Meeting the new neighbour

On the evening of last Aug. 28, as 80,000 pumped-up Democrats streamed into Denver’s Mile High Stadium to cheer Barack Obama’s acceptance of their party’s presidential nomination, a lone Canadian politician strolled the streets of Boulder, about 50 km away from the action. Lawrence Cannon, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s transport minister at the time and now his foreign minister, was in Colorado to make contact with Obama’s team, but opted against attending the big show that night. Even on a solitary walk, though, he encountered the man of the hour at every turn. Happening upon a movie theatre that was screening a live feed of Obama’s speech, Cannon tried to get in, but the place was sold out. So he ducked into a restaurant. “There were about 75 people eating,” he recalls. “Nobody was talking. They were all glued to the television set.”

Wandering unnoticed on the fringes of a historic American political moment—it’s a plausible image of what’s in store for the Harper government in Obama-obsessed America. What are their chances of making Canada’s presence felt in a transforming Washington, D.C.? Competition for a fragment of Obama’s attention is fierce. Not only does he come to power lugging enormous domestic expectations, he’s also the focus of unprecedented world attention. He has an economic crisis to wrestle into submission, and a war to wind down in Iraq. Still, several key Harper ministers spoke optimistically to Maclean’s about their bid to be heard, on everything from climate change to Afghanistan to aid for the auto industry. “We’re pretty confident,” said Industry Minister Tony Clement, “that there will be an openness to continental solutions.”

The first concerted attempt from the Harper government to crack Obama’s charmed circle came at that landmark Democratic convention in Colorado. Three ministers—Cannon, Clement, and Peter Van Loan, then government House leader, now public safety minister—attended as guests of the National Democratic Institute, the Democrats’ international affairs organization. Cannon and Clement both declined to say which Obama-linked figures they met with, saying the discussions were private. However, Maclean’s has learned that among the key players they gained exposure to through the NDI were Washington lawyer Greg Craig, who was named Obama’s White House counsel this week, and Anthony Lake, an Obama foreign policy adviser who was former president Bill Clinton’s national security adviser.

Clement boasts that the Tories (who hedged their bets by also reaching out to Republican nominee John McCain’s camp last summer) were “aggressive” and “prescient” in their courting of Obama’s coterie. Their efforts to introduce themselves, and a Canadian perspective, followed months of diplomatic slogging, orchestrated largely by Canada’s embassy in Washington, to connect with the teams of all of the possible next presidents, including, of course, Obama’s. Now those nascent relationships will begin to be tested against real issues. And Harper has chosen an unexpectedly ambitious idea—a shared trading system for greenhouse gas emissions—as his opening bid to grab the incoming administration’s policy imagination.

The file makes Jim Prentice, the new environment minister, one of the Harper government’s most important envoys to the Obama White House. That’s because, after three years of aligning his policies with a George W. Bush administration that was doing as little as possible on global warming, Harper must now keep step with Obama’s activism. In both cases, the Tory line goes, Canada had little choice. “We occupy the largest free-market energy system in the world, us and the United States,” Prentice said. “It would be hard to imagine a policy framework between us and the United States that would be discordant.”

For the moment, Prentice can do little more than wait while his officials analyze Obama’s campaign rhetoric and scrutinize signals coming from the Democratic transition team. They’ve identified three figures close to Obama who will probably be big players on energy and climate change. Robert Sussman was the second-in-command in Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency. Todd Stern was the senior White House negotiator for the Kyoto accord. But the key player seems to be John Podesta, who was Clinton’s last chief of staff, and is one of the Obama transition team’s three leaders.

Podesta is said to covet an “energy czar” role, if Obama creates one—a new White House position along the lines of the national security adviser. He is the driving force behind the Center for American Progress, where Sussman and Stern also work. The highly influential centre-left think tank advocates bringing energy and environmental policy together under the aegis of a new “National Energy Council.”

The council’s rough Canadian counterpart will be the Harper cabinet’s environment and energy security committee, whose key players are Prentice, rookie Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt, and the committee’s chairman, Transport Minister John Baird.

“We’re very much at a crossroads,” Prentice said of energy and environmental issues. He named three factors driving decisions: the continuing global economic crisis, the “extraordinarily ambitious” Obama environmental agenda, and the looming Copenhagen conference of December 2009, that will seek global consensus on a post-Kyoto agenda for the fight against climate change.

The Harper government’s goal is to be part of a North American energy market and a carbon cap and trade mechanism. Versions of the concept featured in both Harper’s and Obama’s fall campaign platforms. Companies would face limits on how much carbon dioxide they are allowed to pump out, but they could buy the right to emit more—and thus burn more fossil fuels—from firms willing to sell their own emissions credits.