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The two neighbors are each other's best customers, but it is a chronic Canadian complaint that Canada gets the short end of the bargain. By the trainload and shipload, Canadian newsprint, nickel, aluminum feed the U.S. economy. The Consolidated Denison mine in Blind River, Ont. contains twice as much uranium as all the known U.S. reserves, and its entire output through 1961 is earmarked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In turn, the U.S. ships industrial machinery, automobiles and consumer goods to the north, and Canada's trade deficit with the U.S. last year ran to $1,290,000,000.
Until recently Canada managed to offset her perennial deficit in U.S. trade by selling wheat to the rest of the world, but this market tapered off last year, and Canadians blame U.S. international wheat giveaways and subsidized sales. Unless the problem of U.S. surplus-wheat disposal can be settled without injuring Canada, warns a Canadian official, it could threaten Canadian-U.S. relations even on defense matters. Canada and the U.S. must also work out joint policies for waterpower development of the international rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and Canada must decide whether its own long-term interests permit the large-scale export of abundant Alberta natural gas to a fuel-hungry U.S.
The Moody Baptist. The man the Canadian people chose in June's election to guard their liberties, ensure their prosperity, levy their taxes, and sell their wheat is a husky (5 ft. 11½ in., 175 lbs.) prairie lawyer who practices the profession of politics with all the zeal of a successful evangelist. John Diefenbaker is an intense, moody man, sensitive to personal affront. His deep-set blue eyes can blaze with anger or fill with quick emotion; moments later he can smile with easy friendship, remember a name, recall an anecdote to suit an occasion and mood. Brought up a Baptist, Diefenbaker does not smoke, and he recently surprised Sir Winston Churchill by declining politely to share a bottle of Napoleon brandy.
Impatient of the dull details of a law case or parliamentary debate he prefers to delegate the slogging staff work of poltics; he can skim a 300-page legal brief to his satisfaction in an hour and a half. Canadians say that he is their "first Prime Minister with a hearty laugh."
Diefenbaker's youth was a conscious preparation for public life. He was born in Sept. 18, 1895 in the Ontario village of Newstadt, son of a German-descended schoolteacher who liked to boast that he had taught William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's famed and durable (1921-48, except for five years) Liberal Prime Minster. When John was eight, father Diefenbaker took his family to a Saskatchewan crossroads where the northern prairies turn into a subarctic wasteland of muskeg, timber and lakes. There one day father Diefenbaker tied a red bandanna to the rim of a wagon wheel and, counting the turns of the wheel, measured off a 160-acre homestead. That spring he broke the virgin sod to the plow and put in his first crop of wheat.