The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [100]
This future springs not simply from my fertile imagination but from cold, hard cash. Those 175 billion barrels of grubby bitumen lie right next door to the world’s largest and friendliest customer, whose other suppliers have either entered decline or soon will. Energy companies are no fools. By early 2009 the government of Canada had already leased more than seventy-nine thousand square kilometers in tar sands contracts. Future production is anticipated to rise from 1.3 million barrels per day today, to 3.5 million by 2018, to 6 million barrels per day by 2040.425 If that black torrent of tar becomes reality, its flow will be nearly ten times greater than the amount of conventional oil flowing south from Alaska’s North Slope today.
America is ready and waiting.
The visual image of Canadian oil flowing from north to south is exactly the right one to hold in mind. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it passes over U.S. borders unencumbered by tariff. And compared to the world’s other geopolitical relationships, America and Canada remain two countries in a happy marriage.
Their embrace far transcends the energy industry. It is just one part of a bigger cross-border dependency that has long existed, thanks to friendly borders and the geographic proximity of their neighboring population cores, as described earlier. But this lovers’ gaze has not always been so transfixed. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Canada was focused more on domestic integration than the cross-border sort.
A serious schism was fractious Québec, the French-Canadian province with a long history of separatist movements and terrorism. A wave of bombings by terrorist cells of the Front de Libération du Québec culminated in 1970 with the kidnapping of two government officials, one of whom—Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte—was found strangled and dumped in the trunk of a car. The 1970s also marked the emergence of aboriginal rights movements and rising economic and political power in Canada’s energy-rich western provinces. Debate was raging over a national bilingualism policy. During this period of history most Canadians were focused on bridging their country’s internal cultural divisions, not furthering its integration with the United States.
The New Cascadians
But the passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked the beginning of a stunning reorientation in Canada’s political and economic geography. It quickly began to integrate in a north-south direction with parts of the United States, rather than in the old east-west orientation across Canada. Very recent studies of this phenomenon are discovering it runs far deeper than simply increased cross-border trade and traffic; there is an actual melding of cross-border economies under way.426 This is not being steered by Ottawa and Washington but rather by a proliferation of cross-border networks of business groups, chambers of commerce, NGOs, mayors’ councils, and other forms of grassroots enterprise.
The end result of this north-south reorientation is the emergence of new cross-border “super-regions” with distinct economic footprints and cultural auras of their own. Names are even being floated for two of them. “Cascadia” refers to the melding economies of the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, centered on the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor. “Atlantica” links upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.427 A key super-region is the Toronto-Hamilton-Detroit corridor integrating southern Ontario—the industrial heart of Canada—with Michigan’s automotive industry and manufacturing sectors in Indiana, Ohio, and other Midwestern states.
For each of these emerging super-regions, the two respective halves across the U.S.-Canada border are also knitting culturally. New surveys reveal that the social values of Atlantic Canada now resemble those of the U.S. East Coast,