Cute ads unlikely to help Canada win lumber war

The newspaper ad features a grainy black-and-white snapshot, presumably from the 1960s. Arms around each other, two freckle-faced boys in bad haircuts and striped T-shirts are smirking at the camera as if they'd just dropped a frog down someone's pants. One is wearing a pair of old horned-rim glasses. The other is missing his front teeth. "We grew up together," the tag line reads. Believe it or not this is the latest secret weapon in a $10-million (U.S.) Canadian-led campaign designed to convince George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress that the steep import duties on softwood lumber are undermining a historic trading relationship. Beneath the photo, the copy spells out the importance of Canada-U.S. trade, noting that the 27-per-cent lumber duty hurts Americans because it's crippling America's biggest trading partner.

"Let's get this relationship back on track," the ad soberly concludes. The newspaper ads were created by a murky new entity, the U.S.-Canada Partnership for Growth, which describes itself as a coalition of individuals, corporations and trade associations in Canada and the United States. The campaign, which also includes TV spots hitting at similar themes, was launched yesterday in Washington, D.C., and will soon reach key markets across the U.S. The group has also hired two high-priced politicians to spread the word - former Michigan governor and U.S. ambassador to Canada James Blanchard and William Brock, U.S. trade representative in the mid-1980s and a former senator from Tennessee. Mr. Blanchard is a Democrat and Mr. Brock is a Republican.

Work is also underway to recruit several key state governors to lobby the White House on the issue. The group won't say exactly who's paying for it all. But the short answer is that Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill. The group says "primary" funding comes from the Forest Products Association of Canada, which represents about three-quarters of the Canadian forestry industry. FPAC acknowledges that most of money is coming from a $17-million (Canadian) grant it received from the Canadian government this spring to run a two-year softwood lumber "communications program." So there you have it. After all the political rhetoric, years of bureaucratic angst and tens of millions of dollars in legal bills, Ottawa has conceded that none of what it did in the past worked. The whining, the threats, the negotiating and the sulking have produced nothing. Canada's message apparently never reached the people who could make a difference. So now Ottawa is laundering its cash and its message through a front for the Canadian lumber industry. The Canadian side is convinced there is a narrow window of opportunity to resolve the dispute after Americans voted in a new Republican Congress in this week's mid-term elections.

"This is a very good time to accelerate the process," Mr. Brock explains. "It's easier to get quick action right after an election." Mr. Brock, who pines for the old days when Canadians and Americans worked as "a team" on trade, argues that for too long U.S. administrations have treated the lumber issue as a case of an aggrieved domestic industry pushing its self interests. "We need to draw a focus to a larger issue," Mr. Brock says. "Our purpose is to draw some national attention to this." From a Canadian perspective, the objective is worthy. A lot less clear is how two hired guns with laundered money stuffed in their pockets and two cute kids are going to make the softwood dispute miraculously vanish. In spite of the handful of seats that changed hands Tuesday night, the U.S. political landscape hasn't changed that much. The U.S. lumber industry remains as determined as ever. Its allies in Congress remain on side. Indeed, Mr. Bush is now beholden to Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, a key member of the lumber lobby and one of the new senators who helped deliver the Senate to the Republicans.

The issues that have thwarted a resolution of the lumber dispute for so long remain as complex and divisive as ever. Changing the optics of the debate and nostalgically drawing on memories of an earlier friendlier era in Canada-U.S. relations may make people feel more hopeful. But the way out of the lumber mess isn't any clearer than it was Monday. Seen in that light, the toothless boy in the ad might well represent Canada - bravely trying to salvage a friendship after getting his front teeth knocked out by his bigger American neighbour.