was much more comfortable with Mulroney’s Con-
servative leadership than it had been with Trudeau’s
liberalism, which at times seemed to threaten U.S.-
Canadian foreign policy. Days after his victory in
September, 1984, Mulroney announced in New York
that “good relations, super relations with the United
States, will be the cornerstone of our foreign policy.”
The two conservative governments shared an ideo-
logical compatibility. U.S. foreign policy did not
change in the course of the 1980’s; Canadian policy
accommodated itself to it. Both Republicans and
Conservatives accepted the older assumptions of the
Cold War; spoke of arms control; and professed a
commitment to balanced budgets, to trade liberaliza-
tion, to privatization, and to deregulation. This politi-
cal compatibility extended to the two heads of state:
Reagan and Mulroney liked each other personally,
and a period of amiable relations began. Reagan was
one of the few presidents who actively sought a closer
relationship with Canada and who consistently made
improved trilateral North American relations and lib-
eralized trade a priority of his administration.
The new prime minister made a brief visit to
Washington, D.C., in September, 1984, and wel-
comed the reelected president formally to Canada
at Quebec City in March, 1985. At this summit, Rea-
gan and Mulroney appointed Drew Lewis, former
U.S. secretary of transportation, and William Davis,
former Ontario premier, to study acid rain. A year
later, the prime minister met the president with the
envoys’ conclusion that “acid rain imperils the envi-
ronment in both countries.” Reagan promised ac-
tion, and Mulroney showed off Canada’s new influ-
ence in Washington, announcing that acid rain had
become “a front-burner issue,” but the Reagan ad-
ministration proved unwilling to enforce the result-
ing legislation.
One of the features of the new relationship be-
tween the U.S. and Canadian governments was a
greater frequency of high-level meetings. Mulroney
and Reagan pledged to meet annually to review out-
standing issues, and they did so between 1984 and
- Reagan’s secretaries of state and Mulroney’s
ministers of external affairs met even more fre-
quently. The improved relationship also owed a good
deal to the energy and diplomatic skills of Allan
Gotlieb, Canadian ambassador to Washington
(1981-1989), who made a real effort to understand
the U.S. Congress. He realized that nothing could be
accomplished either in trade policy or on environ-
mental controls without active congressional sup-
port and that a hostile and protectionist Congress
could do great damage to Canadian interests. Con-
servatives and Republicans worked so well together
that by January, 1986, Reagan declared that he had
achieved a “renewed spirit of friendship and cooper-
ation with Mexico and Canada” and a “most produc-
tive period in Canadian-American friendship.”
At a follow-up meeting in Washington, Reagan
and Mulroney renewed the North American Aero-
space Defense Command (NORAD) agreement for
five years, but NORAD suddenly became a conten-
tious issue in Canada, as it involved Canada in the
Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI). In a charged political atmosphere, consensus
in the Canadian parliament was unlikely, and a joint
Canadian Senate-House of Commons committee re-
port, while supporting the need for the United
States to undertake basic research on SDI technol-The Eighties in America Canada and the United States 179
In the United States,Timemagazine heralded Brian Mulroney’s
election as Canada’s prime minister and its importance to re-
lations between the two countries.(Hulton Archive/Getty
Images)