Protecting Canada’s eggs in the US basket

About one-third of Canada’s entire output, 85 percent of our exports, goes to the United States. With all those eggs in one basket, protecting them and promoting Canada’s interests in the US must be a top priority, says Allan Gotlieb, former Canadian ambassador in Washington. Once an advocate of incrementalism in managing Canada-US relations, Gotlieb suggests that Canada does better when it advances a big picture agenda, as it did in the 1980s with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. In a major address to the Montreal Economic Institute, Gotlieb suggests the US might be receptive to another big idea, provided it’s in their interest as well as ours.