Canada Has Earned America's Suspicion

Canada just won itself an expensive victory in the United States.

On Thursday, the Americans agreed to exempt Canadian passport-holders from a new rule requiring all persons born in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Sudan to be fingerprinted and photographed before entry into the United States. Foreign Minister Bill Graham extracted this concession with some very noisy diplomacy: Canada even posted a travel advisory warning Canadian citizens born in those five countries against traveling to the United States. From now on, naturalized Canadians born in the member states of the axis of evil will be treated just like all other Canadians.

Except of course that they won't. As Graham himself acknowledged, according to a National Post report, "Canadians who hold dual citizenship and travel to the United States on a foreign passport may still be subject to increased scrutiny by U.S. immigration officials. Canadians may also receive increased attention at the border if they have travelled to countries that the Americans believe pose a security risk to the United States."

As for the Syrian-born Canadian whose deportation by the Americans back to Syria triggered this spat -- well, he remains in Syrian custody. The Lebanese-born Canadian arrested in Israel for terrorist activities remains in Israeli custody. The Kuwaiti-born Canadian terrorist captured in Oman remains in U.S. custody, as does the Canadian captured with the al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.

In other words: the Americans have dropped the obnoxious procedures that reveal their mistrust of Canada's immigration and security procedures. But they have not ceased to feel mistrust.

And no wonder. On the very same day Graham announced his big diplomatic win, he informed the House foreign affairs committee that Canada would continue to permit the so-called political arm of Hezbollah to operate freely in Canada. He explained, "We don't believe it would be appropriate to label as terrorists innocent doctors, teachers and other people who are seeking to do charitable and other good works in their communities."

My first reaction to this statement was a kind of awe. How can anyone manage to be such a fool as that? OK, so maybe Graham doesn't listen to his intelligence briefings or look at the documents in his dispatch box. But does he not even read the newspapers? Is it possible to be the foreign minister of a country supposedly allied with the United States in the war on terror and not have the faintest understanding of how the world's second-deadliest terror organization does its murderous work?

No, I don't believe it. Not even Graham could achieve so perfect a degree of ignorance. There must be another explanation. And Graham himself provided it to those who listen carefully. For at the same time that he was exculpating Hezbollah, he was conceding that Canada might after all be compelled to join -- or at least refrain from opposing -- an American military action in Iraq unblessed by the Security Council.

"In the event of an ambiguous resolution or a divided Security Council, we may very well be called upon to chart a course based upon the circumstances and conditions at hand, which takes into consideration global security interests, questions of regional stability and, of course, Canada's own interests. Doing nothing about Iraqi defiance poses grave risks."

Translated from the original Mandarin, that means: "We're stuck, fellows."

Graham and Jean Chretien are trying to walk a narrow defile. On the one hand, they want to seem supportive enough of the Americans that they can ask for favours -- like the exemption from normal security procedures for Canadian passport-holders. On the other hand, they are plainly terrified of taking a tough line on terror and possibly provoking a terrorist attack against Canada.

So they waffle.

But waffling has its price. The old English-speaking alliance inherited from the Second World War and the Cold War -- the United States, U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- is breaking in half. The U.S., U.K. and Australia now sit at the alliance's adults' table, where the decisions are made. Canada and New Zealand sit at the children's table where their noises won't disturb the grown-ups. From time to time, when the kids really yell, the adults remember to send over a cookie, as the Americans did last week.

On the merits of the dispute about the treatment of naturalized Canadians, Canada is surely right. In both Canada and the United States, foreign-born citizens are entitled to be treated as citizens, plain and simple. Even on its own terms, the fingerprinting program makes little sense. If we're trying to predict terrorist sympathies from place of birth, surely the people we would want to fingerprint are people born in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, not Iraq? Yet for strategic reasons, those two most dangerous nations are exempt.

I am sure that Canadian diplomats quietly raised these points a month ago. Nobody in Washington seems to have listened, because in Washington attention and respect are earned. What Jean Chretien and Bill Graham have earned for Canada instead is suspicion and disregard.