Consider Your Friends

There is a true love/hate relationship between Canadians and Americans. Or perhaps that's a trifle harsh. Suspicion, perhaps, a little bit of hostility, the certainty one has of its superiority over the other. We are neighbours, we travel across friendly borders to visit with one another. We bargain and trade with one another, advantaging ourselves enormously by our geographic proximity and our valuation of goods captured through eager markets.

But Canadians complain incessantly that Americans are too controlling, too obsessed with calling the shots, too dismissive of Canadian autonomy, too overbearing with their ubiquitous culture symbols and aggressive trade tactics. And Americans are unfailingly surprised that this country next door of which they know very little and have no intention of becoming better informed, might have anything at all to complain about with respect to their relationship.

On the other hand, we tend to relieve the situation when we meet, as we happen to often enough, one on one, through travel and exchange, and we realize that we share more in common than what it is that sets us apart. Isn't that always the way, after all? Go to just about anywhere in the world, and you will encounter other people whose aspirations and goals fairly well reflect your own.

Here's a very tender, good news story about neighbours. A Canadian steamship given the name of SS Queen Victoria, built in a shipyard in Scotland, and used in 1860 to transport the Prince of Wales about Canada, later used by the British colony's governor general, and later still, in 1864, outfitted to convey Canada's founders, John A. Macdonald, George-Etienne Cartier and George Brown to a Charlottetown meeting to negotiate the colonies of British North America to nationhood, sank in a storm off the U.S. coast in 1866.

This historic vessel of grand provenance and great historical value to Canada, later re-named "the Confederate Cruiser", was sunk by a hurricane in 1866 on a charter run to pick up cargo from Cuba, off the U.S. coast. The American captain of a U.S. ship rushed into action to assist in rescuing the Canadian sailors, who in gratitude, presented the captain with the ship's bell to honour his heroic act.

Now, over one hundred and forty years later, a small New England fishing town where the bell has been kept as a heritage symbol of the maritime history of the people of Prospect Harbor, Maine - had made an exact replica of the historic Canadian bell for presentation to the people of Charlottetown, in honour of a shared maritime heritage, and in friendship between neighbours.

The mayor of Charlottetown, at the unveiling of the bell's recovery to his city, said that the city was "honoured and indebted" to the people of Maine for their "very generous act of kindness".

Fact is, Canadians luuuv Americans. It's just their government we kind of hesitate about. And its aspirations with respect to Canada's natural resources, our endowment by nature of all those fundamental and internationally desirous goodies, like our natural gas, our oil, our water, minerals, that kind of solid stuff.

And our Arctic sovereignty....

HANDS OFF!