At age 150, celebrate that long and peaceful U.S. – Canadian border

MONTREAL — When the United States celebrated its 150th birthday, Calvin Coolidge was president, Al Capone’s gangsters were running wild in Chicago, NBC was just being formed and Gene Tunney was girding to defeat Jack Dempsey. Generally, it was a quiet, contented country, not all that important in world affairs, not all that worried about war or depression.

Next weekend, Canada turns 150 in a different world, more quiet and contented than its neighbor to the south, about as influential in world affairs as the United States was in 1926, indeed very much like America was then: on the rise, admired globally, a little self-conscious but overall a relatively uncontroversial force for good worldwide.

The United States has many natural advantages, but none so great as being planted beside Canada. “Geography has made us neighbors,” President John F. Kennedy once said. “History has made us friends.”

That was a bookend to a speech Winston Churchill delivered 22 years earlier: “That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations, is an example to every country and a pattern for the future of the world.”

Today Kennedy’s words are carved into the walls of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa. They were cited by former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau in 1981 and Brian Mulroney in 1984 and by President Bill Clinton in Ottawa in 1995 and again in Washington two years later.

And the Churchill remarks are so vital to the Canadian psyche that when I spoke the other morning with Mulroney, who was the country’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993 and helped create NAFTA, he quoted them word for word, with unerring accuracy. He went on:

“The relationship between Canada and the United States is a model for the world, and that is why I worked on it for so long,” Mulroney said. “It’s very important that as we begin the NAFTA negotiations in the next few months, the parties realize how vital and beneficial that relationship has been. It is the most productive and peaceful relationship between any two neighbors in world history.”

Canada’s birthday — up here it is called Canada Day — is being marked by the sale of Canada Day body jewelry, all manner of T-shirts, a splendid two-CD salute to songs written by Canadians and books.

Plus, celebrations galore. The “Proud to Be a Canadian” event in Dorchester, New Brunswick. The “150 Years Strong” celebration in Whycocomagh, Nova Scotia. The “Birthday Bash 2017” in Whitewood, Saskatchewan. The “Tomahawk Canada Day Celebrations” in Tomahawk, Alberta.

But perhaps the most unusual commemoration is occurring 300 miles south of here, in Milton, Massachusetts, where the 41st president of the United States was born in 1924. The selectmen of that town recently proclaimed July 1 “George Herbert Walker Bush – Right Honorable Brian Mulroney – Canada Day.”

Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had a summertime retreat at Campobello, New Brunswick, Bush has a special affinity for Canada. “Can you imagine waking up every morning worried that your neighbors might invade at any minute? Or might send raiding parties? Or spies into your midst?” Bush wrote in an email for this column. “Too many countries have lived with that fear off and on in their long histories. With Canada, that has never been the case. We trust each other. We work together. We root for each other. We breathe the same air, and share the same values.”

The son of a Montreal mother and a Massachusetts father, I am quite literally the product of the Canadian-American relationship. And, like any marriage, that relationship can be perplexing, in part because Canada, with its two languages, is a far more complex nation than Americans generally realize.

There are also challenges in the Canadian-American relationship itself. The two countries still are engaged in a dispute over softwood lumber that only lawyers understand and over which only lawyers profit, and this spring the two countries sparred over milk prices.

“We had a few disagreements, although at age 93, I can’t remember them,” Bush said of Canada and Mulroney in his email. “But I could always trust he had my back. I think our friendship is symbolic of the friendship between our countries. We have each other’s back.”

We do have each other’s back, both in French and in English, and we also have that long, undefended border. Sometimes only the first two sentences of Kennedy’s remarks in Ottawa are remembered and quoted. Perhaps as we approach Canada Day, we might recall the three sentences that follow:

“Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.