Canada Gets to Work on Grabbing Obama’s Attention

(Mike Blanchfield — The Gazette)

“Think big,” experts advise Ottawa – and be prepared to commit troops to Afghanistan beyond 2011

Canada’s laundry list for Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House next month is long and ambitious: boosting trade across a dysfunctional border, creating a continental energy and climate-change accord, and halting the economic meltdown.

But if Ottawa has any hope of getting the ear of the world’s most popular politician, it will have to think big and act even bigger. And that means dumping plans for the large-scale withdrawal of Canadian Forces from Afghanistan in 2011.

That was the underlying message this past week when dozens of senior bureaucrats, diplomats and analysts from Canada and the U.S. met in Ottawa to discuss a “blueprint” for getting the Canadian government on the radar of the incoming Obama administration.

The message couldn’t be any more timely, given the musings last week by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates about keeping Canadian troops in Kandahar as long as possible.

Carleton University’s Canada-U.S. Project will forward its sweeping policy paper to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in an attempt to advance an ambitious new agenda in Washington.

Canada’s overtures to Obama will have to be as big as the larger-than-life U.S. president-elect himself, and will only grab his attention if they are bold and daring, and promise to take the Canada-U.S. relationship to new highs.

That means playing the Afghanistan card.

Against the backdrop of recession, Obama comes to power facing weighty world problems with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a provocative and nuclear-minded Iran, and carnage in Haiti and Sudan’s Darfur region.

“It’s not wait times at the Ambassador Bridge,” one senior Bush administration official said, on condition of anonymity. Read more here.