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Clearly, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed with the US in 1989, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed five years later with Mexico and the US, have altered the way we do business. They have also helped change how we see ourselves and what we talk about.

Since the FTA was signed our trade with the US has pre-occupied our thinking because it dominates our economic life. One example of why border trade is at the top of the agendas of business and government it that cross-border trade jumped from $180 billion to $700 billion in the last 12 years.

Yet only a few years ago, debating our identity and prospects for national unity were the major themes at national conferences. The conference titles reflected those preoccupations: What distinguishes Canadians from Americans? What does Quebec want? But today, even if we never found the answers, we are no longer as preoccupied with the questions.

In short, the topics on our national agenda have changed. And many of those changes were on show at the conference Borderlines - Canada's Options in North America* The talk at the two-day meeting centered on everything from one North American currency to exporting water, from common regulations at our borders to the future of the two health-care systems.

A wide spectrum of opinions were heard from panels made up of academics, lawyers, economists, business people from coast to coast, as well as from a Mexican academic and several Americans. And observers who contributed to the free and frank discussions included labor union officials, journalists, a former governor of the Bank of Canada, an MP, think-tank researchers, former and current diplomats and one former Canadian foreign minister.

Altogether, it produced lively debates that brought new ideas to the surface and new trends in thinking about cross-border questions. Some of them developed before Sept. 11, 2001 and some after. By the end, there seemed to be a consensus on a few of those trends.

One is that links in Canada, especially economic links, are shifting from east-west to north-south. Nowhere is that more obvious than with our railways, both of which have penetrated the east coast and mid-Western US. The focus of the trucking industry also has shifted from east-west to north-south.

Another is that the tragedy of Sept. 11 last year has alerted Canadians to how important the US border is and how vulnerable we are to any US crackdown at the border. For example, there was a 47-kilometer tailback at the Windsor-Detroit border crossing in the days following Sept. 11, 2001 that took weeks of negotiation to unravel.

And while many Canadians may have taken US-Canada relations for granted before Sept. 11, the attack on the Twin Towers jolted us into the realization how crucial those relations are. It is clearer now than it ever was that if we neglect or ignore those relations, we will suffer as a nation. In fact, a priority goal of our governments should be to broaden and deepen those relations, always remembering that our economy and population are one-tenth those of the US.

Inevitably, the conference had to wrestle with the perennial question: Will economic integration lead sooner or later to political integration? And the answer, while it couldn't be described as a consensus, came from a convincing chorus of speakers. It was that Canada could go much further with economic integration without endangering our political institutions.

"Market nationalism" was the way Tom Courchene of Queen's University, a proponent of a common North American currency, described the Canadian attitude. "We want their economy but not their values." The Americans might well feel the same way.

The conference wound up without coming to any firm conclusions. But the many points of view heard during the two days provided evidence that Canada has many options in North America. But to keep those options open, we have to market ourselves and our concerns more forcefully to the Americans and the Mexicans than we have in the past.

*This was the second Borderlines Conference on the theme Canada In North America. It was held at Marriott Chateau Champlain in Montreal Nov. 1 and 2 last and was organized by The Institute for Research on Public Policy in conjunction with Borderlines.

James Ferrabee welcomes comment on this column at jferrabee@irpp.org