Introduction: The Reality of Canada’s Relationship with the United States

From the earliest days of Confederation, there is no single issue that has shaped Canada more profoundly and demanded more consistent attention from its prime ministers than managing the country’s relationship with the United States of America. It is commonplace for Canadians and others to boast that Canada and the United States share the world’s longest undefended border and are bound together not merely because they share a continent; they are also linked through trade, shared cultural traits and values and, for much of the last century, by common concerns over security. At the same time, it is also an undeniable fact that Canada’s neighbour is far larger and more powerful than is Canada and that in ways makes the relationship both indispensable and, at times, deeply uncomfortable.^[1]

Canada’s prime ministers have navigated this asymmetrical partnership for more than a century and a half, struggling to maintain the nation’s sovereignty, distinctiveness, and national interests alongside a neighbour that is not only more powerful but has often taken Canada for granted or treated it with ambivalence if not benign neglect. They have wrestled with the persistent dilemma of how to coexist and benefit from proximity to the world’s dominant economic, cultural, and military power without surrendering Canada’s sovereignty and political autonomy, cultural distinctiveness, and national identity.

The challenge has been constant even if it has changed form from one generation to the next. At times, the Canada-US relationship has been marked by suspicion and, at other times, by an aggressive if defensive nationalism. Yet, in moments of crisis and uncertainty, there has been remarkable cooperation and personal friendship between the sitting prime minister of Canada and the sitting President of the United States. All the while, beneath the fluctuations of diplomacy and moments of warm personal relations, as between Mackenzie King and Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, concern for Canada’s uniqueness and well-being have remained. Thus, there has been much continuity in the relationship between the two countries, as Canada’s prime ministers, regardless of party or ideology, have had to navigate similar concerns of economic integration, political sovereignty, cultural homogenization, and continental security. Their approaches have differed dramatically, but the underlying problem has remained constant.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, set an enduring pattern almost immediately after Confederation, a pattern that would become a recurring Canadian instinct: the fear that too close of a trading and economic relationship with the United States would lead inevitably to political absorption. A dozen years after Confederation, in 1879, Macdonald promoted the National Policy. This included various defences against what he termed American imperialism, namely, protective tariffs, transcontinental railways, and western settlement, all designed to orient Canada on an east-west axis rather than north-south. Macdonald’s policies shaped the nation for decades. He saw the newly formed country as fragile, requiring economic instruments and institutions strong enough to resist the gravitational pull of the mighty American neighbour on its doorstep. This strategy was not simply economic, but also political as it was designed to build a coherent, east-west Canadian economy, oriented away from the south but also focused internally, and when it did look internationally, it was towards Great Britain.^[2]

Not all of Canada’s political leaders shared Macdonald’s worries, not even in the late nineteenth century. The Liberal Opposition, led by Wilfrid Laurier from 1887, argued for greater trade with the United States, and after he had been prime minister for a decade, Laurier negotiated a reciprocity agreement with Washington in 1911, offering broad tariff reductions. Macdonald’s Conservative Party weaponized the idea of free trade with the Americans, warning that closer economic ties would erode Canadian independence. The general election held in 1911 became a referendum on Canada’s economic relationship with the United States, and Laurier’s defeat in that campaign was a warning to all political leaders that the fear of Canada’s absorption into the United States would long remain a potent force in Canadian political life. Even as late as 1988, when another election decided another trade agreement between Canada and the United States, the campaign revealed just how deeply anxieties about American influence were embedded in the Canadian political consciousness.^[3]

Gradually, after 1911, Canada-United States relations changed, as a great economic downturn, two world wars, the decline of the British Empire, and the emergence of the United States as a global superpower narrowed Canada’s opportunities in a new world order and drew Canada steadily closer to Washington. Prime ministers, especially William Lyon Mackenzie King, recognized that geography and security made cooperation unavoidable. The 1940 Ogdensburg Agreement, negotiated by King and President Roosevelt, for the first time formally linked Canada and the United States in continental defence. King even negotiated an economic arrangement with the United States in the Hyde Park Agreement; nevertheless, he remained an anxious nationalist, and worried ceaselessly about the erosion of Canadian sovereignty, so much so that he cancelled a planned free trade agreement that he himself had ordered negotiated.^[4]

After the Second World War, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West deepened these ties dramatically, especially through such defence arrangements as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 during the tenure of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, and a decade later, the signing of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), when Progressive Conservative John George Diefenbaker was prime minister. Both military alliances were largely under US leadership. Before all that long, tensions emerged, especially between the administration of President John F. Kennedy and the Diefenbaker government during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Diefenbaker’s concern over American disregard for Canada as an equal partner in North American defence revealed how vulnerable Canada could be when relations with Washington deteriorate. His hesitation to put Canadian forces under NORAD on full alert in 1962 produced a genuine rupture, even prompting Washington to interfere in Canadian domestic politics, leaking damaging information that contributed to Diefenbaker’s defeat in 1963. This was a stark reminder that the relationship would never be easy, although this period was one of the most turbulent in the history of Canada-US relations.^[5]

Liberal Lester B. Pearson, succeeded Diefenbaker as prime minister. He attempted to mend relations and show there could and would be disagreement without rupture. He also strengthened Canada’s trade relationship with the United States, particularly with regard to the auto sector. Pearson’s rebuilding of Canada’s relationship with the United States did not come without controversy, however, most notably as the result of a speech Pearson delivered at Temple University in 1965. Breaking his own rule that the best approach is a quiet one, Pearson suggested a pause in American bombing of North Vietnam and provoked President Lyndon Johnson to grab him by the lapels and berate him. It was difficult, Pearson learned, to be cooperative and independent at the same time.

When he became prime minister in 1968, Liberal Pierre Elliott Trudeau sought immediately to reduce Canadian dependence on the United States through his “third option” foreign and economic policy. Trudeau often approached the United States with disdain, even as he eventually accepted the economic reality that Canada could not drift too far from its big neighbour to the south. Under Trudeau, Canada recognized Communist China before the United States did, established close relations with Cuba, and attempted to reduce Canadian dependence on American trade by diversifying towards Europe. Trudeau greatly disliked US President Richard Nixon, but he understood the facts of Canada’s dependence on American markets, and by the end of his time in office even played with the notion of sectoral free trade with the United States.^[6]

Trudeau’s successor, Progressive Conservative Party leader Brian Mulroney, cultivated a warm personal friendship with US presidents Ronald Reagan and, later, George H.W. Bush, much to the embarrassment of many Canadians, and he embraced closer integration with the United States. Mulroney famously secured the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988, which was a reversal of the National Policy that had been instituted in 1879, pieces of which had long remained in place. The agreement was later extended to include Mexico to become the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. The 1988 election, like the one in 1911, was also a referendum on free trade, but this time the continentalists prevailed. Economic nationalism had given way to managed integration, where the Government of Canada believed rules-based access to American markets would strengthen rather than weaken Canadian sovereignty.

The post–Cold War era introduced new challenges especially after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien demonstrated that a close economic relationship did not require political capitulation. Canada declared its support for the United States in its attempts to deal with international terror organizations, joining the fighting in Afghanistan but refusing to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq without a United Nations mandate. On economic matters and trade, Chrétien embraced Mulroney’s policies. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who followed, was similarly committed to strengthening security and economic cooperation while navigating disputes over energy and borders.^[7]

Liberal Justin Trudeau became prime minister of Canada in 2015. He had to deal with President Donald J. Trump’s first administration and that tested the Canada-US relationship severely. Trump imposed tariffs, particularly on Canadian steel and aluminum on national security grounds and insisted on the renegotiation of NAFTA, renaming it the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (Canada-US-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, in Canadian documents), amid much tension. Trump and Trudeau had a testy – even adversarial – relationship, especially after Trump returned as president as a result of the 2024 US election. Then Trump took to belittling Trudeau as the “governor” of Canada and talked of annexing Canada as the 51st state of the United States of America. Mark Carney succeeded Justin Trudeau as prime minister, uniting Canadians in their resistance to Trump and spurring a huge increase in a sense of patriotism and pride among Canadians, although important matters of trade and security remain to be worked out.^[8]

The chapters in this book were written in an upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminar in the fall of 2025 as Canadians became increasingly worried about the United States and its sitting President. This was an appropriate moment to look back and examine how various Canadian prime ministers have managed the unequal but indispensable relationship with that big neighbouring country since 1867. Not all of Canada’s prime ministers are considered here; nevertheless, what clearly emerges is that the relationship between Canada and the United States has not been a problem to be solved once and for all, but that, instead, it is an essential and a permanent aspect of Canadian statecraft. Every Canadian prime minister inherits this issue and must deal with it. Despite what President Trump has said recently, Canada and the United States need each other; however, that need is not equal. Canada is the weaker economically and militarily, but it does have resources and products that the United States needs. Canada’s prime ministers, whatever their ideological stripe or party, have to carefully manage the relationship with the United States while Canadians always worry about the effects of economic integration and how they might impact their political sovereignty. Still, as Canadians look to the United States, they realize that, especially regarding continental security, the partnership forged over the decades cannot be ignored. Prime ministers have combined resistance with realism and have understood, some more quickly than others, that Canada’s options have limits. Living next door to a superpower offers its challenges to a smaller nation like Canada, especially when its economic well-being and standard of living are often contingent on access to the superpower’s marketplace. What Canada’s leaders have found is that neither strident anti-American nationalism nor unquestioning continentalism offers a complete answer.

The relationship between Canada and the United States is managed best when prime ministers recognize both the limits of Canadian power and the importance of defending Canadian interests with clarity and confidence but without needlessly poking the American elephant in the eye.