U.S. a big issue in Canadian vote

BURLINGTON, Ontario – Rob Hlohinec, 58, doesn’t see what’s so bad about Americans. He even admits to knowing some.

“I’ve talked to Americans. They want the same things we want,” Hlohinec said as he watched a Conservative Party campaign rally in this Ontario town recently.

At his side, Irene Heller, 82, agreed. She said that was one reason she would vote to replace the government headed by the Liberal Party’s Paul Martin in Canadian national elections on Monday. Martin, she said, uses anti-Americanism to try to win votes.

“He gets votes when he knocks America, and I don’t approve of that,” said Heller, who braved a sleet storm to attend the rally.

Heller’s and Hlohinec’s candidate, Conservative leader Stephen Harper, holds a strong lead in public opinion polls, fueled largely by dissatisfaction with 12 years of Liberal rule. Among the dissatisfied are voters unhappy with the growing divide between Canada and the United States.

Polls show a deep antipathy among Canadians toward the Bush administration, made more acute by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That has carried over to a more general anti-Americanism, and academics here have made a cottage industry of talking about the divergence of values between Canadians and Americans.

Martin sought to corral that sentiment by portraying Harper as dangerously pro-American. But the strategy appeared to backfire in this campaign, hastening his slide in the polls.

“In the last campaign, those attack ads worked. This time, they won’t. People are just fed up,” said Peter Bryce, 46, a financial manager who said the political rally in this town west of Toronto was the first he had attended.

The Conservative Party’s lead in the polls hovers at about 10 percentage points, putting the party in position to lead a coalition government that would probably be more in tune with the Bush administration.

The Liberal Party’s attack on Harper’s American sympathies was mostly political posturing; Martin himself has sought good relations with the United States.

But his party has a mixed history on the issue. The prime minister had to expel one member of Parliament who stomped on a Bush doll on television, and a spokeswoman for his Liberal Party predecessor, Jean Chretien, referred to the American president as a “moron.”

The Liberals were resorting to a campaign tactic that had worked before; they successfully erased Harper’s lead in the polls in the last election in 2004, by painting him as too pro-American. But this time, some Canadians say they feel the anti-Americanism has gone too far.

“You would think that issue would be more fertile ground because there has been an erosion” in the relationship between Canadians and Americans since the last election, said Frank Graves, president of Ekos, an Ottawa polling company. “Both countries look at each other with less regard than before.”

But surprisingly, Graves said, “the America card doesn’t seem to have had much traction this time.”

“We think it’s wrong. We’re not against Americans,” said Linda Armstrong, 60, who attended the Burlington rally with her husband, Mike, 61, like her a retired schoolteacher.

But it’s not as if Harper is wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes. With an eye to the perpetual Canadian ambivalence toward its powerful neighbor, Harper has maintained a distance from the United States on the campaign trail.

His standard campaign stump speech vows “not to engage with allies in a false war of words.” But he follows that quickly with pledges to be tougher on the United States in disputes such as the one over softwood lumber, where the U.S. refusal to abide by international rulings that its tariffs are illegal has infuriated Canadians.

“As a rough approximation, one-third of Canadians are favorably predisposed to the United States, one-third are knee-jerk opposed to the U.S., and the remaining third can go either way, depending on the issues,” said David Welch, an expert on U.S.-Canadian relations at the University of Toronto.

Harper treads carefully around those issues. He rarely mentions foreign policy and has crafted a campaign relentlessly focused on domestic policy matters. If he heads the next government, though, “you would get a dramatic improvement in the tone: He would be generally friendly to the Bush administration,” Welch said. “Would you see a whole lot of difference in substance? Probably not.”

In his party’s platform and in his campaign speeches, Harper has differed only vaguely with the Liberals on Canadian-U.S. relations. The Conservative platform calls for increasing spending on the military, for example, a move that would please the Bush administration. Yet, the Liberals have already boosted military spending.

Harper has criticized the Liberal government’s refusal to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but has said Canada has no troops to spare for the occupation. Canada has 650 troops in Afghanistan and plans to boost that number to 2,000 in February.

The Conservatives have promised to cooperate with Washington on border security issues, although that, too, is a direction already set by the Liberal government. Harper has hinted he would revisit the government’s decision not to join the Americans in planning a missile defense system, but it is unclear if he would have parliamentary support. Martin had privately wanted to join the initiative, but lacked political support for the move.

On social issues, “there is much more common ground” between Harper and Bush than between the U.S. president and Martin, Welch said, citing their shared opposition to same-sex marriage.

Martin, attempting to reverse his party’s slide in the polls, is campaigning hard on social issues, warning that Harper would try to overturn Canada’s approval of gay-marriage and abortion rights and to redirect its social liberalism.

Harper’s agenda follows “the extreme right of the United States,” the prime minister said Thursday. He seized this week on Harper’s criticism of judicial activism, warning that the Conservatives would try to circumvent the courts. Helping Martin, the attorney general of Ontario, Michael Bryant, accused Harper of wanting to “Americanize our judiciary.”

Harper has clung to a campaign strategy downplaying those views and painting his candidacy as a more centrist, moderate one. He has declined to discuss his views on abortion rights, for example, and ignored the increasingly strident Liberal effort to portray him as a neoconservative.

“I think what I’ve tried to lay out to the Canadian people is that we would take a middle-road approach,” Harper told the Toronto Star newspaper. His government would focus on fiscal issues and on his pledge to transfer more powers to the provinces, he said. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to have a lot of other stuff.”