The troubled U. S. -Canada relationship might be fixed by______.

The relationship between the U. S. and Canada should be as placid as Lake Ontario on a calm summer day. The border is undefended. Their peoples seem like cousins. Each is the other’s largest single trading partner. Yet there has been serious friction between the two neighbors in recent years — friction that might now be eased by the surprise election of a new Canadian Prime Minister.

Call it a miracle, or simply an exercise in artful negotiation, but in brokering the historic talks between the United States and Cuba that ended a five-decade-long embargo, Pope Francis managed to accomplish something that had long eluded some of the world’s finest diplomats: resolving a seemingly intractable stalemate between two bitter Cold War rivals.