Suckered by America

Doing the Continental: A New Canadian-American Relationship is a useful but somewhat portentous little book that immodestly bills itself as “a new and sensible basis for making decisions and taking steps towards doing our dance with the U.S. differently.” David Dyment assures us: “That a political scientist would write a book that includes himself is understandable … I sought to understand Canada and Quebec by learning French in my twenties and doing a Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal. Writing this book is an attempt to understand that other great dimension of our collective life—the role and place of the U.S.” These insights are passed down, du haut de la chaire, in the last pages of the narrative, not where such hustling of an author’s wares usually appears, in the foreword or the blurbed encomia of friends on the back cover. The ambitions were commendable, but on the evidence, the missions were not accomplished.

Although hackneyed and...