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“I can’t speak for the Diefenbaker era, I wasn’t at the foreign ministry then. But it’s as cool as I remember.”

He was speaking in an interview this week, a day after President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to build the Keystone XL pipeline.

In past disagreements, Gotlieb said there was hostility against the neighbour’s policies. As an example, he said Trudeau’s National Energy Program infuriated the U.S. administration. In his time there were also disputes about cross-border TV ads, softwood lumber and, until there was a deal, acid rain.

But in those days, he said, American presidents paid special attention to Canada-U.S. issues. Ronald Reagan even campaigned on the idea of a North American Accord in 1980.

Obama, meanwhile, hasn’t made a bilateral visit to Canada since his first month in office. Gotlieb lays much of the blame on the president, not the prime minister.

“The Keystone project has been handled with considerable insensitivity. Our history has been characterized by … a sensitivity to each other’s interests,” he said.

“And I think some of that is intrinsic in the style of Obama. He sees his legacy, maybe, as standing up to big oil and Canada’s interests are secondary to the much bigger primary interest of Obama to go down in history as the man that stopped carbon from heating up our planet.”

Don’t get him wrong — he’s not declaring doom and gloom.

Canada and the U.S. remain each other’s top trading partner, with $2 billion in goods and services swapped each day; there’s military co-operation in the Middle East; federal departments deal directly with one another on scores of different initiatives; the governments are working on harmonizing industrial regulations across a range of sectors; and the historic reopening of U.S. relations with Cuba began in Canada, a fact Obama acknowledged and expressed gratitude for.