OTTAWA

T opping Stephen Harper's to-do list is a small job with huge implications. He must insert the word "north" into the U.S. protectionist phrase: Buy American.

Buy North American is more than a slogan or even a don't-beggar-your neighbour plea. It defines shared economic space and is a declaration of common interests. Most of all, it suggests an effective way forward for a U.S. president who must first cope with the domestic employment crisis if he is to advance an inspiring global agenda.

What it can't be is a whiny Canadian protest against legislation now speeding through Congress. Wrong-headed and as flagrant a breach of trade pacts as the law would be, Canada's best course is to be a problem-solving partner, not an aggrieved supplicant.

That strategy – smart, not spineless – accepts two realities. America is commendably single-minded in protecting its hegemony. Canada is dependent on a trade deal with a dispute resolution so slow and vulnerable to special interests that winning is a distant mirage.

Faced with those truths, Ottawa can get mad or find ways to pull even. It can yammer about linking oil exports to U.S. market access or it can be as creative as it was after 9/11 in finding mutually beneficial responses to communal threats.

In this case, Canada has a good case. Building trade barriers is a feel-good reflex that would slow U.S. recovery and hurt Americans. When economies are integrated, determining what's made where is a slow, high-cost, low-return exercise. It will inflate prices for consumers, infrastructure projects and taxpayers. It will put at risk the estimated 7 million U.S. jobs dependent on Canadian trade.

Those compelling arguments are supported by a reassuring principle. Economic growth has the infinite quality of parental love: It doesn't decrease with division; it expands with multiplication.

How that works is theoretical. But the opposite practice has been tested often enough, most notably in the Depression, to make the assumption that prosperity isn't a zero sum game where one country must lose for another to gain.

Canada is now perfectly positioned to take advantage of that accumulated experience. Barack Obama's first foreign trip, a one-day whistle-stop scheduled for Feb. 19, is an opportunity to rise to an occasion. Instead of defending the cross-border status quo, Canada should be promoting how much more the Three Amigos can achieve together by fulfilling NAFTA's promise as a trading bloc.

That would mean talking more about a continental perimeter than American protectionism. It would recognize that the U.S. is worried more about imports from China and India than Canada. Best of all, it would identify this country as an active supporter, as well as a potential beneficiary, of Obama's overarching objective of leading his country out of the recession greener, smarter and more competitive.

Harper's capacity to command the magnanimous heights of open trade policy is only enhanced by the position now being proselytized by some captains of U.S. industry. As well as accepting that there's no unscrambling of the continental trade egg, they accurately forecast American protectionism will lead only to destructive tit-for-tat global parochialism.

The Prime Minister need only agree. When they meet, Harper can, and should, tell the president that there's nothing whatever wrong with buying American as long as America is North America and that Canada is inside, not outside, the U.S. trade tent.





James Travers' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.