Close Relationships In Canada

Kouta Hébert

Grade 10 History Culminating Essay

Over the course of the 20th century, Canada’s close relationship with the United States has been built upon trade, military and other economic partnerships and agreements. This close relationship has sparked a number of trade agreements and alliances. One of these alliances is NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). This is an alliance that consists of 29 independent countries across North America and Europe, and was originally created to resist the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism near the end of the 1940s. Now, NATO is more focused on crisis management and peacekeeping. Another one of these would be the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The NAFTA is a trade agreement between

The NATO is a military alliance that was originally formed between the countries of Western Europe and North America to resist the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism. It was signed on April 9th, 1949, and consists of 29 independent countries along with 21 other countries participating in the NATO Partnership for Peace program. For Canada, the NATO would be their first peacetime alliance it has joined, marking this as historically significant. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the NATO has shifted into becoming more focused on crisis management and peacekeeping. The United States affected Canada by bringing them into the signing of NATO, thereby creating a military alliance with them. Canada has benefitted from this alliance because of the mutual assurance of defense in case of an attack. During the Cold War, Canada and the United States cooperated closely against the Soviet threat. They lost much of their previous animosity following cooperation in the two World Wars. After the Cold War, NATO remained undissolved which allowed for Canada and the United States to maintain a close, allied

The NAFTA is a free trade agreement that was formed between the three countries of North America, or more specifically Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The main function of NAFTA is to eliminate all trade barriers between the three countries, such as tariffs, to lower the prices of groceries produced by the three countries involved. NAFTA grants the “most-favoured-nation” status to goods produced by the countries involved, which means that these goods must receive equal treatment as domestic goods. They also cannot give a better deal to non-NAFTA countries. This trade agreement greatly benefited the economies of the three countries, and increased the Canadian-Mexican trade eightfold and total merchandise trade between Canada and the United states more than doubled. In 2015, over 78% of Canadian exports were sent to NAFTA partners. It was inevitable that Canada would have to form some trade agreement with the United States, simply because of the fact that it is the only country Canada shares a border with, and it would only benefit both countries by forming some kind of trade agreement. With that, it connects to the