing so much as a cheap shot against us—since they know full well that we have no choice but to maintain this admittedly horrible device on the Korean peninsula to protect thousands of American troops...

...He was particularly abusive about foreign policy decisions in the U.S., which, he claimed, were driven entirely by domestic considerations...

...The burgeoning separatist movement in the province of Quebec (which may just succeed in the next referendum) is well known...

...Canadians, he boasts, "are discovering a whole new world south of our southern neighbor...

...44 October 1998 • The American Spectator One of the defining characteristics of Canadian foreign policy generally, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson (himself of Canadian origin) noted long ago, is the capacity to couch any position, no matter how trivial, in the language of high principle...

...The sagging fortunes of the Canadian dollar may also help explain the sudden appeal of Cuba as a holiday destination...

...He is at work on a major study of U.S.-Cuban relations...

...Trudeau declared "the sexiest man alive...

...At this point the worst possible thing that could happen to Canada would not be—pace Minister Axworthy—the collapse or overthrow of the Castro regime and its replacement by one friendly to the United States...

...The centerpiece of Canada's economic interest in Cuba lies hundreds of miles east of Havana, in Moa Bay, where Sheritt International has taken over a nickel mine originally built by the Freeport Sulphur Company of New Orleans...

...Raddison and Holiday Inn, Burger King and Boeing, American Tobacco and Kansas City Southern Railroad would simply roll right over the Canadians—if, of course, Castro, like the Chinese — suddenly embraced a free market model...

...On that same occasion Trudeau peremptorily signed away the property claims of Canadian citizens expropriated by the regime for a mere $85o,000...

...What it has done is to contribute significantly to Castro's campaign of disinformation on the true state of affairs on his island...

...nationals to sue traffickers of confiscated property in the U.S...

...Another provision of the law virtually assures that there will be no normalization of relations with the island until the Castro regime is gone...

...Axworthy sees no reason to rush into things...

...Nothing more appropriate then, more suitable, than an alliance of losers...

...A Canadian-sponsored political opening in Cuba...

...Look at Russia," he remarked...

...He seemed rather lukewarm, however, about pressing for the changes he claims he wants...

...Do we exaggerate...

...While many countries enjoy tweaking the U.S...

...It's popular...

...is that Canada is a nation perennially on the verge of dissolution...

...This is the foreign policy equivalent of those little maple leaf flags Canadian students always wear while traveling in Europe —which always makes me think, if Canada really is so different from the U.S., why would anyone need to advertise the fact...

...policy—not just the repeal of the Helms-Burton law, but diplomatic recognition of the Castro regime, the embrace of Cuban communism by the Department of State, and the introduction of massive numbers of American tourists and investors into the island...

...42 Octoberey998 • The American Spectator he post-Cold War period has rc .1 I ranged the furniture )t world politics in strange and interesting ways, but perhaps nothing is quite so bizarre as the current alliance between Castro's Cuba and Canada...

...As soon as Chretien's plane cleared Cuban air space, Castro told the press that he wasn't bending to pressures to change his system from any quarter...

...One such example is Gilbert Parent, speaker of the House of Commons, who greeted a delegation from Castro's rubber-stamp National Assembly as "fellow parliamentarians" and made scornful reference to Cuba's "so-called political prisoners...

...And that is where matters stood until 1994, when Jean Chretien's Liberals swept into power...

...MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise °: Institute...

...He believes in the system he has...

...While Chretien and Axworthy fulsomely praise the "achievements" of Castro's socialism, they seem to have few illusions as to how the system works at home, where they are busily introducing massive cuts in welfare, education, and the country's much-troubled health care system...

...C hretien's visit underscored an embarrassing fact about Canadian relations with Cuba: it is not at all clear that Ottawa really thinks the island needs any changes...

...But that is merely the second-least desirable scenario...

...Canadian ambassador to the United States Raymond Chretien, the prime minister's nephew, even admits that he spends as much time talking about Cuba to American authorities as he does about his own...

...Canadian cities are awash with billboards showing happy families enjoying Cuban beaches (with nary a Cuban in sight...

...Castro was a hero to academic and intellectual circles in Canada from the very beginning, and has remained so long after their counterparts in France, Spain, and Italy broke ranks with him in the 1970's or 1980's over his persecution of writers, artists, and homosexuals...

...Another company, Consolidated Development, claims that Sheriff is operating oil fields which were seized without compensation...

...Friends...

...Among friends you can talk about everything...

...To the extent that they admit anything is wrong with the state of affairs there, they parrot the line of the Castro regime — it's all the fault of the U.S...

...We didn't get a 24-hour transformation into a full-blown parliamentary democracy, but we established an opening...

...hence, they are always shopping around for issues on which to differ with us...

...At the same time, the country's few unique institutions —the Mounties, its peacekeeping military, even ice hockey— are mired in scandal...

...At the same time, Canadian politicians have urged their 46 October 1998 • The American Spectator people to take retaliatory measures against the United States — including moving their vacations to Cuba instead of Florida...

...Last year it imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar (Burma), a country with which it exchanges a trivial $16 million a year...

...That is, they have not achieved the raw geopolitical power, the living standards, the scientific and technical leadership, or the cultural influence of the United States...

...Canada's confiscatory tax system (it even taxes frequent flier miles) and vast disincentives to new investment have depressed the job market, driven down the value of its currency and caused streams of doctors, high-tech specialists, and entertainers to drift across the country's southern border, where the pay is higher and the taxes lower...

...Warning: The U.N...

...Both have been forced to live in the shadow of the United States, which has inevitably dominated their economies and acted as an irresistible magnet for their most ambitious and talented citizens...

...The end of the British Empire has also left Canada adrift in a massive identity crisis which it has tried to solve with (again to quote Margolis) "soft socialism," turning the country into "an overly feminized society where inoffensiveness and wimpishness have become national art forms...

...As International Cooperation Minister Pierre Pettigrew has said, 'We share with the Americans the wish to see Cuba become more democratic —although we obviously do not share the American view as to the means of achieving that...

...Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not Spain, not Mexico, not even France—but Canada has become Cuba's number one source of foreign investment, its primary source of foreign tourism, its diplomatic protector, its chief patron and advocate...

...In the process, however, he let slip that Canadian foreign policy wasn't all that different...

...Sheriff is the principal — though not the only—target of the Helms-Burton Law, passed in 1996, which among other things allows U.S...

...Doubtless it would be even more startling news to the Cuban authorities themselves, who professed complete satisfaction with the Canadian foreign minister's obsequious conduct...

...On the other hand, it happily trades not only with China but also with Indonesia, a country whose government has slaughtered perhaps a third of the population of East Timor since 1973...

...Even more cynically, the two countries agreed to "cooperation" on human rights matters...

...Underpinning this strange convergence of interests is the biggest paradox of them all...

...economic embargo...

...For those unfamiliar with the rhetoric of Latin American dictatorships, "mutual respect" means the willingness of an outside power to forego criticism of a regime's internal arrangements...

...Hence Foreign Minister Axworthy's visit to the island in January of last year, during which he signed a series of largely meaningless accords, including one which would allow Canada to help train Cuban judges and legal officers—as if the problem of due process on the island was a mere matter of technical competence...

...A country without enemies and without global interests, Canada cannot understand the special responsibilities that devolve on great powers like the United States...

...Canadian soldiers fought heroically in all of Britain's wars, two of which became ours as well...

...As a matter of fact, Cuba represents exactly o.3 percent of its overseas trade...

...A case in point: During his visit, Chretien asked Castro to release four prominent dissidents—Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello, Valdimiro Roca, Rene Gomez, and Felix Bonne...

...If any American company were operating like this anywhere in Latin America today, Canada would be overrun with dozens of "solidarity" groups and grass-roots committees of "concern...

...People like that...

...Sheriff's executives boast that Cuba represents "a business opportunity for which we believe there is no equal in the world...

...The ore was just coming on line in 1960 when the mine and its refinery were seized by Castro...

...Rather, Castro's Gulag represents for Canada the ultimate opportunity to spit in the face of the United States at low cost with high return...

...Not that it would have made any difference...

...Clearly they know whereof they speak...

...of "genocide" and "a new version of the Holocaust...

...bureaucrats like Cuba a lot, too...

...Among other things, critics of the law have shed buckets of crocodile tears over the spectacle of a handful of Canadian children being forbidden to visit Disney World...

...positions in the Gulf and on North Atlantic security issues generally represent not so much a favor to us—as Canadian diplomatic cant would have it as an expression of its own objective interests as a first world country...

...V The American Spectator • October 1998 49...

...Concretely, Canada maintains that its approach ("dialogue," "constructive engagement," etc...

...Viewed from a longer historical perspective, the Canadian fascination with Cuba is even easier to explain...

...Congress wants is to see changes take place in Cuba—and we support those changes, but go about it in a different way—I can't see what they have to complain about...

...The official Canadian line on Cuba—the one at least retailed for American consumption—is one of respectful disagreement...

...It is true—as Canadian politicians never tire of reminding us —that the United Nations consistently ranks Canada number one in quality of life of all its member states...

...As Jeffrey Simpson of the Toronto Globe and Mail has observed, in sheer economic terms "Castro's irrelevance is breathtaking...

...claims...

...Yet unlike the United States, which also authorizes humanitarian and medical aid, it does not require third-party monitoring to make sure that its contributions are not siphoned off by the Communist party's elaborate apparatus of privilege...

...During those years they acquired an impressive reputation...

...The American Spectator • October 1998 43 was a massive propaganda coup for Castro, since Canada is (wrongly) perceived by people around the world, and indeed perhaps by many Americans, as a particularly close friend of the United States...

...Canadians were the first anti-Americans, and the best," historian Jack Granetstein writes...

...I don't expect there will be a general election with any opposition this week"— a prospect which he seemed capable of facing with equanimity...

...Canadian citizens are not accosted when they travel by angry foreigners blaming their country for the bubonic plague, AIDS, or a bad harvest...

...Far from being abashed at this obvious violation of labor rights—condemned both by Cuban independent human rights groups and the AFL-CIO— Sheriff chairman Ian Delaney merely says, "We have the moral high ground here...

...Mess with the Canuks, and you'd risk a good thumping...

...This, he says, would be bad, inasmuch as it would lead to "upheaval" and be "disruptive...

...not just from enemies like the United States but "friends like Canada...

...If he were alive today, he might rephrase the comment by saying "no matter how cynical, selfserving, and hypocritical...

...In a breathtaking leap of logic, he added, "if what the U.S...

...While Cuba was a hugely prosperous country by Latin American standards in 1959, and while Canada even in decline has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, both countries have failed on their own terms...

...Or to four Cuban human rights activists who issued an open letter after Axworthy's departure decrying Canada's collaboration with the regime and expressing dismay that the minister "avoided all contact" with opposition groups...

...The rest goes to the state —which is to say, Castro, the Communist party, the army, and the police...

...thus Canadians (and others) who invested there expecting the embargo to be lifted in the second Clinton administration—and with it, a flood of American tourists to stay at their hotels and purchase their services—have been sorely disappointed...

...Like most Western European countries and Mexico, Canada never broke relations with Havana...

...Castro himself has often said much the same...

...with virtual slave labor to provide services, package tours to Castro's island are significantly cheaper than similar excursions to Florida or other Caribbean venues...

...No doubt such an eventuality would be unpleasant, since it would vindicate forty years of U.S...

...Though many Canadians may not think so, their country's firm support for U.S...

...Since World War II, all that has changed...

...Nonetheless, apparently it is frustrating to Canadian diplomats and politicians to be constantly thought of as "dittoheads...

...Nearly four decades later, Freeport (now FreeportMcMoran) is still waiting to be compensated by the Cuban government for what U.S...

...It resembles nothing so much as a pallid and rather uninteresting copy of its southern neighbor...

...No, for Canada the worst possible outcome would be a wholesale turnabout in U.S...

...There are two reasons why such expectoration is necessary...

...To be sure, Canada, like France, Spain, and other countries, is an occasional recipient of Castro's hostage-politik...

...For his part, Foreign Minister Lloyd Airworthy acknowledges that "Cuba comes up on our radar scope as a much higher priority than before...

...The most spectacular development in recent times, however, has been the state visit last April of Prime Minister Chretien, the most important leader of any democratic country to set foot on the island since the revolution...

...On the other hand, many Canadian leaders seem more frightened that something might change in Cuba than that Castro's repressive dictatorship might continue indefinitely...

...Not long ago Canadians learned that one of their leading hockey coaches was sexually exploiting his players and their chocolate soldiers on duty in Somalia were whiling away their time raping teenage girls...

...48 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator were is a long tradition behind this tendency...

...Just to make sure the United States did not miss the point, Chretien during his April visit listened indulgently while Castro publicly accused the U.S...

...As long ago as 1976 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret made a pilgrimage to the island, where they went scuba diving with the dictator (whom Mme...

...federal courts, and goes even further by denying entry to the United States of the principal executives of such traffickers as well as immediate members of their families...

...In the specific case of human rights in Cuba, Canada manages to coddle one of the world's chief offenders, while pointing an accusing finger at the United States and the Cuban-American community as if they were running the concentration camps, torture chambers and "rapid reaction brigades" that beat up dissidents and their families...

...Sheritt is therefore exploiting stolen property...

...potentially "disruptive") political change...

...Small wonder that Canadians seek to emphasize their trivial differences with the U.S...

...On the other hand, the very existence of Helms-Burton has doubtless discouraged much new investment in Cuba—and not only in properties for which there exist outstanding U.S...

...Clearly, if Cuba were an island floating somewhere off the coast of India or Africa it is doubtful that Canada would find it a particularly interesting venue...

...Moreover, Sheriff pays the kind of wages that make Guatemala seem like a high-cost labor market: nine dollars a worker per day—of which, under Cuba's curious hybrid of socialism and savage capitalism, the laborer receives fifty cents...

...Chretien and Axworthy and their countrymen must hope we never find out...

...Not so well-reported is the conflict between the eastern and western provinces, or the constant threats of secession by the maritime regions north and east of New England...

...His involvement with matters Cuban continues...

...These properties lie at the center of a legal and foreign policy controversy addressed by the Helms-Burton Law, of which more in a moment...

...I like to stand up to the Americans...

...Links with the United States are often more intense than those among Canadian provinces...

...company that sues them under Helms-Burton...

...Canada intensively lobbies for Cuba's return to the Organization of American States, with no questions asked about its political regime...

...One lucky beneficiary of the dictator's predisposition to this tactic is Cecilio Sambra, who was released from jail and allowed to settle in Canada some months after Axworthy's visit, as a gesture to cover the foreign minister's embarrassment over the arrest of three other dissidents during his brief stay...

...But in its totality Canada's policy has done virtually nothing to alter the structure of repression...

...Indeed, the same Lloyd Axworthy who so much enjoys lunching with Castro last year endorsed $32 million in military exports to that dictatorship...

...He added, "But you have to be careful because they're our friends...

...Yet there was once much more to Canadian identity than that...

...Unlike Mexico, another close neighbor, neither is large enough or possesses a culture sufficiently strong and singular to assure its individuality...

...he is now a "paid consultant" to one of the Canadian companies subsidizing Castro's biotech industry...

...officials estimate is about $115-million worth of properties...

...The Cuba affair, I was the first to stand up...

...With friends like Chretien and Axworthy, who really needs enemies...

...Some key areas of Canadian investment in Cuba are financed by "soft" credits paid for by Canadian taxpayers...

...is superior in both moral and practical terms, in spite of the fact that to date it has little to show for its (to put it mildly) conciliatory gestures...

...The Canadian equivalent of our Internal Revenue Service will also launch a $3.6 million, three-year program to help the Castro government create a new tax collection system, wherewith to confiscate the few sources of private income available to individual Cubans—tips from tourists or remittances from relatives abroad...

...Chretien then signed accords with the Cuban dictator for "cooperation" in the areas of health, film, and sports...

...Canada has taken its complaint to the World Trade Organization and has retaliated with legislation of its own that would allow Canadian firms to go after the assets of any U.S...

...national interests — Chretien set about baiting the United States on a wide variety of issues, some substantive, some symbolic.1 Cuba is an important case of both substance and symbolism...

...over Cuba, only Canada has made support for Castro the virtual centerpiece of its foreign policy...

...But this is a bit like saying that Oregon is the best place to live in the United States— an observation that is true enough if one happens to be a tree...

...Canada was a leader in the movement to embargo South Africa, and an enthusiastic backer of President Clinton's policy of putting a stranglehold on Haiti...

...Canada is a regular contributor of humanitarian aid to Cuba, including medicines, food, motor vehicles, even paper and pencils for use in schoolrooms...