“The undefended border” is the cliché that still governs Canada–United States military relations. Most clichés are true, but for most of North American history not this one. Before American independence, the French and their native allies in Québec warred against New York and New England from the early seventeenth century to the fall of New France in 1760 in the French and Indian War. Congress's project for 1775, during the Revolutionary War, was an attack on Canada and, though Montreal fell, the venture failed. Again in the War of 1812, American forces attacked Canada, the fighting especially fierce along the Niagara frontier. The resulting stalemate meant Canadian survival. The Rush‐Bagot Agreement of 1817 put limits on the number of naval vessels Britain and the United States could station on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, but land fortifications proceeded apace. Then, after the 1837–38 Canadian rebellions against British authoritarianism, there were supportive “Patriot” incursions from the United States, but these were no more successful than U.S. calls for “54 40 or Fight” in the Oregon Territory border dispute or the 1860s Fenian raids that sped Canadian Confederation. During the Civil War, some 40,000 Canadians served in Union blue, while U.S. draft evaders hid in Canada.
After Canadian Confederation in 1867, the frequently aggressive‐sounding United States continued to be perceived as a military threat to the new dominion. Repeated war scares in the 1870s and 1890s produced bursts of Canadian martial enthusiasm, but economic and social intercourse made such talk increasingly unreal.
The two countries cooperated militarily in 1917–18. Each provided pilot training to the other's nationals; the U.S. Navy lent materiel for the Canadian antisubmarine war; and military‐industrial cooperation flourished. President Roosevelt was close to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and in 1940 they created the Permanent Joint Board on Defense. Agreements to maximize war production followed; there were joint operations in the Aleutians, and U.S. troops built and manned air and other installations in northern Canada. After 1945, these were purchased by sovereignty‐conscious Ottawa.
During the Cold War, the new Soviet threat forced continued cooperation. U.S. bases in Newfoundland, acquired in 1941, remained a sore point, and joint northern radar lines were contentious projects, especially when the Dew Line (distant early warning) bases forbade entry to members of the Canadian Parliament. Nonetheless, air defenses were combined in the NORAD (North American Air Defense) Agreement (1957–58). The Conservative government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker undertook to acquire nuclear weapons for its NORAD and NATO forces, but it delayed and was toppled in Parliament in 1963. Some charged that the administration of President John F. Kennedy had connived at its downfall; certainly, the successor Canadian government under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson accepted the weapons. Ottawa was less accommodating during the Vietnam War, when Canada provided haven to perhaps 100,000 American deserters or draft evaders and Prime Minister Pearson was occasionally critical of U.S. policy. Nonetheless, military cooperation between the two nations remained close in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Canadian forces relied on U.S. equipment, they trained with American forces, and Canada's United Nations peacekeeping frequently served U.S. interests, as in Haiti in the 1990s. Not without domestic opposition, Canada permitted cruise missile testing over its territory, and it participated in the U.S.‐led coalition in the Persian Gulf War. The myth of the undefended border had been replaced by close defense cooperation.
[See also Arctic Warfare; Cold War; Destroyers‐for‐Bases Agreement.]
Bibliography
- J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, For Better or for Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s, 1991.
- Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada: From Champlain to the Gulf War, 1992
