Business isn’t personal. It’s hard-edged. People do these things to their neighbors. We need to manage our strengths and vulnerabilities. Trump’s behaviour is unfortunate, but it has underlined that it’s really important to change our economy. We don’t want to be here again.
Jim Balsillie, former CEO of Research in Motion, creator of the Blackberry
So, here we are. The Canada-United States relationship has unraveled and has become an economic interaction to be managed. It’s likely relations between the two countries will never to be the same again.
And now, as evidenced by the quote above, some influential Canadian business leaders - along with many Canadians - have begun to publicly and privately advocate for a quiet disentanglement from the United States, urging federal and provincial governments to seek markets and trade agreements with other, more reliable partners and reduce Canada’s reliance on the American market.
I voted against the original Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988. However, over the years up until now, I'd come to appreciate some of the nuances involved with our trading relationship with the Americans – with some important qualifications – and with what eventually became NAFTA.
So, what’s this got to do with Canadian soccer you ask?
Lots.
In the decades since the dissolution of the North American Soccer League (1968 – 1985), an earlier joint American - Canadian professional football competition, Canada’s soccer landscape has been beset by competing visions of an elite club structure - to the detriment of the CanMNT.
Canada’s last attempt to create its own domestic league ended in failure 25 years ago and resulted in some surviving clubs retreating to regional domestic circuits and others joining American-based and controlled competitions.
Since 2007, when the American first division, Major League Soccer (MLS), began play in Toronto, a small yet influential group of Canadian soccer administrators, entrepreneurs and governors along with their American corporate soccer partners, have attempted to control the country's professional soccer agenda. Operating without a genuine political and social license, they've not only attempted to move Canadian professional soccer towards American rule, they've also begun to lay the groundwork for a NAFTA-like, soccer economy made up of both Canada and the United States and as of this year, with Mexico through an MLS-Liga MX best-practices and competition agreement.
The choice to define this new soccer economy as NAFTA-like is deliberate in light of the relatively fast manner in which the American first division moved into Canada’s three largest football markets, reshaping important aspects of the country’s soccer conversation and challenging the Canadian Soccer Association's (CSA) authority to administer and govern the game in the country.
And with the MLS-Liga MX partnership taking shape, preliminary discussions concerning the establishment of a North American super-league have begun without meaningful, representative Canadian input. And no, despite the probability that MLS views its Canadian clubs as the country's voice regarding elite club football, they do not, in fact, represent our national soccer interests.
All of the above illustrates the similarities between American economic and foreign policy and it's corporate soccer agenda towards Canada and Mexico - save Mexico's willingness to cut its own deal: total domination of North American club football along with the creation of Canadian and Mexican dependence upon an American soccer administrative, financial and governing centre.
A heavy-handed, over-the-top condemnation? It might be, but I know I’m not alone in my thoughts.
There’s no doubt some of you will find my commentary shrill. But I won’t apologize. I’m convinced there is an American corporate soccer agenda the aim of which is to marshal the entire North American soccer market under it's control. In this new soccer landscape, Canada, Mexico and the rest of CONCACAF are mere vassal soccer states, supplying players for service in a continental super league in order to exploit the global television market.
But even if one finds my analysis outlandish, I ask readers to remain open to the possibility that I may be right.
So, here's a bit of evidence to support some of my claims: today, despite a combined twenty-seven seasons of play in Canada, Americans continue to constitute a majority on the rosters of MLS clubs in Canada and the United States. In essence, Canadians have been relegated to that of a novelty on rosters in a league that purports to be a partnership with Americans. And there's an even lower number of Canadian managers, game day officials and league executives.
Need a bit more proof? Over at the players’ union, I’ve counted only one Canadian to have ever served on the players’ union executive and as of today, there’s not one Canadian players’ union representative.
Ah, I'm just getting warmed up. But today I'll go easy. To be sure, there's more evidence to discuss as I write more in the future.
So, who is to blame for all of this? For me, it’s not just overwhelming American football capital, but a number of my fellow Canadians who’ve worked willingly alongside American corporate soccer executives to ensure that micro American soccer economies take root in Canada's three largest cities.
Up until the emergence of America's Donald Trump-inspired Make America Great Again imperative, there's was a persistent, naïve belief among many Canadians that the Americans would always deal fairly with us.
However, it's now plain to see it was a myth - a bedtime story that Canadians have perpetually told themselves when learning that again, they've come up on the wrong side of a deal with the Americans. Here in my province, if it isn't the Pacific Salmon Treaty, it's the Softwood Lumber Agreement.
But remember, there are sharper expressions of American power that don't work out in our favour here in Canada. Many of us haven't forgotten the American Coast Guard Polar Sea excursion through Canadian Arctic waters in 1985 nor the American's continual insistence that the international maritime boundary along British Columbia's coast, at Dixon Entrance, be moved to reflect the United States' belief where the border lies.
And the list goes on.
It's over. The myth that we'd always be regarded as a trusted ally and relatively speaking, a cultural, economic and sporting equal has no truck nor trade among a majority of Canadians. Canadians now understand that Americans have never seen the relationship the same way.
When an American president can lie about the facts of our trading relationship, threaten our country with economic ruin through the imposition of tariffs upon automobiles manufactured in Canada destined for the entire North American market, insult our Prime Minister and other political leaders and American lawmakers and their constituents are okay with that, then there's no going back.
As for professional soccer, allowing the American first division soccer to gain a foothold in our country under the moral cover of promoting the game and Canadian player development, only enabled nothing more than a soccer version of Manifest Destiny on our pitches.
But take hope my fellow Canadians, for American soccer economic expansion in our country is far from complete. There’s still time for us to regain control and reassert ourselves as a self-governing soccer nation.
It's at a time when Canadians have begun to pressure their political leaders to redefine our political and trading relationship with the United States, I believe it's time to do the same in soccer. It’s time to disentangle our professional game from American corporate soccer and by extension, the United States Soccer Federation, lest their influence – their dominance – throughout our soccer system does in fact, becomes complete.
Till then, keep calm and support your CanPL and CanMNT.