Home Washington Secretariat Midwest State Legislators Conference

Address to Midwest State Legislators Conference

Colin Robertson
Minister (Advocacy) and Head, Washington Advocacy Secretariat
Regina, Saskatchewan,
August 1, 2005

Minister Taylor: Thank you for your kind introduction.

Premier Lorne Calvert, Leader of the Opposition Brad Wall, Senator and Chair Kevin Coughlin, Speaker Kowalksy.

I’m delighted to be with you, our state and provincial legislators as the Mid-West State Legislators hold their first conference in Canada, here in Regina, to celebrate the centenary of our host province, Saskatchewan and its sister province, Alberta.

I’m honoured to be here with my colleagues Kim Butler, our Consul General in Minneapolis, Ann Charles, our Consul General in Chicago, and Pam Wallin, our Consul General in New York. We’re part of the expanding network of Canadian offices across the United States that help to sustain and grow the dynamic trade between our states.

In the eleven states you represent, sales to Canada create over a million American jobs. For each of your states, your largest export market is Canada, as it is for all of America. And what’s really interesting about our trade is that the stuff we make often criss-crosses the border four or five times. That’s the case with our most important commodity, the cars and buses that brought so many of us here today.

As I’ve observed during my four tours of duty in the United States the relationships between states and provinces are the hidden wiring of the Canadian-American relationship. It’s through institutions like the Mid-West Conference, where legislators can talk to one another peer to peer, that we solve problems and share solutions, not just on the inter-mestic challenges of trade and the environment, but on issues of mutual concern like health and education.

I encourage you to get out and explore Regina. Great golf courses. Or do what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning and run around the Wascana, past the Legislative Buildings that you visited last night as guests of Speaker Kowalsky. Cross the Albert Street Bridge - reputedly the longest bridge across the shortest body of water in the world. Watch out for the Canadian geese. Hunting season is just weeks away.

A couple of months back, I was on Capitol Hill with Mark Wartman and Rosann Wowchuk, Agriculture ministers for Saskatchewan and Manitoba. We were making the case for letting science, not silliness, decide how we jointly manage the affliction of mad cow. We called on Nebraska Congressman Tom Osborne. You may know Tom Osborne as the great coach of the Cornhuskers. After we’d made our pitch, Tom told us about going north up to Lac La Ronge to fish for trout and northern pike around its 1300 islands. Best in the world he told us. So is the hunting. So join Tom and come back here.

For me this centenary homecoming has special meaning.

My great-great grandparents, Madison Fisher and Frances Fry and their eight children, homesteaded near Spring Creek, in what is now the south-east corner of Saskatchewan. The year was 1891. They’d left their home in county Tipperary and sailed across the Atlantic, that vale of tears for so many Irish, attracted by the offer of free land. That first summer they recorded that it was ‘very hot and the mosquitoes were very bad’. They built a stone church, St. Peter’s. Madison became the People’s Warden. It was a hard life. Frances died and was one of the first to be buried in the churchyard of St. Peter’s. But a few years later their son, Fisher, my great-grandfather married my great-grandmother Beatrice in that same church.

And it was in St. Peter’s, that my grandmother, Susan Beatrice Cruden, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was baptised a hundred years ago December. I’d visit the family farms as a teenager. We’d eat steaks this thick. And after a glass or two of rye out would come the fiddles. The step-dancing and singalong would begin. And it reminds me that our folksongs are the same, whether your land begins in California and goes to New York Island or begins in Bonavista and ends on Vancouver Island. But if the lyrics are slightly different, the music is the same. Sort of like our relationship.

Today the Frys still farm around Spring Creek raising cattle and growing grain. And my return to Regina this week is occasion for me to celebrate my parents' 55th wedding anniversary and my Dad’s 80th birthday.

Our family has branched out from our Prairie roots, spread across the Canadian and American West from Chicago to Seattle, from Winnipeg to Vancouver Island and south to Ackley in Iowa. They went in search of opportunity; the border didn’t matter. Most of you have similar stories of having a Canadian cousin or an American grandmother – in effect, a bi-national family.

The people you’ll find on either side of our border share common traits, shaped by a common environment: self reliant, neighbourly and community-minded. We take pride in our communities. In front of City Hall in Regina you’ll see the ‘I love Regina’ sculpture proposed by Mayor Fiacco, himself the son of immigrants.

The Mid-West states and the Prairie provinces share a common geography in the Great Plains of North America. There is no natural barriers separating the borders of our two countries. For thousands of years the First Nations peoples crossed our plains following the herds of buffalo that roamed from Texas to Alberta. The border along the 49th parallel was settled not by conflict but by negotiation and compromise.

I’m going to talk about trade and security but remember that the tie that binds Americans and Canadians at its most basic is that of family and friendship. We are bound by ties of blood, belief and belonging to the land.

I was part of the team that negotiated the original Free Trade Agreement as well as the NAFTA. We can’t tell ourselves often enough that we’ve both benefited from access to each other’s market. And mutual collaboration creates competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Today over 96% of our commerce goes back and forth without duty or tariff, most of it on trucks that criss-cross our borders roughly one every minute.

President Bush and Prime Minister Martin and President Fox launched a process in Texas a couple of months back that aims to enhance our prosperity through improved economic cooperation while ensuring North American security. This process won’t succeed without your active involvement. The FTA and NAFTA took care of the tariffs, levelled the playing field and gave us a fair, impartial means to settle disputes. What hampers trade today is a thicket of rules and regulations. Many of them are at the municipal and county, state or province level. And because you’re the level of government closest to community and business you’re best placed to hear the problems.

This is part of your agenda this week but the discussions will be ongoing. Come to Winnipeg next May for Hemispheria where legislators from across North America will participate in this process. We do each other more harm than good when we adopt beggar thy neighbour approaches at the border. If we can’t cooperate with each another how can we compete globally?

And when we’ve got a problem we should try to first solve it at the state and province level. Increasingly, it’s action taken by state and provincial legislatures that can regulate or legislate remedies.

A word from the Canadian perspective about cattle and lumber.

On cattle we had an integrated market that pre-dated Saskatchewan as ranchers from the American west would send their cattle north to fatten on our grain. They’d return to be slaughtered and sent to market. Shutting the border because of mad cow has disrupted this natural, mutually profitable approach. As we know, mad cow disease is a shared problem and approaching it as a joint challenge is the sensible approach. The cattle are once more moving back across the border. People are heading back to work in Canada and the US and we are getting back to business, like we always should have been. Now we need each other's help to show the rest of the world that our beef is safe, by working to get markets in Japan and the rest of the world open to our cattle.

Intense cooperation between our respective governments, and those involved in the cattle industry – ranchers, the packing and supply industry helped to reopen the borders to beef. We need to take that same problem-solving collaboration to other agriculture issues, especially our grain trade even if the main table is at the WTO.

Go north and you find yourself in the boreal forest. We harvest our timber and it becomes the two by fours for housing. The surcharge on Canadian lumber levelled at the border adds about $2000 to the price of a new home in the U.S. That’s the price of a drier, washer and dishwasher and the annual cost of the electricity to run these appliances. As legislators you know the importance of affordable housing. Does this make sense to you?

Speaking of electricity, we live in a cold climate. Energy security matters. And in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta, we can assure much of the long-term energy needs not just for the Midwest but for all of North America.

If you go west to Lloydminster, you’ll find the eastern edge of our oil sands. Fly northwest to Fort McMurray, the heart of the biggest energy project in North America, where daily production is a million barrels of crude oil. The oil sands, spanning both Alberta and Saskatchewan are the biggest in the North America, and our proven reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia. Their development is already cost-effective at world oil prices of $23/bb.

Beyond the oilsands, so-called 'heavy oil' is also a huge untapped resource out here. In Saskatchewan alone, there's an estimated 35 billion barrels of it. That’s more than the entire proven reserves of the U.S. We’re pushing the science of enhanced oil recovery at the University of Regina’s Petroleum Technology Research Centre that we’ll visit tomorrow afternoon. The work there is done in partnership with North Dakota and the Department of Energy.

In northern Saskatchewan you’ll also find the premier source of uranium in North America. Mines in places like the appropriately named Uranium City provide the source of an estimated 10% of American electricity. The Athabascan Basin has the richest deposits of uranium yet discovered on Earth. And if you go north for fishing and spot something that dazzles it might well be a diamond – the biggest kimberlite fields in the world are in the Saskatchewan north.

Keep flying east into Manitoba, the land of a hundred thousand lakes and rivers. These rivers are important. Last month in Des Moines, Premier Gary Doer and the governors of many of the states represented here today, agreed to promote reliability for transmission through, for example, standard protocols on power generation. And when the Conawapa dam on the Nelson River comes on stream it’ll generate enough power as Premier Doer puts it ‘to light up Hong Kong’.

And then there’s our natural gas fields. Western Canada supplies 15% of American demand. The next step is the construction of pipelines to Alaska and the Mackenzie delta through western Canada to supply the lower 48. These will be the biggest engineering projects in North America.

All of these projects require big investment as well as ongoing technology partnerships. Investors want assurance of markets and long-term contracts. Encourage your state power authorities to look at what we’ve got. We want to continue to be the source of America’s long-term energy supply but we’ve taken an open market approach and there’s interest from China.

I mentioned my American family. In one of my first trips to Washington as a young foreign service officer I was invited by my Mom’s cousin to the Officer’s Club at Annapolis. Admiral David Cruden was a submariner in the American Navy who’d served around the world including a stint in San Diego.

In December, 2003, in San Diego harbour, I stood on the deck of HMCS Regina with Commodore Roger Girouard and American Admiral Jose Betancourt. Using the Commodore’s sword we cut the cake that symbolized the opening of our San Diego consulate. HMCS Regina and its sister frigates were midway through exercises in the Pacific with the American Navy. As Admiral Betancourt remarked, there are no two national navies who share such close cooperation.

It was my second time on HMCS Regina. Ten months earlier I’d stood on her deck in Pearl Harbour. There I watched Admiral Jamie Frasier as he pinned campaign medals on crew members who’d served in East Timor and in the Gulf. That afternoon the Regina steamed out of Pearl Harbour to the Gulf to help stop the flow of drugs, arms and terrorists on the high seas and to serve as escort to American aircraft carriers.

This naval cooperation is reflective of our overall security and defence relationship. Canadians and Americans have fought together through two world wars, in Korea, in the Balkans and through joint peacekeeping and peacemaking in places like Haiti, East Timor, the Balkans, Indonesia and East Asia in the wake of the tragic tsunami, and now in Darfur.

Living in Washington makes one acutely aware that the United States is at war. Americans need to know what Canada is doing to support our mutual security in the global war against terrorism and in the protection of the space we share in North America.

NORAD, headquartered out of Colorado Springs and Winnipeg, is the cornerstone of our defence relationship. It will celebrate a half century of bi-national cooperation in 2007. A Canadian serves as deputy commander and it was Canadian Lt. General Rick Findlay who scrambled NORAD fighter jets on 9-11. As you know when President Bush closed American borders, there were 233 American jets in the air. They landed their 33,000 passengers in Canada, in places like Halifax and Gander. It’s what neighbours do.

NORAD’s objective: the protection of North America, is evergreen. We want to expand the NORAD model of ‘one team, two nations’ for even stronger joint defence. The recent creation of a Canada command and the biggest increases to our defence budget since the Second World War reinforce NORAD and the security of our North American homeland.

Like it or not, we live in an era of fragile and failed states. In the last fifteen years, Canadian forces have served in 146 different missions. In the Balkans alone we rotated through over 40,000 troops. ‘Interoperability’ is the term used for Canadian American cooperation on the seas but ‘interoperability’ extends to all our defence operations.

Afghanistan was our first theatre of action after 9-11. We went in with you at the sharp end, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO coalition missions. Canadian troops and Special Forces fought alongside the 10th Mountain Division and 101st Airborne. The President has awarded 30 bronze stars to Canadian snipers for their work in clearing out the caves around Tora Bora. Our chief of defense staff, General Rick Hillier, is a former commander of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan. Hillier is a ‘soldier’s soldier’ who also served as Deputy commander for the US 3rd Armoured Corps at Fort Hood in Texas.

Since our first mission to Afghanistan in October 2001, nearly 14,000 Canadians have done active service there. Twenty Canadian warships have patrolled the Persian Gulf. HMCS Winnipeg recently replaced HMCS Toronto for a six month operation with the Pacific Fifth Fleet. Canadian pilots have flown more than 3,500 sorties from Camp Mirage - Canada's air base in the Gulf.

Last Tuesday, 150 officers and troops of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry flew by Airbus out of Edmonton to join Canadian Forces in Kandahar. The regiment will relieve American forces. By next February we’ll have fifteen hundred on the ground, the largest forces in Afghanistan after those of the U.S.

We were with America when Operation Enduring Freedom began in Afghanistan and we’re with you there for the long run. Our objective is twofold.

• First, to keep Afghanistan on the path to freedom and democracy. I like the way General Hillier put it: “We're going there to take down the folks who are trying to still blow up men and women in Afghanistan and still provide a base for an organization like Al Qaeda to grow its venom.”
• Second, to give the Afghan people the tools and training they need to create those institutions that define civilized society: the rule of law, fair and free elections.

We’re working with America not just in Afghanistan but around the world. Elections Canada led the international team that helped to plan the January elections in Iraq. Just over a week ago one of my friends returned from Baghdad. He’d gone there with former Ontario Premier Bob Rae to share the experience of administering a federation.

And we’re in other trouble spots as well. Last Tuesday night, one of my team left for the Sudan to help address the tragic situation in Darfur created by the civil war. Last Thursday, 105 Canadian Armoured vehicles were shipped from Montreal to assist the African Union mission there.

Good policing is essential to the rule of law. Regina is home to Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP is unique. It’s not just our national police force but the police force for eight of our provinces and many of our smaller municipalities and cities. And it works arm in arm with the FBI and American law enforcement agencies to keep North America safe. Look at the work of our integrated border enforcement teams. Their approach mirrors that of our armed forces. Here’s a quote right from their rules of operation:

“Shared credit for shared work. This philosophy does not single out individuals such as RCMP seized this and US Border Patrol seized that. The true effectiveness is what the Team seized, period.”

Actually it should be an exclamation mark.

The RCMP is sharing its approach to policing around the world. In places like Haiti. And in Jordan, where they’re training the new Iraqi police force.

In the war against terrorism and in the campaign to keep North America safe, we’re partners and we’re allies.

We’re allies because the attack on America, like the recent attacks in London and Sharm el-Sheikh and the attacks in Spain and on tourists in Asia, is an attack on all of us.

We’re partners because that’s the way Canadians and Americans do business. Together.

What the terrorists seek to achieve is to divide us from one another. They don’t realize that in diversity lies not weakness but strength. No two countries in the world are as open to people and ideas.

Scratch any of us and you’ll find we’re mostly first, second and third generation North Americans. Immigration and giving a home to those fleeing persecution or seeking a better life remains vital to our joint prosperity. And there is no question of the benefits we gain from immigrants like my great grandparents or Mayor Fiacco’s parents in economic dynamism and innovation.

I am also convinced that our openness and the ingenuity that springs from diversity and tolerance is what gives North America its edge in global competition and will preserve our advantage.

Closing doors to one another is not the answer. As we realize from the recent London bombings and tragedies in both of our countries, the bad-guys can be homegrown.

And now I come to my ‘ask’ of you.

As currently drafted, Homeland Security legislation would require Americans to have a passport when they re-enter the United States from Canada after January 1, 2008. Canadians would be obliged to show a passport to enter the United States. Business on both sides of our border say this will significantly cut back on our on trade and commerce as well as tourism. That’s serious, and will fly in the face of the progress we’ve made in making the border both safe and business-friendly through our ‘Smart Borders’ initiative.

As a boy I used to travel to Minot, Fargo, Grand Forks and Minneapolis for scouting jamborees. Require a passport and these events will die; it was hard enough for my Mom to pack my socks and underwear. Even legislator forums like this will be more difficult if you have to have a passport.

And yet these occasions are the cement for Canadian American friendship. Surely there has got to be a better way. I challenge you to find that better way, starting here. Keep the conversation going when you return home. We want to keep our border open for the families and friends who go back and forth for hockey, little league, and football.

Speaking of football, come back here on Labour Day and you can watch two of the best teams in Canadian football, the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in their traditional match at Taylor Field. You’ll recognize many of the players from American college.

Our football is pretty much the same: our field is longer and slightly wider. We’ve only have three downs so pass and run counts. Again, like the Canada-US relationship, slightly different rules, but the game is the same.

And what really counts, of course, is what happens before and after the game. We are the only two people in the world to understand what a tailgate party is all about. So you all come back and raise an elbow with us to our long partnership as friends, allies and good neighbours.