The Past Speaks

I’d like to make a quick observation on the state of Canadian-American relations. On Thursday, the Canadian and Ontario governments announced that they would be taking equity stakes in the reorganized Chrysler. This means that they will be joint owners of the company along with the United States government and the UAW. On the same day, however, the U.S. State Department added Canada to its blacklist of countries that provide insufficient respect for intellectual property. Canada is the only developed country on this list.

It is striking that the same day there can be one announcement related to transborder cooperation on one issue (rescuing Chrysler, a bankrupt twentieth-century smokestack company) and conflict on another, arguably more important question, (the intellectual property rights on which the IT and entertainment industries are based).