The Globe and Mail

John McCain should stay out of here
LAWRENCE MARTIN
From Monday's Globe and Mail
June 16, 2008 at 7:30 AM EST


It's rare, perhaps unprecedented, for a U.S. presidential candidate to come to Canada and deliver a political speech in the course of an American election campaign. But here comes John McCain, right on the heels of the NAFTA imbroglio that embarrassed Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

The controversy over the Canadian leak of a diplomatic note damaging to Democrat Barack Obama has been receding with time. This can only be pleasing to the Harper team. But the appearance in Ottawa of Mr. McCain, set for Friday, is a good bet to reignite the whole business, putting Ottawa's ignoble deed again in the mix in the race for the White House.

That's bad for the Harper government, bad for bilateral relations. As interesting as it is to have the Republican candidate for the presidency here, better that he stay away.
The Prime Minister didn't invite the Arizona senator. It was the idea of the McCain team, encouraged by U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins with no apparent dissent from the Prime Minister's Office.

No doubt, Mr. McCain feels it will be politically profitable for him to use Canada as a base to remind everyone that he is an ardent free trader while his opponent - if the leaked Canadian memo is to be believed - has been speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the issue. No doubt the McCain team wouldn't mind seeing the NAFTA controversy splattered all over the front pages again.

While the Harperites didn't organize the McCain visit, they have close ties to the Republicans. They will be suspected by Democrats, already angered by the memo episode, of lending a hand to the Republican campaign effort again.

By tradition, Ottawa steers clear of American political campaigns and vice versa. No favouritism is shown because the mere hint of it causes problems. One such example was in the 2000 campaign when Raymond Chrétien, our ambassador in Washington, gave a speech that some interpreted as favouring Democrat Al Gore over George W. Bush. Another was the Canadian election of 1963 in which the Kennedy administration's leanings to Lester Pearson over John Diefenbaker provoked a storm.

Neither of those campaigns featured something as hot as the NAFTA/Obama episode. The diplomatic note suggested Mr. Obama wasn't serious about his campaign trail talk of renegotiating NAFTA. Most observers feel it cost Mr. Obama important votes in the Ohio primary and perhaps elsewhere.

Besides throwing gasoline on that fire, and making bilateral harmony more difficult, the McCain visit comes with another downside for the Harper Conservatives. John McCain is hardly as toxic as George Bush, a president from whom Stephen Harper has wisely kept a distance. But polls have shown Canadians favour the Democrat Obama by nearly a four-to-one margin over Mr. McCain. Common sense says the Tories shouldn't be seen as doing the guy any favours.
His speech will be welcome in one respect. Canadians by and large favour free trade and Mr. McCain will give it a hearty endorsement. It is needed because not only are the Democrats getting ornery on the subject, but the Republicans' record has been unimpressive. On the softwood lumber dispute, they pulled every trick in the book to circumvent the spirit and letter of the agreement.

But this one positive from the McCain visit is far outweighed by the likely negatives. The NAFTA affair is still rife with potentially damaging consequences. Prime Minister Harper himself has termed the matter very serious and unfair to Senator Obama. He called for an internal probe that failed to turn up the source of the leak. Reports have since emerged, however, alleging the PMO leaked the report to a close Republican contact, Frank Sensenbrenner. He is the son of James Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. The diplomatic note then wound up in the hands of the Associated Press.

If these reports are true, it demonstrates unseemly cross-border collusion between Conservatives and Republicans and orchestrated interference in a U.S. election campaign by the Canadian government. Serious stuff.

John McCain is a fellow conservative but he's the last thing the Conservatives need in Ottawa this week. They should tell him to give his speech in North Dakota.