For Stephen Harper, the imminent retirement of George W. Bush is the best news he's had in a long while: It will remove a big stick with which he's been regularly beaten by his political opponents. And I can't imagine a future scenario in which Mr. Harper is accused of being a "Barack Obama clone" - which, in the Bush days, was shorthand for alleging that the PM was selling out Canadian interests to the American behemoth.
Still, these days, one increasingly hears commentators invoking the rocky relationship between Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker and President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the 1960s as evidence of the difficulties that Conservatives experience when they are in office at the same time as Democrats. That, of course, misses the irony that it was Mr. Diefenbaker who stood up to the Americans while the Liberals ultimately agreed to station nuclear-tipped missiles on Canadian soil.
One wonders whether history is about to repeat itself.
Mr. Obama believes that Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, is the good war against "terrorism" and must be fought with increased resources. And he is expected to ask NATO allies to step up their involvement in Afghanistan.
Mr. Ignatieff, who spent part of his career in the U.S. and has ties to some of the people around Mr. Obama, has gone back and forth on the Afghanistan mission. During the federal election campaign, Mr. Harper reiterated the commitment expressed by Parliament last March to end our military mission there by the end of 2011.
Would Canadians support revisiting the Afghanistan withdrawal decision at the request of a president who is extremely popular in Canada?
Alternatively, if it comes to a clash between Harper and Obama that could end up affecting access for our products to the U.S. market, is it conceivable that Canadians - egged on by the Liberals as they were in the Pearson-Diefenbaker days - will support a U.S. Democratic president against their Conservative prime minister?
