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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A top Canadian official calls Bush a "moron" -- and her countrymen cheer. Why do our northern neighbors think the president is a chimp?
Nov 26, 2002 | It takes a lot for Canada to make the papers, but this was a good one. Last week at a NATO conference Francoise Ducros, a top aide to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, was overheard calling President George W. Bush "a moron." Out loud.
It was, to say the least, a bit of a diplomatic faux pas. In the Canadian Parliament, opposition politicians screamed for the head of Ducros, Chretien's director of communications. Ducros paid the price for her indiscreet comment Tuesday when Chretien accepted her resignation. (She had offered to resign last week, but the prime minister initially refused to accept her resignation.) Before Ducros departed, a Canadian news organization ran a poll, asking the public what Ducros' fate should be.
The winning suggestion: Give the woman a promotion.
No, these are not good days for the president's international image. Bush may bask in warm approval ratings back home, but Canadians seem to view him with a mixture of fear and contempt, a German government official compared his foreign policy to Hitler's, while European political cartoonists almost uniformly portray him as various species of monkey. And those are his allies.
Prime Minister Chretien, a man who often seems to speak both English and French as second languages, promptly offered a helpful clarification. "He's not a moron at all," Chretien said of Bush. "He's my friend."
That ought to show up in future Bush campaign literature. Pretty much lays the issue to rest (although Chretien left open the question of whether the president might be a chucklehead or possibly a putz).
Canadian antipathy to the States is neither new nor secret. A recent cover story in the National Review pilloried Canadians as "Wimps!" decrying our mewling, hypocritical complaints about U.S. behavior and facetiously suggesting that a good, sound bombing would do wonders for our attitude.
The Review story had a point. There is indeed a facile strain of Yankee-hating on the Canadian left, a relentless demonizing of the American ogre combined with an utter lack of gratitude for the military and economic benefits of having such a kick-ass next door neighbor. While 9/11 prompted an overwhelming grass-roots outpouring of Canadian solidarity with America, it also gradually uncovered an appallingly deep and intellectually lazy anti-Americanism among many educated Canadians. There was a widespread tendency to seek justifications for the terrorist attacks; a sort of "Yes, it was awful, but so is U.S. foreign policy" approach. The long habit of criticizing America proved so durable that many Canadians began to cast Osama bin Laden as a legitimate grievant.
That's inexcusable. But in many other ways, northern anti-Americanism is not only understandable but inevitable. And for that, President George W. Bush must carry the can.
Try to walk a mile in fur-lined Canadian galoshes while you consider the following.
As the U.S. prepared to attack the Taliban, Bush called for allied support. Canada responded by sending troops to Afghanistan.
And how did the president say thank you? By imposing a massive tariff on Canadian softwood lumber, a tariff that threatened doom for the West Coast lumber industry and made a mockery of our vaunted North American Free Trade Agreement (not to mention the supposedly fundamental Republican commitment to free trade). The World Trade Organization criticized the U.S. tariff as pure politics. The Canadian government howled. No matter.
Meanwhile, four Canadian troops were killed in Afghanistan when an overzealous American pilot bombed them during a training exercise. The military investigation was secretive and grudging, while Michigan politicians began raising money to protect the U.S. pilots from a "witch hunt."
And Canadians asked: Is this how America rewards its friends?
