U.S. President George W. Bush appoints a South Carolina politician with no knowledge of our country as ambassador to Canada.

The Canadian ambassador to the United States, Frank McKenna, resorts to op-ed columns to get Washington’s attention to stop North Dakota from letting water from Devil’s Lake flow into the Red River and into Manitoba.

At a meeting before Bush’s visit to Canada last winter, Canadian officials assured Condoleezza Rice that Prime Minister Paul Martin would come through on missile defence. Like McKenna, she was surprised to find the opposite was the case.

Transport Minister Jean Lapierre promises to fight back on the American demand that all passenger lists undergo a pre-check before Canadian aircraft cross into U.S. airspace. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America agreed to in Waco, Texas, a few months ago was a last-minute, hurry-up piece of paper with no substance behind it.

The mad cow and softwood lumber issues are just meandering their way through the American political system and lobbies down south feel little counter-pressure from the White House.

Discussion about cultural and political differences boomerang and many Americans wonder if Canadians are still their friends. The Canada-U.S. border increasingly looks like Checkpoint Charlie.

The point is that the current model of American-Canadian relations is not working. It is worse than merely unpleasant interaction, for we risk missing the next train we need to catch to improve our economic and security needs.

Canada needs to squeeze into a closer economic partnership with the United States lest competition from Asia or the Americas overtake Canada’s original advantage. Similar logic applies to security and foreign policy.

The relationship has suffered structural damage in the past decade, especially in the past five years. Many in Canada like to blame Bush, but the real problem is deeper and will last beyond Bush if we do not mend our ways.

The root cause is a faulty bilateral relations model employed by Canadian governments with backing from most leaders in academia and the media. Their approach is basically this: Be as separate and divergent as you can, but cooperate where you must. This model implies hammering out individual deals on separate issues, while ignoring or wishing away political linkage, alliance, friendship, loyalty and trust.

This design has failed miserably. Canada prides itself on being a meticulous multilateralist, but that strategy simply does not work in the Canada-U.S. relationship. Declaring that it should does not help. The American political structure is allergic to supranationalism. It hardly allows formal deals that transfer American sovereignty to bodies such as the United Nations.

The softwood dispute is a glaring example. Canada needs more than treaties and dispute settlement mechanisms. We need a new model that turns the current design on its head. The onus is on Canada to find a better way to deal with the U.S. We need an approach that emphasizes convergence in the public realm alongside an inside political game, something that maximizes Canadian interests that multilateralism and formal state-to-state relations alone cannot accomplish.

This model begins with a new political-strategic friendship. The strategy implies that only by getting closer to the Americans can Canada maximize its prosperity and security interests.

The U.S. is a highly fragmented political interlocutor. Canadians constantly need to build the right coalitions inside the complex American political process. The U.S. machinery is so highly partitioned and diverse that Canadian interests are easily compromised by just one clever American player using the checks and balances in his favour. Canada needs to mix inside the coalitions of give and take, of half-a-loaf is better than none, of horse-trading and log-rolling.

All of this starts with a seamless and smooth liaison between the Prime Minister’s Office and the White House. From there, it’s on to the Congress and the bureaucracy.