What Price Independence?

The hardy perennial of Canadian-American relations is once again at the political forefront. The August 2005 refusal of the Bush administration to acknowledge the ruling of the Extraordinary Challenge Panel of NAFTA in Canada’s favour in the ongoing softwood lumber dispute has set the cat among the continental pigeons. The softwood lumber dispute started in 1982: it says something about the tenacity of Washington’s special interests that we are still debating the issue in 2005. But something snapped this summer—either the cavalier way the U.S. Commerce Department dismissed their own handiwork of the Extraordinary Challenge Panel (for it was Jim Baker, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, who put this innovation forward at the last moment to break an impasse that threatened the negotiation of the free trade pact in October 1987) or the Canadian realization that it does not really matter if you play by the rules, because in George Bush’s Washington it is only power that counts...