:
Good afternoon, colleagues.
This is meeting number three of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Wednesday, February 11, 2009. Today we're going to begin our review of key elements of Canadian foreign policy.
As a witness, from Ekos Research Associates we have Frank Graves, the president.
Recently, on December 8, 2008, Mr. Graves made a presentation to the Canada-U.S. project at the Government Conference Centre in Ottawa entitled “Public Perspectives: Emerging Opportunities for Canada-U.S. Cooperation”. I've seen part of this presentation on the website. It contains a wealth of information concerning what the Canadian public thinks about a wide scope of issues in regard to the Canada-U.S. relationship.
Our committee is very interested in what you have to say to us, Mr. Graves. Certainly we recognize that the United States is our largest trading partner, our closest neighbour and our closest ally, so we look forward to your testimony.
I would also like to say that we very much appreciate your coming on such short notice. I guess that's one of the advantages of being close to the city, but we do appreciate your being here today.
Mr. Graves, the clerk passed on the order here. We'll give you time for an opening statement of approximately ten minutes, and then we'll go into the first round of questioning. Each party will have seven minutes. Then we'll go into the second and third rounds.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'm delighted to be here to speak with the committee.
This is a topic I'm extremely interested in. I've been studying this topic in some depth for over a decade, comparing not just Canadian attitudes but also looking at what Americans and sometimes even Mexicans think about these issues. Our research has been supported over that period of time by all three governments as well as significant parts of the private sector.
I have a fairly useful time series. Instead of saying how things look at some snapshot in time, I can give you a sense of how things have been evolving, what's changed and what hasn't, and what's particularly relevant in the current context. In many respects it is quite different from some of the features of this relationship we've seen in the past.
I do have a bit of missing data on the American side--my data are about a year old--but the rest of the data are quite timely.
I'm only going to take a few minutes. This is an extremely complicated topic. I can't think of another topic in social research or polling that provides the same combination of complexity, interests, and relevance.
I could take the time to show you a presentation that would give you a decidedly different view of what I think the overall conclusions are. The public opinion and public attitudes, more importantly, are a much more stable way of looking at things. We don't just look at opinions. We look at attitudes, we compare values, and we find that they are rife with contradictions. Finding out what Canadians really think about this relationship is a pretty daunting task. It's much more difficult than a lot of the more routine assignments in public opinion research.
I want to stress two fundamental conclusions that we're seeing about the relationship right now.
Despite some ambiguities and contradictions in Canadian and American attitudes and values, the similarities are far more impressive than the differences. More importantly, through time we're seeing a pattern where the differences between the two countries in terms of core values and attitudes are actually getting smaller and not larger. That's important, because it contradicts a lot of the perceived wisdom about the relationship between the two countries.
I would argue that the differences are magnified in the minds of Canadians by a narcissism. Many Canadians feel they would like to have the differences be larger than what they are. But in their heart of hearts, Canadians do acknowledge that they believe the differences are relatively modest and that they are actually getting smaller, which is consistent with a lot of the serious academic research.
There are significant differences, certainly; there are enough to sustain a separate sense of national identity. But overall you could argue that you would be hard-pressed to find two countries in the advanced western world that share more similar value systems than Canada and the United States.
The second point I want to make is that there are recent shifts in our reciprocal outlooks--how Canadians look at Americans and how Americans look at Canadians--coupled with political changes that have actually strengthened the opportunities for returning to a more ambitious bilateral, perhaps trilateral, North American agenda. I'll try to give you a few pieces of information in support of those claims, but I'm not going to go through these in any depth.
I'd like to start by noting that there is a sharp distinction between asking Canadians if we're becoming more or less like the United States and when we ask what we would like to happen. We find a very sharp difference. The clear majority of Canadians say they'd like to become less like the United States. In fact this is part of this point of difference. One of the things in the past that sustained a sense of national identity in Canada was that we're not sure exactly what our identity is, but dammit, we're not American, and that's a good thing.
When you ask, as well, if we are becoming more like the United States, by an equally clear margin in the reverse direction Canadians say that in fact we are becoming more like the United States. As I mentioned earlier, when we do the comparisons through time, and with some of our value comparisons, which are consistent with the international literature, they suggest that the value differences separating Canadians and Americans are relatively modest and the differences are getting smaller, not larger.
We find another area of considerable ambiguity in the U.S.-Canada relations and the Canadian optic on this. Despite the fact that at various times Canadians express deep reservations about the United States, its foreign policy, leadership, and so forth, we find the interesting statistic that about 95% of Canadians say it's at least somewhat important to strengthen relationships between the two countries. What do we find when we ask that question in the Untied States? It's exactly the same number. Despite the proliferation of irritants that have characterized the relationship over the last decade, there is a deep belief that the relationship should be strengthened and that there are mutual interests for both Canadians Americans in doing so.
What's also interesting is that the strains we see in the relationship over the past several years have actually dissipated to a large extent, and we've seen a warming in the outlook of both Americans on Canadians and Canadians on America. By the way, this movement pre-dated the change in administration. It started a couple of years ago. So Canadians would also acknowledge that the relationship has in fact improved and that that's an important thing to do.
It is the case that the American outlook on Canada, for the most part, ranges from being very favourable to benign. There are very few Americans who have a negative impression in the United States. In fact the incidence is less than 10%. It never goes much above that. In the Canadian public we do find a higher incidence of unfavourable attitudes, but again I would connect that back to that narcissism of difference and note that they aren't that deeply felt, because in contrast to the incidence of people who say they have an unfavourable view of the United States--roughly 30% or 40% as it oscillates through time--about 75% of Canadians say the United States is our best friend. And as I also mentioned earlier, almost 100% say we should strengthen that relationship. The instance of those who have a favourable outlook on the United States has actually been improving.
Another point that I thought was interesting as a point of comparison, which is an antidote to a lot of received wisdom within each of those countries about true attitudes to NAFTA and free trade, is we find, for example, that both within our country and in the United States, by commentators like Lou Dobbs, there is a sense that there is violent and growing opposition to free trade and protectionist sentiments are on the rise. There is no question that the United States has experienced a period of what borders on isolationism following the exuberant internationalism that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 and the perceived failure of the foreign policy to deal with that. What we have found is that notwithstanding those views, there are problems with the external world and a growing desire to pull up the drawbridge. We do find that the incidence of Americans who still support free trade is in the 60% to 70% range, and in fact it is somewhat higher in Canada.
We have seen some wobble in that support in recent years, and this is something we should be quite mindful of. Generally speaking, when we look at attitudes to trade, the free movement of Canadians throughout American society, the concerns with security threats emanating from Canada and so forth, we see that the general characteristic of the American outlook on Canada is that it is relatively benign. In fact, there is no country in the world that is seen as relatively less threatening than Canada. That's not to say that Americans aren't concerned about security with respect to Canada. They are. They are concerned with security with respect to the entire world, including their own country.
There is some evidence that the security ethic that has gripped upper North America since September 11 shows some signs of fraying, particularly in the United States. That will be interesting to watch.
By the way, in the theme of contradictions and ambiguity, again, there is the fact that we find majority support for free trade in both Canada and the United States, and indeed in Mexico as well, which is something that hasn't always been the case. If we go back to 1990, the obverse was the case: the clear majority in all three countries objected to free trade. But we find that this co-exists with the sense that free trade hasn't necessarily been all that good for me and my country. All the member countries think that the other partners did better than them. But it is important to recognize that beyond those irritations there's still a pretty strong commitment to free trade.
I already mentioned that there had been a warming in the relationship between the two countries that predated the change in administration, but Canadians have expressed almost a collective degree of Obama envy. As this phenomenon to the south has gripped the United States, they have looked at that with a considerable amount of intrigue and some degree of envy, but there is a sense that this is something that has the potential to fundamentally alter the relationship. About half of Canadians say it won't have much effect, but fully half of Canadians believe this is going to profoundly change the relationship between the two countries. And when we probe further and ask if that is a good or bad thing, by a very decisive margin virtually all of those people think the changes will be for the better. That's not to say that Canadians are not critical in their unabashed admiration for President Obama. When asked further about certain types of policy issues, like concerns about trade, they express deep concerns about possible protectionist sentiment. They also express a fair degree of resistance to a potential request to extend the mission in Afghanistan. So there is a mixture of admiration but a fairly circumspect view in terms of some of the policy questions that affect the relationships between the two countries.
I'd like to wrap up with one of the intriguing areas that seems to develop the highest levels of support. We asked what areas should be a focus, in terms of having a more ambitious renewed bilateral agenda. There's the idea of a blended approach to dealing with climate change, the economy, and security, where we would collectively figure out a strategy for dealing with the potential obsolescence of our manufacturing automotive sector. There is a sense that although Canadians strongly support the Kyoto ratification, trying to manage an entire globe is a good idea in theory but in practice extremely difficult. A continent now looks like a fairly appealing alternative.
There's also a sense that energy self-sufficiency as a bargaining tool couldn't help relax some of the tensions people have seen growing at the border. There has been a growing recognition by Canadians that the problems with the border have made it more difficult to travel to the United States to do business, and the hard economic data seems to support that there has been a downturn as well.
I think I've taken ten minutes, so I'm going to stop now. I'd love to answer any questions. I have all kinds of other data if you would like to ask questions on what I've presented, or any other related areas.
Thank you.
:
Absolutely. I've already published some of this. I have a number of articles that have been published in scholarly journals. I have some other ones that are in a more accessible format, which I'd be glad to pass on to the committee.
The regional differences in Canada with respect to attitudes in the United States are relatively straightforward and fairly easy to understand. For example, generally speaking, we find Albertans and, almost to the same extent, Ontarians more sympathetic and favourably oriented to the United States.
We have found one difference, really, which is for Quebec. Quebec went through a period of relatively negative views of the United States. The recent data I've seen suggests that's really improved quite significantly. It looks maybe a little more like it used to during the original free trade debate, when Quebeckers were ahead of the curve in some respects on attitudes to free trade in the early 1990s.
There are some other interesting differences as well. The really interesting differences, I think, occur more along demographic than social class lines. In the United States, the regional differences are extremely difficult to understand. American regional differences are very complex.
I mentioned that Americans and Canadians overall look relatively similar on many key issues and values, but the internal heterogeneity, the internal differentiation, within the United States is much more diversified than it is in Canada, and not just on a regional basis. American society is much more divided on issues of social class and race. We find much more consensus in Canada on many of the key issues than we do in the United States.
Yes, there are differences, certainly, that would occur across border states, but some of them are quite puzzling. I can pass those along. There are some recurring patterns, but there, they're considerably more challenging from a research perspective than understanding the more stable, familiar, and frankly less exaggerated patterns of difference across region and demographics that we see in Canada.
:
Again, in Canada there is a very high level of awareness of the interdependent nature of our economies. Part of this sense of the importance of the relationship is focused not just on the fact that we think Americans are our best friends, but on a real politic understanding of the maturing business opportunities that go along with this.
As for American society on the levels of awareness, no. For example, we've tested whether Americans know that Canada is their strongest trading partner. No. It would rank sixth or seventh, well down the list. Do they understand the value-added process whereby goods flow back and forth across the border? No, they don't.
But what is interesting is that Americans, unlike their neighbours to the north, think Canadians are just like them, and they would consider that a compliment. They think Canadians are “just like us”, that they're a little different, that they're up north and a little colder, but basically they're just like Americans and therefore they don't have to worry about us that much. They would think that would be saying a good thing. Canadians would bridle at that, as I pointed out at the beginning of my presentation, and would say no, we're really quite different, and we shouldn't be reduced to being just like Americans, even if on many issues we are just like Americans.
By the way, the pattern of ignorance in the American public about what's going on in Canada, which is perhaps much more of a concern in the elite portions of American society, can be a mixed blessing. For example, we tested at one point whether Americans were aware that Canada was fighting alongside their soldiers in Afghanistan. No, they weren't, for the most part, or they had limited awareness. When you told them, they said that was a good thing and it made them feel a little more favourable. Interestingly enough, in the same survey we asked if Canadians were fighting alongside Americans in Iraq, and they replied yes, they were. So raising public fluency could be a mixed bag here. Let's be careful.
I'm also not a strong believer in American public opinion, which is very favourable to Canada. It's a pretty difficult beast to move. It's pretty inert. The idea that some kind of a rational discourse will raise this fluency and therefore everything will be fine is a bit of a mug's game. I believe that we have to be much more focused and strategic.
:
Well, we have tested that explicitly, and we've tested it at different points in time.
We've found, for example, that when you ask Canadians, Americans, or Mexicans for that matter, should we have a bilateral or trilateral approach to various things, the environment has always been one of those things where people say, you know what, the environment doesn't respect political geography, species move across borders, and air and water moves, so it makes sense to cooperate on these issues—and more so than on other issues, on which they'd say, well, I'm not so sure I want to have a joint immigration policy.
What's interesting about the environment and climate change is that when you look at the issue of climate change and you blend it with issues of energy self-sufficiency—which is a much more attractive proposition for the United States, which would like to free itself from some of the geopolitically unstable regions where it currently goes to get oil, which they think increases their security risk—and when you factor in what's on the table for Canadians, and Mexicans for that matter, freer access to a less thickened border, for example, would be something of interest to us.
There seems to be a growing consensus among everybody that doing something about the climate and climate change is the single largest long-term challenge, not just in terms of social virtue, but as a real economic exigency, as people look at things like the faltering manufacturing sector and wonder how upper North American society is going to evolve to meet the challenges of a post-carbon society.
So when we blend energy, borders, and climate change together, we find that support dramatically increases in all three countries: Mexico, Canada, and the United States. That becomes a very attractive North American project.
I do hasten to point out that it's much easier to talk about things in a bilateral framework, but on some of these issues where you want to have the political emphasis behind it, perhaps this kind of a question is best framed as a North American issue, including Mexico as well. That's something that would take a little bit more time to get into.
:
Well, frankly, I think it's almost shocking that we don't have the basic kind of data that every large corporate entity would have to make its case to the American public in a period of difficulty, and not just the American public, but the key decision-makers. As far as I'm aware, the data we've been assembling for the last 10 or 15 years has basically petered out, and there's none of that being supported by our government or others. The shelf life of the materials we do have isn't really up to the task. Beyond that, I believe that we have to focus on the areas where we're really likely to make a difference and get a return on the investment, which are more or less the areas we've been discussing this afternoon.
I also believe that it's folly to try to generally change American attitudes towards Canada. I think what we need to do is find the segments of American society, the key groups, that we could call, perhaps, the “influentials”--the folks who are most likely, for example, to participate in the political process, write letters to the editor, perhaps belong to political parties, and so forth--and try to figure out messages that would resonate with those particular groups. There are ways, as researchers, to segment and refine the messages and target the messages using appropriate media to places where you could make a difference.
It's also essential that our key representatives in our consuls and also in our provincial governments and so forth are equipped with the basic information needed to dispel some of the false images about what Americans are thinking about Canada and the border and that they are also, by the way, aware of areas where difficulty exists. For example, it's extremely disturbing to find out that three years ago, 48% of Americans wanted to build a wall at the Canadian border. Now, we could be comforted that 87% wanted to make a wall at the Mexican border, and they actually started building it. But I personally found it pretty chilling that 48% of Americans.... Now, that number's gone down a bit, and it coexists with a lot of other data that would suggest that it's not a very sincere belief on the part of Americans. But I think it's important for us to know where the problems exist as well as what our exposed flanks are. And where we do have points of advantage that are highly significant, we should be able to assemble those in some focused communications to the key decision-makers we're capable of influencing.
:
Those are good questions. I'll try to respond to a couple of them.
It was quite shocking to see in the aftermath of September 11—which was the most viewed event in Canadian history as well as American history.... People were riveted to this for the immediate period and thereafter. It had an enormously profound impact, which all the evidence suggests was generational—it didn't dissipate. To best sum up the view, Canadians almost felt embarrassed about any of the more churlish or negative views they had about the United States. The overall sentiment was that we were all Americans now.
That sustained the strong support we had for such things as going to Iraq and Afghanistan. But we also saw it dissipate considerably, some time out, as we became much less convinced that Americans were going the right way. Now there is a greater sense of a common plight, with the economic woes that confront both countries. Despite the fact that there are some differences, there's also a greater sense of resonance or sympathy for the political administration in the United States right now.
Do I think this poses a danger that Canadians will perhaps relinquish or sacrifice their sense of their unique identity? I think we should be mindful of that possibility, but I also think the more likely answer is that it won't. Part of the maturing of the Canadian sense of identity that has occurred over the last 20 years has been a sense that we don't necessarily need to define ourselves now as not being American; we have a positive sense of what it means to be Canadian. It's more a sense of what we understand to be a positive conception: of being Canadian rather than of not being American. We see some evidence of that in our data.
Another point worth noting is that when free trade came into existence, the arguments were that both a pre-condition and a result of free trade would be a greater unification of values and subsequently of identity. In fact, we saw in Maastricht—in Europe—that precisely that happened, although there were different reasons. In Europe now, the instance of people who see themselves as both French, say, and European is almost equal, whereas at the outset of free trade the numbers were dramatically different.
What we've seen in North America is quite startlingly different. In North America, despite the fact that the levels of economic interdependence are as high as or higher than in Europe, national identities have actually been increasing through time. If we measure them over the last 20 to 30 years, the incidence of people who see their principal identification as being with their country, in Canada and the United States and probably Mexico, is much higher now than it was at the outset. What has declined is attachment to local community. In Europe, attachment to continent and local community have been rising. In Canada, attachment to North America has been relatively trivial, unlike the case in Europe.
It really is a different sort of trajectory. I would describe it more as a mosaic of strong identities co-existing within a common market. I don't see anything that will disrupt this in the near future. Perhaps another huge security shock is something that could do it, but I personally think that identities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico are relatively robust.
For the kinds of risk that were predicted by a lot of Canadian nationalists in the 1980s, the evidence is that we've sustained a very strong—in fact, perhaps a stronger—sense of identity during this period of trade liberalization. It's one that is in some respects improbable, but I think it answers the question: there's a good chance we'll be just fine, and our flirtation with the new administration does not mean we're going to be surrendering a sense of sovereignty or identity.
:
Again, that's an excellent and complicated question. I believe this should be a really prominent focus for us in the coming year, because I do believe that this thickening of the border, which is a term the Americans don't like, has not been particularly healthy.
Our research shows that there will be sizeable portions of both the American public and the Canadian public who are simply not going to travel as a consequence of WHTI. It's more focused on those people who are not particularly affluent, on people who are going to be crossing the border in their vehicles. With air travel, the effects largely have already been dealt with and 95% of people got their passports.
The numbers would be very, very large in terms of the economic consequences of people who would have travelled but aren't going to do so now because of this.
My optimistic scenario is that in terms of sheer risk analysis, there are better ways to deal with this with less economic cost, and there might be some receptivity to that, given some of the shift in both the public mood in the United States and the administration as well.
There are also other interesting ideas that we see emerging from some of the research that we've been doing on security and borders. For example, Canadians and Americans both seem to favour a shift to using electronic technology, information technology, as a method for reducing the intrusiveness and costs, time, and inconvenience of the border. If they acknowledge that this stuff is a necessary evil, then there is a sense that perhaps it could be dealt with, that rather than being patted down or asked to take off your belt and remove your shoes, maybe there would be technologies. In an ideal world we find that Canadians in growing numbers support the notion of a national identity card with a biometric. It sounds like something that would be very scary. In fact, we find the vast majority of Canadians now say that would be a good idea. I found as well when I polled the United States, which supposedly would be completely allergic to national identity, given their libertarian traditions, that a slim but significant majority of Americans would support a national identity card.
Ideally, in Canadians' best world, they would have a system of virtual passports that would be triggered by facial biometrics, and bad guys would be ferreted out by machines, and I wouldn't have to be annoyed by the nuisance of all the bells and removing my shoes and so forth. I think there's reason to believe that in the absence of achieving the more obvious goal of trying to soften or eliminate some of the WHTI initiatives, progress on the technology front will help to at least provide a more manageable and convenient world. There is growing resistance in consumers.
The other interesting area is that Canadians would like the idea of a unified approach to managing security so they would go along with the idea of a North American no-fly list. They don't like the idea of an American no-fly list being imposed, particularly in travelling in Canada, but they would be in fact supportive of one that was managed jointly. This is an area where Canadians and Americans would support shared approaches to dealing with the intelligence information. The solutions for Canadians more and more lie in the merger of intelligence and technology.
:
Mr. Chairman, there are two things I want to say.
One, I would hope that as a matter of style and practice, the steering committee would be able to work hard on the agenda and give us a sense of direction. There'll be some trade-offs, and we all have our special interests and subjects. I mean, we could spend a lot of time debating motions that come before us, but we have to say, okay, how do we want to organize our schedule? What are the issues we want to deal with? How do we want to go forward? I would hope that as a matter of just working style, we'd be able to do that.
We made a decision last time that we'd do this broad study, that we'd begin to pull together the people we want to look at. There are a couple of issues that I've mentioned, and Mr. Obhrai has moved a motion on them--Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, areas of particular crisis where we need to be able to respond and to have, on an ongoing basis, sessions on.
I would just prefer that we do that. We have to understand that if we say we're going to consider this, then we're going to consider that, and then, by the way, we're going to consider this in addition, that kind of unfocuses us, that's all. I think we have to try to stay focused. Otherwise we can spend time debating motions.
As I've suggested to people, I'm happy if we can have a day where we talk about Sir Lanka, get a couple of witnesses in who can give us some information, and have an engaged discussion on that. That's worthwhile, and we can move on that basis.
I'm not quite sure, for example--speaking about both of Mr. Dewar's motions--when we would do this. Would it take time away from other stuff? How would we integrate it into the rest of what we're doing?
I really think these are the things that need to be traded off in the steering committee much more. In my view, that's what the steering committee should be doing.
:
No, it hasn't. The House rose. We had, like, five minutes to talk about it and it was over.
It's the same with the Khadr report. I'll just say, quite frankly, if you want to withdraw the Khadr report from that, I don't know...fine, but I thought....
These three items were items that the previous foreign affairs committee had worked on, had passed, and had just gotten to the House before we recessed.
So that's the intent. Just so you know, that's why that's there. It's not about doing extra work. It's not about delaying us. It's actually finishing the work that this committee had done in the last Parliament.
I think it's important that this committee does its work and that it also finishes the job. The job, as you know, is not just the work here; it's also sending it to the Commons. If we don't do that, then we're working on another planet. It actually wastes our time.
So those three items I've brought back simply to clean up, to do mop-up.
On the second item, I'm happy to fold that in, Bob or anyone else, to the work that we're going to do. The issue I put down here, on resolutions 1325 and 1820, is something the government signed onto and is actually doing work on. This isn't playing gotcha. This is actually, in light of what we had talked about at committee, when I was bringing up the Congo and Darfur, the role of Canada...as a resolution that was passed, 1325, which is the role of women in peacekeeping, and 1820, which actually goes further and prescribes how to do that.
Instead of saying we should take a country, I was wanting to apply these principles, which we've passed in the UN, and take a look at it. But I'm happy to fold that into the approach that we'd taken at the steering committee.
No problem; if that's...but I just want to make sure that's part of our study. If we're trying to actually move this along, fine. But these other two items, as I said to Mr. Obhrai, he helped amend, in the case of CSR, to the liking of the government, I assume, at the time. It's simply to make sure that these two items, along with the Afghanistan report, get out of this committee to Parliament. We never had that opportunity, because the House rose.