The Canada-US Relationship: An Updated Evaluation of Public Opinion

ABSTRACT

Despite the political turbulence of the Trump-Trudeau era, the US-Canada relationship remains workable on many policy fronts. Against this backdrop, this article explores this relationship by first focusing on public opinion toward “the other,” including general sentiments as well as political leadership specifically, before turning to public opinion in specific policy fields, such as bilateral trade, security, energy, and diplomacy. We broadly find that Canadians are more likely than Americans to draw distinctions between Canada and the US and view the relationship in more cautious terms. By contrast, opinion in the US appears to be much more positive about the relationship.     

The “Works of the Old Men” in Arabia: remote sensing in interior Arabia

In the 1920s pilots overflying the Transjordan panhandle discovered thousands of enigmatic stone-built structures which the beduin called ‘’The Works of the Old Men’. We now know these works are several thousand years old, extend from Syria to Yemen and probably number a million or more, making them far older and significantly more extensive than Peru’s Nazca Lines. Like the latter they are often unseen and seldom intelligible at ground level. Now an aerial reconnaissance programme in Jordan and high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth for large areas of Arabia is vastly expanding the database bringing transformation and opportunity. Despite regional and diachronic variations, these works are plainly parts of an immense prehistoric cultural continuum surviving as hunting traps, funerary/religious sites and seasonal camps. Extensive sampling and test-mapping show patterns and associations which suggest methodologies for developing a remote sensing programme to record, map and begin analysis for interior Arabia as a whole. On such foundations may be built interdisciplinary collaboration to interpret and explain this little-known human landscape on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent.