President George W. Bush had planned to come to Canada next month. Luckily, we seem to have dodged that bullet.

Many people are taking Bush’s decision to cancel his scheduled Ottawa visit as evidence of his pique over Canada’s refusal to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq. No dispute there. Punishing the disloyal is clearly something Bush enjoys.

Of course, the cool reception Bush would have likely received from the Canadian public was also probably a factor.

This is not a president who enjoys seeing the dissent part of democracy in action. As the BBC reported last month, negotiations over a possible address by Bush to the European Parliament fell through when the Europeans were unable to meet White House demands that a standing ovation be guaranteed. (It’s possible some Canadian MPs might have been similarly begrudging.)

The cancellation of Bush’s Ottawa visit has caused predictable hand-wringing here. But we could just regard it as a lucky break.

The key item on the agenda of the Canadian visit was to have been energy and, short of coming here to liberate us, the next most worrisome thing that Bush might have had in mind was closer ties on the energy front.

In fact, that’s definitely what he does have in mind.

Washington has always wanted guaranteed access to our fairly ample and easy-to-reach energy resources  oil, gas, electricity  and it largely won this with the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA prevents us from selling our energy resources in Canada at lower rates than we sell it in the U.S.

It also prevents us from cutting back on the amount of energy we sell to the Americans, in order to keep a larger share for ourselves  two things a sovereign country might want to do in a world where energy is one of the keys to a strong economy. (Mexico, the third NAFTA partner, balked at giving away such control, and opted to stay out of the energy portions of NAFTA.)

It might seem, then, like we’ve already sold the family furniture. Even so, the Bush administration, with its close ties to oil and gas interests, wants more.

Shortly after taking office, it released a far-reaching report calling for a national energy policy. Produced by Vice-President Dick Cheney, the report argues for more closely integrated North American energy markets in order to guarantee greater U.S. energy security.

Ironically, then, the thing the U.S. is fixated on  national energy security  is the very thing that we’ve given up, under pressure from Washington. (A desire for national energy security is something Washington has never been particularly sympathetic to when it’s surfaced in other countries.)

The concept of “a national energy policy”  a phrase that smacks of government involvement and which has been all but banned from political discourse in Canada in the last twenty years  is central to Washington’s thinking these days and is, in fact, the title of Cheney’s report.

One might think this is because we have limitless energy up here, while south of the border SUVs routinely lay stranded at the roadside for lack of fuel. But, in fact, Canada’s remaining conventional oil reserves (as opposed to the more expensive, largely undeveloped oil sands) only amount to a nine-year supply  the same as the United States’.

The dismantling of our control over energy has been relatively uncontroversial here, largely because it has been championed by Canadian energy companies (many of them U.S.-owned) and by the Alberta government (also heavily influenced by U.S. interests), giving it the look of a purely internal family spat among Canadians.

But things may be about to get more contentious.

A recent paper on energy by the business-funded C.D. Howe Institute notes, approvingly, that the dismantling of Canada’s energy regulatory regime is almost complete. But it points out that finishing off the deregulation job  as the Bush administration wants  may be politically unpopular here “as consumers face higher commodity prices and perhaps sacrifice some direct sharing of the lower costs that are attributable to Canada’s natural endowments.”

In other words, Canadians are likely to be mad as hell that we won’t be enjoying the low energy prices we should enjoy because of Canada’s natural energy endowments. That anger was evident in Ontario last year, forcing Premier Ernie Eves to reintroduce controls on electricity prices.

With Iraq’s oil fields secured, Bush will now be looking for other ways to secure supply for the voracious American energy appetite.

Resisting U.S. pressure on the energy front has never been Canada’s strong suit. At least let’s not throw any standing ovation guarantees into the bargain.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...