I had to laugh when I heard yesterday that the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security is pitching a “Grand Bargain” between Canada and the United States. Apparently, according to the report’s emailed release, “the crisis in US-Canada relations presents an unprecedented opportunity to forge a transformative agreement that goes far beyond traditional trade deals.”

It’s a terrible idea, for obvious reasons. It pretends that Donald Trump is a rational actor interested in maximizing US security and prosperity (he’s not) and that the US isn’t descending into chaos at best and long-term authoritarianism/fascism at worst. Neither is conducive to any kind of agreement that respects Canadian sovereignty, let alone a comprehensive trade and security agreement (which just happens to be what the Prime Minister is also trying for) that would make us a subservient/vassal state to a country that doesn’t respect human rights or the rule of law. See my Globe and The Conversation articles for a recapitulation of this argument, though hopefully it should be evident to most people why you can’t trust an authoritarian liar.

Memory-holeing 9/11

But it also brought me back to the very beginning of my academic career, prompting a laugh of rueful recognition. Because this is very much not a new idea for an unprecedented times. It is very much precedented.

In the early 2000s, reacting to the US response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CD Howe Institute went big in favour of exactly this same policy. The situation was very similar: US actions (in this case, a reprioritizing of security over economics at the border) threatened Canadian access to the US market, upon which a decade of free trade had made the country increasingly dependent. In response, a cadre of Canadian intellectuals and pundits essentially panicked, arguing that we would have to do whatever the US wanted on security in order to secure our economy.

Check out Wendy Dobson’s April 2002 pitch for a “strategic bargain.” Or Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein’s call for a “friendly agreement in advance” from June 2002, which argued that if we didn’t adopt the US Ballistic Missile Defence program, they would strangle the Canadian economy (Spoiler: We didn’t; they didn’t).

As it happens, it was this debate over whether deeper integration was a good ideal that convinced me to leave my job as an economist at the Parliamentary Information and Research Service (which provides non-partisan research services for parliamentarians and parliamentary committees) to pursue a PhD in Political Science. I wanted to learn if Canadian policy autonomy was, in fact, as restricted as Dobson and Granatstein’s proposals suggested, that we had no choice but to do whatever the US wanted.

The short answer is, no, as experience quickly demonstrated. Canada got through the crisis by addressing US security on its own terms, while also working to pursue common interests in managing the economy. No grand bargain needed. (I turned my dissertation into a book, if you’re interested.)

What did the grand bargain people get wrong? Basically, I would argue, the foundations of the North American relationship, in this case specifically the norm regarding non-linkage of issues. Plus, if you think about it for even a moment, the idea of trading security for economic access is absurd. Canada can’t credibly threaten to hold US security hostage to a better economic deal at the border.

Also, they overestimated the extent to which, in the words of the US ambassador to Canada at the time, Paul Cellucci, “security trumps trade.” Both are important. The US, not least President George W. Bush, understood this. When the US slammed the border shut on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was the US auto companies that convinced Bush to immediately re-open the border lest their entire industry collapsed.

(That Trump’s continued with his tariffs despite the self-harm it’s causing to the US auto industry is as good an indicator that “North America” as a joint, shared economic space, no longer exists.)

In other words, there was no need for a strategic, or grand bargain, or a friendly agreement in advance. There’s always been a constituency for deeper integration with the United States, as these 2002 proposals showed. But deeper integration represented a choice, not a necessity.

Not that you would know any of this history from the Macdonald-Laurier report. The entire 2000s are conveniently and completely absent from this paper: it skips straight from 1988 and the signing of the original Canada-US free trade agreement to the Trump era. This, even though the early 2000s are directly relevant to their proposal. They completely ignore it.

Again, these previous proposals in response to the last US crisis isn’t something that happened in the 1800s. This debate occurred (and was lost) 24 years ago, well within the lifetime of most Canadians, including, I’m assuming the report’s authors, and, I’m certain, the CNAPS Advisory Council.

Misguided idea then, indefensible idea now

Fast-forward to 2025, and these grand bargain ideas are even less defensible. In 2002, one could plausibly argue that while deeper economic and security integration would tie Canada even more tightly to the US mast – an issue that’s been recognized for decades (not that this report is concerned with that history, either), the United States and Canada at least shared foundational values: democracy and respect for human rights, the rule of law, sovereignty and multilateralism. We’d be a junior partner, but to a country of laws and human rights that shared fundamental national interests, e.g., in promoting multilateralism.

That’s no longer the case. In 2025, any grand bargain or comprehensive agreement would involve tying ourselves to an authoritarian-leaning (at the very best) country that has rejected all of these values. There is no bargain between equals on offer. Given the fact that the Republican party has gone full authoritarian, the most Canada and the rest of the world can hope for is years and years of chronic instability as successive Republican and Democratic administrations reverse their predecessors’ laws and agreements. The worst is Canada being forced into vassal status underneath a regime designed for domination, not cooperation.

And if you think that the United States of 2025 can muster the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to approve any treaty, let alone a treaty like this, you’re out of your ever-loving mind.

In short, As Wilfrid Laurier University Professor of Political Science Jörg Broschek pointed out on Bluesky, the conditions that made comprehensive agreements such as the one proposed here no longer exist. To think otherwise is, as I note in my latest Globe article, cargo-cult policymaking.

Look: Canada is in an incredibly difficult situation. But ignoring past experience and present political realities is a surefire recipe for bad policy. We need policies that respond to the reality of our situation, not to the dream of how we wished things were. Grand Bargain proposals like this should be left on the scrapheap of history.