Neighbourhood Watch

These two very different books—Patrick James’s Canada and Conflict and Geoffrey Hale’s So Near Yet So Far: The Public and Hidden Worlds of Canada-U.S. Relations—make a useful contribution to the literature, situating themselves at opposite ends of the scale of ambition and of price. Each provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on Canada-U.S. relations, a topic most of us believe we know a lot about and understand reasonably well. Mostly we do not, of course, know nearly enough about one of the world’s largest, most complex and intertwined economic relationships, as the authors subtly make clear. It is a relationship that plays out at several levels of government, through our respective private sectors and, to a degree, also involves civil society on both sides of the border at times (think indigenous rights, energy policy and climate change, sometimes all three). Both authors also deal bracingly with the geostrategic cousin of economic links: the widely...