We love Barack Obama, don’t we? Canadians, I mean. Yes, we surely do. It’s because, as the U.S. president himself once said at one of those comedy roasts he handles so perfectly, he’s just “too awesome.”
From a Canadian point of view, Obama is simply too fantastic not to adore. He’s charming. He’s smart. He’s funny. He has the cachet of being America’s first black president. He’s an internationalist. He would never thumb his nose at the French, or eat a freedom fry, or use bad grammar, or go to war without UN approval. Indeed Obama is as different from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, as it is possible to be. Consistently, polls show Obama winning about 80 per cent of the popular vote among Canadians, if we could vote in this U.S. election, which judging by the recent radio chatter most of us wish we could.
Now, here’s the truly intriguing thing about the phenomenon: A dispassionate look at the rival platforms clearly shows that an Obama win would be worse for Canada – significantly worse – than a Romney win. It’s not even an argument. It’s a slam-dunk.
For evidence I turn first to my Postmedia colleague, Lee Berthiaume, who published an excellent piece over the weekend highlighting the differences between the two contenders, from a Canadian policy perspective. I won’t go through the whole article, other than to note a few its most salient facts.
To start, if Obama wins, U.S. military spending drops substantially as the 2nd term Democratic president – assuming he keeps his promises, that is – beats swords into ploughshares. Good idea? Absolutely. But any decline in U.S. defence spending from its current level of four per cent of GDP (Canada spends just over one per cent) will put pressure on our government to spend more – or stop pretending we can participate in international efforts such as the Libyan campaign, Haitian earthquake relief, and the like.
Health care: Obamacare is projected to create a massive doctor shortage south of the border – to the tune of 63,000 by 2015. Hmm, let’s see: Where will lavishly generous, for-profit U.S. health care firms go to find all those excellent doctors? Well, they’ll come here, to Canada. So much for reduced wait times.
Of course there’s energy: Romney loves the Keystone XL pipeline, intended to ease the passage of Alberta oil to the Gulf coast. Obama may approve it post-election despite his reservations, or he may not. And that has follow-on consequences. For one thing, a speedy go-ahead for Keystone would relieve some market pressure behind Enbridge’s plan to push its own Gateway pipeline across B.C. to the Pacific. Gateway has already caused tension between Alberta and B.C. and the chosen route has riled environmentalists, people who live along the route, as well as aboriginal groups.
Then there’s the bridge in Windsor-Detroit, as former ambassador to the U.S. Derek Burney pointed out in a splendid rant on Rex Murphy’s Cross-Country Checkup. How is it that Canada fronts the entire $4-billion cost of this new span, deemed integral to furthering the world’s greatest bilateral trading relationship, and has been forced to negotiate with the state of Michigan, which may in fact scuttle it Tuesday in a plebiscite, Proposal 6, attached to the presidential ballot? As Burney points out: Where is the U.S. government in all this?
And there’s Obama’s oft-noted yen for protectionism: ‘Buy America’ and the like. Congress being Congress, there will never be an end to U.S. protectionist twitches. But Burney and others point out that, in a Romney presidency, we’ll likely see less of them. Burney also notes that Canada was a wallflower in initial negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (though we are joining now). How does that happen when your best friend and biggest trading partner is hosting the dance?
In fact, Obama has never – not a single time, that I know of – appeared to care a jot about Canada’s economic interests, in any way. His interests, as one might expect, are his own, and his concerns domestic. Good on him – but that doesn’t mean the two sets of interests, his and ours, coincide. They often haven’t.
Finally, there’s the single dominant issue of this campaign – the economy. The United States, of course, buys 70 per cent of Canada’s exports. If their economy fails, so does ours. With that in mind, check out this U.S. national public debt clock widget. It’s now $16 trillion and rising, at a rate too dizzying to watch. Divided by the U.S. population, roughly 314 million, that yields a tab of just under $52,000 for every man, woman and child in America.
Now consider: Which candidate, based purely on their personal experience, seems to have a better grasp of bottom-line, dollars-and-cents issues? Community organizer and all-round nice guy Obama, or balance-sheet warrior Romney?
It’s not a conclusion many Canadians will wish to draw. I don’t particularly wish to myself, because I like Obama. But if you drill into the policy differences just a bit, the result is clear: It’s a good thing Canadians can’t vote in this election. If we could, we’d be acting overwhelmingly against our own interests.
A Romney win better for Canada?
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