Canada scrambles to keep privileged ties with Trump-led America
By
Roger Jordan
17 January 2017
Canada’s Liberal government has launched a major diplomatic offensive to convince the incoming Trump administration to maintain and expand the Canadian bourgeoisie’s economic and military-security partnership with the US, including privileged access to the US market.
Since the November 8 US election, Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, have held at least a dozen meetings with top representatives of Trump’s transition team, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and chief strategist, the neo-fascist owner of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon.
Last week, shortly after the Liberals publicized their concerted efforts to “engage” with Trump, Trudeau shuffled his cabinet. The press uniformly interpreted Trump’s impending assumption of the US presidency as the chief reason for the shuffle. For his part, Trudeau said Canada’s government had to take into account the “shift in global context.”
For three-quarters of a century, Canadian imperialism has relied on its partnership with Washington to advance its global interests. Canada was a founding member of NATO, is tied to the Pentagon through the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has participated in virtually every US war in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
The Canada-US military-security alliance is underpinned by a close economic partnership. Fearing the growth of protectionism in Washington and the increasing division of the world into regional trading blocs, the most powerful sections of the Canadian bourgeoisie changed course in the 1980s, abandoned their traditional “national policy” and…