http://www.canada.com/national/story...1-26f144a539aa
Bush scoffed at opposition to missile defence during private meeting with PM
Robert Russo
Canadian Press
Sunday, December 05, 2004
OTTAWA -- A brief question laden with incredulity foreshadowed George W. Bush's determination to sell missile defence directly to Canadians and taught Prime Minister Paul Martin that what occurs behind closed doors rarely stays there.
The U.S. president had a pointed question for his host on missile defence: Why would anyone be opposed to this?
Martin, describing the Ottawa discussion a few days later during an impromptu encounter with a handful of reporters, said Canada's possible participation in the U.S. plan to erect a system aimed at knocking down supersonic missiles was raised during the private meeting Tuesday between the two leaders.
The prime minister said the discussion on the contentious issue lasted less than a minute.
But Bush's emphatic pitch, made so publicly to Canadians, caught Martin's team unawares and will undoubtedly roil political debate in Canada for months.
The Pentagon has strung together a preliminary system that uses detection devices in space to track threatening missiles. But the current U.S. plan calls for any rogue missile to be brought down by ground-based rockets rather than space-based weapons.
China and Russia are developing new long-range rockets in response to Bush's ballistic missile defence project, prompting fears of a new arms race.
Any doubts about the effect of Bush's intervention were put to rest over the weekend when the Quebec wing of Martin's Liberal party voted in favour of a motion calling on the prime minister to keep Canada out of U.S.-led missile interceptor program.
Among those urging Martin to say no to Bush were several Liberal MPs, including Denis Coderre.
"It is perhaps by standing up like we did during the war in Iraq that we show that we have our own identity and that we are in favour of the welfare of the entire planet," Coderre said during the policy conference in Montreal.
About 30 Liberal MPs are considering voting against any agreement that would lock Canada into an anti-ballistic missile defence shield led by the United States. Opposition Leader Stephen Harper has yet to take a formal position on the question, although the Conservatives' deputy leader was sending strong signals in favour of missile defence on Sunday.
"If we don't participate, we completely lose our voice in these discussions," Nova Scotia MP Peter Mackay said.
"I think this is very much about the defence of North America."
Bush's private scoffing at opposition to his missile defence plans would suggest a surprising lack of awareness of Canadian political reality or a president who is determined to prod his host into defending his reticence to take a clear position on one of his legacy projects.
State Department officials said Bush was amply briefed on the fragility of Canada's minority government. He knew exactly how divisive a House of Commons debate over missile defence would be and he knew that debate would be largely controlled by the opposition parties.
Any president with aides able to pluck a six-decade-old quote from Mackenzie King - a Canadian prime minister who's been dead for over a half-century - and deftly drop it into his centrepiece speech Wednesday in Halifax knew what he was doing when he decided to effectively go over Martin's head and sell missile defence to Canadians.
"I hope we will also move forward on missile defence to protect the next generation of Canadians and Americans from threats we know will arise," Bush said, as Martin looked on, shortly before concluding his first official visit to Canada.
Martin acknowledged later that he had no inkling that Bush would use Canada's longest-serving prime minister to advance one of his cherished foreign policy goals.
Nor did he expect Bush to go from questioning the opposition to the system in private to trying to convert Canadian skeptics in public.
Martin did tell Bush during their closed-door meeting that the issue was divisive in Canada and it would be brought forward for debate in the fractured Commons.
Bush evidently decided to use the presidential bully pulpit to subtly strongarm the direction that debate might take. That has likely forced Martin, who keenly wanted to control the timing of any public discussion on the issue, into taking a stand sooner than he would have liked on a question that wins him no votes in the province that will make or break his hopes for a majority government: Quebec.