EVERY COUNTRY has its problematic national story: race in the United States, class in Britain, empire in Russia. Canada's problem is its perpetual identity crisis, a collective neurosis bred of being a confederation of English and French peoples--what the novelist Hugh MacLennan once called the country's "Two Solitudes"--and the small neighbor to one of history's few great nations. Canadians alternately worry about too much American attention--of being overwhelmed by the United States--and, as suggested by the title of a recent book, Invisible and Inaudible in Washington (2000), of being ignored by the United States. (It didn't help that the New Republic once judged the most boring headline ever to be "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.")
These twin pressures have always existed as an immutable fact for Canadians and likely always will. But American policymakers need to be far more interested in how Canadians deal with these questions, since their answers will largely determine whether Canada is likely to remain a trusted ally in the unpredictable post-9/11 world or become a dangerously exposed northern flank.
The United States cannot "wall itself off" from Canada. Traffic across the 5,061-kilometer U.S.-Canadian border, which Ronald Reagan once hailed as "a meeting place between great and true friends", cements the most comprehensive bilateral trading relationship in history. A truck crosses the U.S.-Canadian border every 2.5 seconds. Approximately $1.3 billion in two-way trade crosses the border every day--or $500 billion a year. More than 200 million two-way border crossings occur yearly, making the shared border the busiest international boundary in the world.
