Listening to Stephen Harper you would think that Canada has never been less relevant to the United States. “We've just become increasingly irrelevant to a country [U.S.] that has a lot of priorities…” (CBC Newsworld, July 11, 2003). In reality the opposite holds true. Our trade with the US is at an all time high. Not only are they are biggest trading partner, but we are their biggest trading partner. All of this is pretty well known. What is less well known is just how much attention some of the Liberal Party’s more progressive policy proposals (i.e., decriminalization of marijuana and gay marriage) and the Liberals choice not to join the “coalition of the willing” have gathered in the US.

Now, admittedly some of the attention has been negative. Conservative pundits have directed a great deal of bile our way, but not anything Canadians have not already heard from would be Prime Minister Harper; in a letter to the National Post, entitled “Separation, Alberta-style: It is time to seek a new relationship with Canada”, Harper went for beyond anything Lucien Bouchard every put to pen and called Canada “resentful”, “smug”, “second tier” and “second rate”. http://www.stephenharpersaid.ca/" title="http://www.stephenharpersaid.ca/" target="_blank"http://www.stephenharpersaid.... However, whereas Harper only went so far as to threaten to set up “firewalls” around Alberta, some pundits have threatened violence. Ann Coutlier has threatened to have us “crushed”, O’ Reilly has threatened us with nuclear winter and the Western Standard’s Goldberg http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/i s_22_54/ai_94960947" title="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/i s_22_54/ai_94960947" target="_blank"http://www.findarticles.com/p...  has said we should be “bombed” and his colleague Matt Labash http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articl es/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=2" title="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articl es/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=2" target="_blank"http://www.weeklystandard.com... has seconded him. Thankfully all are only arm chair dictators. Still others have echoed Harper in calling us irrelevant and O’Reilly and gang have also used this line when they are not threatening violence. Most recently, Tucker Carlson likened us to Honduras “only colder and less interesting”. http://mediamatters.org/items/200412010011&nb sp" title="http://mediamatters.org/items/200412010011&nb sp" target="_blank"http://mediamatters.org/items...;  All, of course, are involved in sort of performative contradiction. In repeatedly c alling us irrelevant they have helped entrench us as part of the public debate south of the border and so have made us increasing relevant.   

The Democrats badly needed to update their legislative agenda when Clinton came to power. Clinton brought the party up to speed on the economic front, but after the cold war ended the whole locus of politics in the West switched from the economic sphere to the cultural one and Clinton and the Democrats were caught flat footed. In 8 years of Cultural war, Clinton gave his base next to nothing. He let the social cons set the agenda at every turn. Although, the affect of such a stand pat policy may not have been evident over the short term, over the long term the affects were devastating. “liberalism” if it is to mean anything at all to the average American must represent a vision for American society that weaves together a series of legislative proposals. What is more, this vision has to be updated to meet changing realities. Clinton’s whole approach to the cultural wars was defensive and defeatist.

The party got to the point where in 2002 its identity was based solely upon what it is not, viz., the Republican Party. In 2003, Dean pulled party back from the dead by actually addressing the party base and their anger at Bush. He gave them hope, but the party still lacked a legislative agenda. Enter Canada: Chrétien’s announcement that Canada would be legalizing gay marriage and decriminalizing marijuana gave many Democrats a sense of what could eventually be accomplished. Slowly at first and then more quickly later, prominent newspapers and magazines started gushing over what Canada had done.

Working links

the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk...

From the NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/0 6QUESTIONS.html?ex=1112072400&" title="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/0 6QUESTIONS.html?ex=1112072400&" target="_blank"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/0...;en=7aef39efeffd405d& ei=5070&ex=1061697600 &en=5c469e9929ae55fa& amp;ei=5070
the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&" title="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&" target="_blank"http://www.thenation.com/doc....;s=klein

From the Christian Science Monitor:  http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam .html" title="http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam .html" target="_blank"http://www.csmonitor.com/2003...

From the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a1 0.html" title="http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a1 0.html" target="_blank"http://www.mapinc.org/drugnew...

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sa m0730p1.asp" title="http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sa m0730p1.asp" target="_blank"http://www.post-gazette.com/c...

From CanWest News Service: http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&a mp" title="http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&a mp" target="_blank"http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/i...;itemID=421

From Macleans: http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/arti cle.jsp?content=20031013_6700 3_67003" title="http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/arti cle.jsp?content=20031013_6700 3_67003" target="_blank"http://www.macleans.ca/switch...

Links that no longer work

From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com...;node=&contentId=A545 02-2003Jun30¬Found=true

From the Seatle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource....
In the September 27 2003 edition the Economist also pronounced that Canada was cool, but in order to access that article you have to pay for it.
From the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/1...

From the International Herald Tribune via the NY Times: http://www.iht.com/articles/9...

From the International Herald Tribune via the NY Times : http://www.iht.com/articles/1...

Even as the Dean scream singled the victory of Victorian reason over passion in the Democratic body, the Democratic base never did loose their sense wonder over the Liberals proposals regarding gay marriage and decriminalizing marijuana. As a result, literally hundreds of thousands looked into moving to Canada in the weeks following Bush’s reelection.   http://slate.msn.com/id/2109300" title="http://slate.msn.com/id/2109300" target="_blank"http://slate.msn.com/id/21093... Canada was made out a be a kind of secular promised land.

The Republican response, outlined above, has ranged from trying to turn Canada into another France to outright worry. For every blue stater lauding Canada, O'Reilly and gang have felt an need to turn up the volume.  The Liberals promise to legalize gay marriage in the wake of the June 12 2003 court decision certainty had Justice Scalia’s beside himself with homophobic rage. “This ghastly prospect was evidently on Scalia’s mind as he composed his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. If sodomy laws are unsustainable, he warned, then so are “laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation”—masturb ation? is that one still on the books?—“adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.” Doom looms, it would appear. According to Scalia, “The Court has taken sides in the culture war,” and the next step, logically, must be “judicial imposition of homosexual marriage, as has recently occurred in Canada.”

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707t a_talk_hertzberg" title="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707t a_talk_hertzberg" target="_blank"http://www.newyorker.com/talk...

The Liberals promise to decriminalize marijuana together with their backing of safe injection sites poses a major ideological threat the US’s war on drugs. Hence, all the attention Drug Czar Walters has paid us for the last couple of years.

In a private meeting with then mayor Philip Owen and future mayor Larry Campbell, Drug Czar Walters had threatened action if Vancouver went ahead with a plan for safe injection sites. Namely, Canadians could face major border slow downs. Owen described the meeting thus: “It was the most unsatisfactory meeting of my life.” “The pressure was intense. John Walters had about 30 officers with him, special agents. At the door there was a guy with the bulge of a gun under his clothes.”
http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2004/10/26/VanDru gExpWinConverts/" title="http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2004/10/26/VanDru gExpWinConverts/" target="_blank"http://www.thetyee.ca/News/20...

Shortly after Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell road to power in the biggest landslide in Vancouver municipal history on platform centered on setting up safe injection sites. John Walters then took the matter public, telling a Vancouver board of trade audience, in what amounted to a thinly disguised threat not to take things too far, that we were only making matters worse. Larry Campbell quipped afterwards that the notion that safe injection sites would make things worse was akin to saying “flies cause garbage”.

Walters has since claimed that Canada risks becoming as big a source for marijuana, a drug he calls equally bad as heroin and coke, as Mexico. He says this knowing full well that Mexico supplies an estimated 100 times as much marijuana as Canada does.
http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread14988.shtml" title="http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread14988.shtml" target="_blank"http://www.cannabisnews.com/n...