"Now we are in Canada," he would say as we approached the Canadian and U.S. flags, flapping way up there in the winds above the middle of the bridge. "And now," he continued as our old Chevy sped past two flags, "we are in the United States."

It was a ritual I sometimes repeated when my now 17-year-old daughter was younger and we crossed that bridge. And it's one that always served as a reminder of how fortunate we all are to be able to cross an international border with so few hassles compared to other parts of the world where too many borders are walled off with menacing-looking watchtowers and razor wire.

As a native Canadian with family roots going back to United Empire Loyalists who settled here in the years following the American Revolutionary War, and as someone who continues to enjoy the company of many friends and relatives in the U.S., I've always celebrated Canada Day and the Fourth of July together. To borrow from the spirit of the annual Friendship Festival, which runs this Sunday through next Friday in Fort Erie and Buffalo, these national holidays are an opportunity to celebrate an almost unprecedented period of peace between our two countries since the end of the War of 1812.

Not that we haven't been through some turbulent times since that war. Like all good neighbours and friends, we've had our share of feuds and the past five years and three months since the invasion of Iraq, led by the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, has been no exception.

I recall crossing that same Peace Bridge and driving my family to Maryland five years ago to visit some friends in a community near Washington, D.C. where a good number of Pentagon and military bureaucrats reside. One look at our Ontario licence plate, at a time when Canada had recently decided not to join Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, was enough to draw a bushel-full of hostile looks from Americans passing us on the highway.

It didn't help that Canada's prime minister at the time, Jean Chretien, did such a lousy job of explaining Canada's otherwise totally defensible decision not to send Canadian troops to Iraq. Chretien, in his own sloppy way, managed to lose the moral high ground on that one, even while Canadians were and still are placing their lives on the line in Afghanistan and suffering more casualties, per capita, than the U.S. in a region of the world where the real architects of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon may still be hiding.

It also didn't help that one of Chretien's aides called Bush a "moron" at a time when a majority of Americans still wanted to rally around their president during a time of war. Later, we had the likes of former Liberal MP Carolyn Parish stomping on a Bush doll on a Canadian comedy show -- an act that made more rounds on the blogs and radio talk shows in the U.S. than all of the financial and moral support Canadians reached in to their pockets and hearts to give to give the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

For Bush's part, he waited more than two years after 9/11 to offer thanks to Canada for taking in Americans who had their planes grounded here immediately following the attacks. And his administration continues to find more ways to create bottlenecks in the guise of security at the Canada/U.S. border (costing communities on both sides countless dollars in tourism and trade) than it has stopping illegal immigrants from Mexico crossing over the border down there to work in poultry factories and other sweat holes where Bush's business buddies would rather hire illegals than pay their fellow citizens a decent wage.

In that kind of climate, it's been hard for Americans and Canadians to have a meaningful dialogue about what we can do together to improve our quality of life on this continent. If you were a Canadian criticizing Bush's policies, you were branded anti-American. If you criticized our politicians, including a Stephen Harper who gave every reason to believe Canada would be in Iraq if he were prime minister at the time, you were branded anti-Canadian.

I, for one, hope that the near-end of the Bush era gets Canadian and Americans back to what we can do in common together to address the challenges we face globally and make life better for all of our children.

The prospect of that is something worth celebrating on this Canada Day and Fourth of July.

Doug Draper can be reached at ddraper@niagarathisweek.com.