Canada's relationship with our closest neighbour has preoccupied us since the 18th century. Right now, all the major parties have proposals in their platforms to improve that relationship. Meanwhile, prominent academics and business leaders who worry about the apparent weaknesses of North American institutions keep weighing in with suggested strategies. This week, one of them, former U.S. ambassador Allan Gotlieb, made a speech in Montreal (a version was published in yesterday's Globe and Mail) repeating his claim that Canada can get inside the American "perimeter" and solve intractable problems like softwood lumber only by concentrating all aspects of our relations in one centralist framework.

Mr. Gotlieb thinks we should establish a "community of law" - a common set of binding rules favouring the movement of people, services and goods within a joint Canada-U.S. space. I think his proposal can't work. Here's why.

The border with the United States of America remains one of the defining characteristics of Canadian life. The border is important precisely because it is defended, and not the reverse, as the cliché would have it. American efforts to strengthen their security post-9/11 have disrupted the flow of commercial transactions, threatening to bifurcate what some Canadians want to see as a common North American economic space. Proposals to fix Canada-U.S. relations are designed, implicitly or explicitly, to make the border disappear, at least as an economic barrier.

Keeping the long but defended border with the United States open is among the most vital of Canadian interests - but Canadians cannot reduce our vulnerability by trying to make the border go away. The Americans may take 80 per cent of our trade, but both of us are enmeshed in many legal regimes beyond NAFTA. The market is integrated, but a sharp regulatory line runs through it, based on the differing responsibilities to Parliament and Congress.

When we look at Canada-U.S. relations from the bottom up, we realize that co-operation is intense in most regulatory domains, but unproblematic, and far from the direct control of the president and the prime minister. Most issues are managed on a department-to-department basis - and government officials are probably brought in only when citizens cannot solve the problem themselves. Our kaleidoscopic North American constitution does not need an amendment. It retains the vitality to adapt to changing needs. And it allows all of us to deploy the flexible set of policy tools we need as circumstances require - Swiss-knife diplomacy, I call it.

Mr. Gotlieb's proposal rests on two pillars: that Canada can use security co-operation with the Americans as a bargaining chip in the economic domain; and that it is possible to create a joint "community of law" or court to resolve disputes.

The first problem is that American concern about homeland security stands on its own as an issue. That is, we can't expect to be paid for security co-operation with market access. The challenge is how we can work issue by issue to make all our shared border-security institutions effective. This effort has been under way since the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. New bodies may be needed, like the Border Services Agency (created in December, 2003), but no treaty will trump the absolute security concern.

Second, the U.S. Congress will never allow any president to sign any treaty of any description that would trump decisions of Congress or the Supreme Court. There is no legal fix to the political reality that Canadians do not vote in U.S. elections.

Let us assume for a moment, however, that such a treaty could be negotiated. Mr. Gotlieb has said that a sweeping treaty would not require joint political institutions to manage a common economic space.

By contrast, I think that such a centralized community of law must have a constitutive basis in shared institutions if it is to be legitimate, and effective. If such institutions could be created, which I doubt, they would be located in Washington.

For Canadians who derive satisfaction from having a different kind of polity, and for those who think that our institutions reflect distinct Canadian values, this weakening of Canadian institutions would be perceived as a loss.

It might be an easy loss to bear if the institutions that we have for managing our most important economic and security relations were failing us, but I think that those institutions actually work rather well.

Canadians neither want nor are able to send representatives to Washington; Parliament and Congress will therefore retain their respective responsibilities. And this means that a defended border with the United States will remain a reality of Canadian life.

I am not counselling inaction. Rather, I am arguing that Canadians, be they private citizens or prime ministers, should be using all the institutions of North American integration that already exist, whether they are formal legal agreements or informal ones created in the course of the millions of daily interactions of Canadians and Americans. We must not be complacent, but we do not need to bundle everything in one framework.

Robert Wolfe is a professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University. This commentary appears in expanded form in Where's the beef? Law, institutions and the Canada-U.S. border to be published later this summer by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.